|
Last Updated
|
| Author's
note: In 1995 I was invited by Prof. Don Hawkins, Eisenhower Chair
of Tourism, The George Washington University to give a lecture for
his graduate students on "The End of Tourism as We Know It."
Twelve years later, are any of my thoughts then of any use now?
I began with the oldest cliché in the book,
It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. Since
we've all heard that old saw about New York City, I applied it the
notion of sustainable tourism. If sustainable tourism exists where
people actually live, then we may view sustainability from the perspective
of the people who live in Manhattan, or more specifically, including
the interaction among residents, hosts and guests in a place like
Times Square, where only a few people actually live.
Either way, we are left with a muddle of questions: Is Times Square
a cultural resource? Should it be "preserved?" (Remember,
this was 1995, before Disney Development Corporation restored much
of what was then, sleaze-city). If it's torn down, should it be
replaced with "indigenous" architecture? What's that?
Do New York residents really want a bunch of tourists crowding their
hometown? If not them, who? Are the folks drinking coffee at Starbucks
on 47th Street native New Yorkers? Recent arrivals? Visitors? Just
in from the suburbs to see a Broadway show? Will those of you who
are tourists waiting in line for a frappuccino please raise your
hands?
Which makes me think about my childhood, growing up in Alabama.
My family owned the movie theater in town. Which makes me think
of my immigrant grandfather, who used to say that all Americans
had two businesses: their business and show business.
Which makes me think about my own visits to New York City as a child.
I went to New York about once a year to visit with my northern grandparents.
They would always take us with our New York cousins to Radio City
Music Hall, a special treat, which made us feel like we were veteran
New Yorkers, but really meant that we were just tourists because
our cousins never went to Radio City except when we were in town.
A few scholars -- particularly British sociologists -- write about
today (that is, the mid-1990s) as an era of "postmodernism,"
which is, in fact, the end of tourism as we have come to know it
over the course of the modern era, from the beginning of the 19th
century until, perhaps, the day before yesterday. They argue that
decentralization and fragmentation in this post-industrial information
society provide indications heading towards a complete lack of differentiation
between tourism products and other cultural products and processes,
such as ethnic restaurants, popular music, public television, market-driven
festivals, shopping malls, education and sports.
This trend has wildly accelerated over the past dozen years. What
we do in our work-a-day world -- dress casually, eat out, shop for
ethnic products, seek-out exotic sports and extra-curricular activities
at school, take short get-away weekends -- are all part of a vacationing
experience that has increasingly invaded our everyday lives. The
reverse is also true: while on vacation, we seek out medical services,
attend education courses, work via email and cell phone, stay in
housekeeping units where we do our own cooking, exercise endlessly,
attend local sporting events, and act in many ways as if we never
left home. These represent evolving behaviors that have transformed
global tourism and the travel trade.
But what about destinations? My example in 1995 was the village
of Ambleside in Westmorland at the head of Windermere in the Lake
District of Great Britain, perhaps aesthetic tourism's original
destination, described by Wordsworth as the most beautiful place
one could imagine, a place completely "free from interruption."
The Lake poets and other artists began to characterize the Lake
District as a place of special character frozen in time, in contrast
to London,
where commerce and science in 1815 had begun to change even the
smallest details of the way people lived.
That unspoiled Ambleside landscape was poised as western civilization
marked the demise of the wilderness and the birth of modern times.
It was a place and a moment in history when government, commerce,
the arts and sciences began to converge, introducing an idealized
vision of mechanization and the industrial age. Wordsworth, in 1844,
opposing the construction of a railway into the Lake District, published
a sonnet -- "On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway"
-- beginning with the line, "Is there no nook of English country
secure/From rash assault?" Soon after, writing to the editor
of the Morning
Post, "the staple of the country is its beauty,"
fearing that the railway would destroy the very thing it was being
built to serve.
An answer to these arguments came from a very democratic U.S. Ambassador
to the Court of St. James, Edward Everett, one of the most eloquent
men of his times, declaring, "The quiet of a few spots may
be disturbed, but a hundred quiet spots are rendered accessible.
The bustle of the station house may take the place of the Druidical
silence of some shady dell; but Gracious Heavens? Sir, how many
of these verdant cathedral arches, entwined by the hand of God in
our pathless woods, are opened to the grateful worship of man by
these means of communication!"
Everett added that the railroad put the seashore and mountains "within
the reach, not of a score of luxurious, sauntering tourists, but
of the great mass of the population, who have senses and tastes
as keen as the keenest. You throw it open, with all its soothing
and humanizing influences, to the thousands who, but for your railways
and steamers, would have lived and died without having breathed
the life-giving air of the mountains."
|
|
SUSTAINABILITY
Somewhere amidst Wordsworth's pristine Lake District
and Everett's mass media exists sustainability, the tension between
technology and human contact, between congestion and solitude, between
development and conservation.
For Ambleside to have become a cultural landscape, it first had
to be discovered; then it had to be interpreted as appropriately
aesthetic; finally it had to be developed, managed and protected
so that its vistas would be perpetually genial to travelers.
Ironically, the Lake District did not come into English Romantic
literature until it was discovered by visitors and writers from
the outside world. For its yeoman farmers and pensioners, the scene
was ordinary, if not a bit scary. Indeed, in the eighteenth century,
Daniel Defoe regarded the Lake District as a forbidding place, "the
wildest, most barren and frightful of any that [he had] passed over."
Only visitors, it seems, could appreciate its special qualities
as compared with other places less beautiful. The first leisure
visitors to Windermere included artists and writers from London
and other cosmopolitan places who rendered it into a mythic place
for armchair travelers and who produced descriptive imagery that
worked its way into travel guides and literature. This publicity
and growing reputation, in turn, drew other artists and writers:
the Lake Poets -- Keats, Shelley, Tennyson; Beatrix Potter, John
Ruskin and their lesser lights. In time, and because of the economic
impact of these travelers, the Lake Region began to organize itself
to cater for ecotourism, including the management of its vistas,
the training of hospitality workers, the regulation of its environment,
architecture, signage and other efforts to promulgate the myth-image
of their place.
The problems in 1995 and 2007 of a destination's carrying capacity,
congestion, beauty, ambiance, sustainability, indeed, survival,
continue to be poised around the Wordsworth-Everett conundrum of
protection against its production. But today the solutions are remarkably
different, mostly due to technological advances: With better use
of GPS and relational databases visitors may be distributed over
a broader territory to less-visited places; with greater sensitivity
to the hazards of over-use; with better strategies for environmental
mitigation; and with the extraordinary growth of both consumer and
technical information for both hosts and guests, funders, planners,
and, increasingly, in the travel trade.
The change over the past 12 years has been in the growth of sophistication
of the traveler, the travel expert, the travel trade and the tools
that we use to enhance and protect the visitor experience, marking
the end of tourism as we once knew it, and, indeed, mostly all to
the good.
|
AUTHOR
Alvin Rosenbaum (email)
is a regional planner and tourism development consultant. He is
senior visiting scholar at the International Institute of Tourism
Studies at the George Washington University and served for many
years as U.S. chairman, cultural tourism scientific committee, International
Council on Monuments and Sites. He has worked for the National Park
Service in the United States and in southern Africa, the Balkins,
Middle East, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and the Caribbean and is the author
of the forthcoming Muscle Shoals Chronicles: Local and National
Regional in America and other books.
|
SEMINARS
Learning never ends. See if one of our seminars
is right for you. |
|
|
|
|
