Index
ATLAS Special Interest Group
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Index
IntroductionGreg Richards
Fundació Interarts, Barcelona, Spain
The Cultural Tourism Research Group (CTRG) has over the past 11 years undertaken nearly 30,000 visitor surveys and produced a number of publications, most of which can be found in the ATLAS publication list. In 2004 the group is undertaking a new round of consumer research covering more than 30 countries worldwide. More details of this programme can be found below and on the 2004 project website (link to 2004 research).
In previous years a lot of work has been carried out on the analysis of the tourism impact of the European Cultural Capitals, past and present. Specific surveys were undertaken of the cultural capitals in Rotterdam and Porto (2001) and Salamanca (2002). A report on the Rotterdam and Porto events has already been published by ATLAS, and a draft report on Salamanca has recently been written by a team of researchers from the University of Valladolid. Some post-event evaluation of the Helsinki event (2000) was also carried out by researchers from the University of Joensuu in Finland. There are tentative plans to produce an overview publication reporting on the research on cultural capitals as a whole. This year the ATLAS data are being used to help the European Union evaluate the future of the Cultural Capitals Programme, which is now scheduled to continue until 2020 at least. The results of this study should be published later this year.
Melanie Smith from Greenwich University in London has been busy putting together the following group publication, Global Cultural Tourism: Issues And Case Studies, which is due to be published by CABI. The book will include chapters on issues such as policy, participation, attractions, market trends, interpretation, environmental management and commodification and authenticity. Each section of the book will be supported by a number of case studies illustrating key issues.
An Expert Meeting on the theme 'Cultural Tourism: Globalising the local - localising the global' was also held in Barcelona in October 2003. This meeting considered some of the important issues surrounding the globalisation of culture and the culturisation of tourism. The proceedings of this meeting are due to be published soon.
Future meetings are planned in August 2004 (Barcelona) and in 2005. Details of these and other CTRG activities from Greg Richards: (grichards@interarts.net)
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Annual review of activities 2007
Greg Richards
Tourism Research and Marketing, Spain
grichards@tram-research.com
The ATLAS Cultural Tourism Research Project is now in its 16th year, and to date has generated over 40,000 visitor surveys at cultural sites around the world. In 2007 the group continued to develop its research activities and publications. You can find more details on the project website: www.tram-research.com/atlas.
A number of changes have been made to the research programme for 2007. The latest version of the questionnaire has been modularised to make it easier for participants to adapt the basic questionnaire to their own research needs. This also makes it easier to use the questionnaire as a part of research assignments for students.
The 2007 questionnaire is currently available in English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latvian, Portuguese, Serbian, Spanish and Turkish. Other languages will be added as these become available. As in previous years, different versions will also be produced for different world regions, including Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America and Latin America.
In previous years each round of surveys has been restricted to a single calendar year. However, we have now decided to extend the timescale of the research so that the current programme will run with the same survey format for at least three years. This will allow partners more flexibility in the timing of their surveys, and also give them more time to build the surveys in their own research and student assignments.
The group is also developing a qualitative research strand to run alongside the quantitative visitor surveys. There will be a special session on this at the group meeting during the Annual Conference in Viana.
The group had a very successful Expert Meeting at Chaves in Portugal in November 2006. The theme of the meeting was Cultural Tourism and Identity, which attracted papers from all corners of the world. The meeting was hosted by the Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, and was excellently organised by Xerado Pereiro and Veronika Nelly. The proceedings of the meeting will be published by UTAD and launched at the ATLAS Conference in Viana in September.
Other group publications have also appeared during the past year. The papers presented at the Barcelona group meeting In 2003 have now been published by Haworth Press in the volume 'Culture Tourism: Global and Local Perspectives'. A link to this volume can be found on the publications page of the ATLAS website. The report of the 2004 ATLAS Cultural Tourism Surveys has also now been published, and is available from ATLAS (www.atlas-euro.org).
Portuguese-speaking members of the group may also be interested in the publication from the Universidade do Algarve 'O Evento FCNC 2005 e o Turismo', which analyses the Portuguese Capital of Culture event held in Faro in 2005. This study was based on the ATLAS methodology which was also used to study previous Capitals of Culture, and therefore provides interesting comparative data.
ATLAS has also established a collaboration with European Cities Marketing, a network of 140 cities across 30 European countries. The aim of the collaboration is to partner cities and research institutions in the development of cultural tourism and other visitor-related research projects. A presentation on the ATLAS research was made at their Annual meeting in Barcelona in May.
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Annual review of activities 2006Greg Richards
Tourism Research and Marketing, Spain
grichards@tram-research.com
The ATLAS Cultural Tourism is celebrating its 15th birthday in 2006 with its 6th round of cultural visitor surveys and an expert meeting in Chaves, Portugal. During the past 15 years, the group has conducted over 35,000 visitor surveys at cultural attractions around the world, and built up the most comprehensive global database on cultural tourism.
Following the visitor surveys carried out in 1992, 1997, 2000, 2001 and 2004, 30 group members from 20 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australasia and America are undertaking new studies in 2006. Participation in the research is facilitated by a standard questionnaire which can be downloaded in different language versions from the website (www.tram-research.com/atlas). The 2006 questionnaire has a special focus on the visitor experience, testing out some of the dimensions put forward by Pine and Gilmore in their book 'The Experience Economy'.
The 2006 team has many new participants, including researchers from Mongolia, Latvia, Kenya and South Africa, as well as many Cultural Tourism Research addicts who are now participating in their fourth or even fifth round of surveys. Particular thanks should go to our local coordinators who help to organise networks of universities to collect data on a national basis. Carlos Fernandes has done a particularly good job in Portugal, where thousands of surveys collected over the past 10 years have helped to create a detailed picture of cultural tourism consumption across the country.
Our research partners are also very resourceful when it comes to adapting the basic surveys to their specific needs, and also in finding applications for the research which can generate funding. In the Netherlands, Wil Munsters has used the surveys as the basis for a 'Cultural Destination Experience Audit', which is proving very popular with Dutch cities. Esther Binkhorst is hoping to develop a similar tool using the surveys in her home town of Sitges (Catalunya).
The ATLAS data is rapidly establishing itself as a leading source of cultural tourism information for academics and practitioners alike. The data were used to provide information for the recent UNWTO/European Tourism Commission report on 'City Tourism and Culture', as well as the European Commission evaluation of the European Cultural Capitals programme.
Members of the group have also been active in spreading the results of the research through publications and conference presentations. On the project website you can find publications from Georg Stadlmann on Innsbruck, Austria, Xerardo Pereiro on Trás-os-Montes in Northern Portugal, Elisabeth Kastenholz,
Maria Joăo Carneiro, and Celeste Eusébio on segments of cultural tourists visiting Coimbra, Portugal, Patricia de Camargo on a crafts fair in Curitiba, Brazil, Zafer Oter and Osman Ozdogan on Ephesus in Turkey and Timo Toivonen's paper comparing omnivorousness in cultural tourism in different countries.
The group has produced a large number of publications over the years, including Cultural Tourism in Europe (1996), Cultural Attractions and European Tourism (2001), a study of the Cultural Capitals in Rotterdam and Porto (2002) and Salamanca (2003).
The next publication to appear will be the volume entitled Cultural Tourism: Global and Local Perspectives, to be published by Haworth Press later this year. This collection of the papers presented at the Expert Meeting held in Barcelona in 2003 includes contributions on the nature of cultural tourism, cultural tourist behaviour, cultural tourism in cities and in emerging areas such as South Africa.
The next meeting of the group on 'Cultural Tourism: Negotiating Identities' will be held at the Universidade de Trás-Os-Montes e Alto Douro in Chaves, Portugal on October 5-7. This meeting has already attracted a record number of abstracts, and promises to offer an exciting mixture of academic debate and cultural experiences.
One of the issues to be discussed in Chaves will be the future form of the research programme. The idea of running a continuous programme of surveys to build up an even more comprehensive and flexible database has been put forward by Timo Toivonen. There are also plans being made to collaborate with European Cities Tourism, to help city tourist offices monitor their cultural tourism demand, and to provide more logistical support for conducting the surveys.
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Annual review of activities 2005Greg Richards
Tourism Research and Marketing, Spain
grichards@tram-research.com
The Cultural Tourism Research Group is the oldest Special Interest Group in the ATLAS network, having been operating since its initial meeting in Germany in 1992. The group now has 62 members from 23 countries.
In 2004/05 the group has been busy with a fourth round of data for its cultural tourism research project. Having started with the (then) 12 member states of the EU in 1992, the latest research involved 35 members from 25 countries. This time there was considerably more participation from outside Europe, with Africa and Latin America being notable additions to the research.
The fieldwork yielded a total of over 13,000 completed visitor questionnaires at different types of cultural sites. The project was ably supported by Celia Queiros, a graduate of the Polytechnic Institute of Viana do Castelo in Portugal. She worked extremely hard during 2004 to develop a centralized management and data collection systems for the project, using the website www.geocities.com/atlasproject2004. This site contains all the different language versions of the questionnaires used in the surveys as well as full implementation instructions. This allowed the different participants to work more or less independently and vastly increased the amount of data that could be processed.
The results of the 2004 surveys indicate that the general structure of the cultural tourism market has changed relatively little over the past decade. The cultural visitors tend to be highly educated, relatively wealthy individuals with a high level of cultural capital. Because of rising education levels, cultural holidays seem to be more important for this particular group. One of the key changes in the market, particularly in Europe, has been the increasingly important role of budget airlines in driving the growth of city breaks. This has also raised the use of Internet to book both travel and accommodation.
Due to its wide coverage and longitudinal comparisons, the ATLAS surveys have now become one of the most important sources of cultural tourism research information. Each project participant received a complete set of the global data, allowing them to produce comparative studies. The latest CTRG publication, Cultural Tourism: Global and Local Perspectives was also completed. This will be published by Haworth Press in 2007.
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Updated WebsiteThe ATLAS Cultural Tourism Project website has been updated and is now available on www.tram-research.com/atlas
If you have any new items for the website, including publications from the project, please forward them to me and we will put them on the site. Future publications and research activities will be on the agenda at the forthcoming project meeting during the ATLAS conference in Barcelona.
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New ATLAS CTRG research and websiteCultural tourism has been identified as one of the most rapidly growing areas of global tourism demand. The importance of this market has created a need for information on the characteristics, behaviour and motivations of cultural tourists. Over the past decade, the ATLAS Cultural Tourism Research Programme has monitored this market through visitor surveys and studies of cultural tourism policies and suppliers. Successive surveys have illustrated how rapidly this market is developing, underlining the need for regular research.
In 2004, ATLAS is launching a new Cultural Tourism Research Project, with over 50 participating institutions from Europe, Africa, Asia, Australasia and Latin America. The depth and geographic extent of the surveys will be significantly greater than in past.
The aim of the 2004 research will be to analyse the motivations, socio-demographic profiles, consumption patterns and destination images of cultural tourists.
Read more at a joint ATLAS and INTERARTS website: http://www.geocities.com/atlasproject2004
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Cultural Tourism: Globalising the local - localising the global - Barcelona 2003The first expert meeting organised by the ATLAS Cultural Tourism Research Group was attended by 20 participants from 7 different countries, who had intensive discussions about the current state of cultural tourism over three days of sessions. The presentations were of a very high standard and generated lively and thoughtful exchanges. The concentrated nature of the expert meeting format allowed ideas to be developed and elaborated throughout the course of the meeting.
It is very difficult to summarise the wide-ranging contributions to the meeting, so this report concentrates instead on the major issues raised and the actions that may be taken by the group in future.
The discussions during the meeting displayed some level of continuity with previous work by the group and by other researchers. For example the issue of authenticity in cultural tourism was discussed in a number of papers, as were conflicts over the 'ownership' of culture and the shifting boundaries of culture and economy.
In addition to these continuities, some differences also emerged. For the first time ever in a meeting about cultural tourism, there was no mention at all of the definition of cultural tourism. This was a very positive point for the meeting itself, since endless discussions about the definition of culture were avoided. But perhaps it also points to a degree of maturity in this emerging research field, as people perhaps no longer feel they need to define each facet of their study object. There was some development of the debate about the nature of the study of cultural tourism, however, with the debate seeming to move away from the cultural 'content' of tourism (high culture, popular culture, etc.) towards the 'context' in which culture is consumed (as part of a process of learning about a city, as a process of distinction, repeat visitors versus first time visitors, etc). In terms of cultural tourism policy, a similar shift can perhaps also be identified in the emergence of 'cultural programming' of cities in place of cultural planning.
Another emerging area of work involves the concept of 'place' - which indicates that the study of cultural tourism is following the spatial turn in the social sciences.
Closely linked to place is the idea of distinctiveness, which seems to have been posed as an alternative to authenticity in some cases. Participation is also an emerging concept which seems closely linked to place - since the participation is usually the residents of a particular location.
When one looks at what might be distinct about places, it usually comes down to some aspect of the local, and the nature of 'everyday life'. This is an interesting development, in the sense that tourism has usually been linked to the 'extraordinary', which has led people to ignore the role of routine and ordinariness in tourism behaviour. Perhaps when 'everyday life' becomes 'culture', it suddenly becomes more interesting not only to consume, but also to study.
But the problem of distinctiveness is perhaps more complex than it might seem on the surface. What for example is the relationship between the terms distinction, difference, novelty and change? Are people looking for distinctiveness rather than difference? Are they looking for new distinctions, or simply more distinct experiences? One of the areas that might be worth examining is the extent to which cultural tourism is related to the collection of experiences as building blocks of identity (usually treated as a characteristic of the visited, rather than the visitor).
This also raises an interesting question of choice regarding the cultural experiences people are consuming. To what extent are people selecting specific experiences that fit a particular set of personal choices (or a lifestyle) or are they consuming a range of experiences offered by a particular place? In this regard, the concept of placelessness is also important, since the whole idea of placelessness is intimately linked to choice. The papers presented at the meeting seemed to reflect two different approaches to place and placelessness:
Your degree of choice radically effects your reaction to these situations of placelessness, because if you have the choice to move, then non-places can be treated playfully. If you don't have that luxury, then these non-places become the raw material from which you need to create a sense of place. There is an interesting sidelight on this problem in Barcelona with the policy of creating 'hard plazas'. These are classic non-places, in the sense that they are stripped of even the most basic markers of place. In reality, however, the people who are forced to use them (because of their lack of mobility) are busy creating place markers of their own, through graffiti, through lounging around, through events. It is also interesting to speculate how this process in turn makes these placeless spaces into desirable places for the tourist.
It therefore seems that notions such as place and placelessness, distinction and difference, culture and identity are all closely linked in the cultural tourism system. Unravelling these different aspects of the cultural tourism experience may well require new approaches to the study of cultural tourists.
Scale of enquiry and methodology
One of the big changes in the study of cultural tourism compared with 10 years ago is the extent to which problems are posed in terms of the local and the global. This is understandable in terms of the pervasive influence of studies of globalisation. The problem is that we are usually operating at one level or the other - there is rarely a link between the two.
In the past, this was a potential advantage of the ATLAS cultural tourism programme - by tackling localised case studies within a wider European or global structure, the peculiarities of the local and the convergence of the global become more visible.
One of the problems with the current ATLAS framework is perhaps the reliance on survey methodology. This has fallen out of fashion with many analysts because of the limitations of quantitative data and the apparent richness of qualitative data. The problem is that without a rigorous basis for comparison, we lose one of the most basic strengths of quantitative research.
This is why we need to look for new methodologies that can link the global and the local as well combining the advantages of the quantitative and qualitative traditions. Q methodology (now being used by the backpacker research group) may be a way of mapping the socially-constructed field of 'cultural tourism' as well.
A number of areas for future work were also identified by the meeting participants.
In terms of research, it was generally agreed that the following areas would be of interest to group members:
These areas need to be drawn into a research plan for the group, which identifies the key priorities for research and puts forward the means to achieve these.
It was clear from the wide range of initiatives being undertaken by the meeting participants and others in this field that there is a need for some degree of co-ordination and networking in the field. In this regard, Greg Richards presented the plans of ATLAS, Interarts and ArtBase for a 'Culture and Tourism Exchange' (CATEX), which would seek to support networking between and within the cultural and tourism sectors on an international basis. It is hoped to develop this proposal further in the coming months.
In addition it was suggested that the development of standardised survey tools or qualitative research instruments would be of value to the group. These might be able to be used by students to conduct comparative research in different countries. A series of comparative case studies might also be developed by students for their dissertations. A system of data exchange for such projects might be one function of CATEX.
Jordi Juan suggested that a link might be made with the UNESCO Chairs in cultural tourism. They have a network, although they have no specific funding for research.
There was considerable discussion of the publication options for the group, both in terms of the papers presented at the meeting and in the longer term. In the short term it was agreed to publish the papers via ATLAS.
In the longer term, members of the group are already collaborating with the volumes being edited by Melanie Smith and David Leslie. It was also suggested that the group should work on producing an Encyclopaedia of Cultural Tourism (this idea has already had some interest from CABI).
There was also felt to be a need for a text in the area of urban regeneration and cultural tourism.
There may also be some scope for more specialised publications, for example in the area of the European capitals of culture.
Julie Wilson suggested that the group should start compiling a bibliography, which would be useful for all members as well as providing source material for publications. There was also a suggestion that it would be useful to compile a list of current research projects among members to increase the flow of information.
Some delegates also pointed out the need for course development in the area of cultural tourism. There seems to be a particular need in Africa and Latin America at the moment. There was a suggestion that this might be linked to the Winter University concept.
It might also be useful to bring academics and practitioners together to discuss issues of mutual importance.
It was suggested that current projects being undertaken by group members should be documented, so that CTRG members could learn more about each others' current research.
It was agreed that future 'expert meetings' would be of value to the group. There are already plans for two conferences involving the group (August 2004 in Barcelona and October 2004 in Finland), so it might be a good idea to arrange at least one meeting in conjunction with these events. For the longer term, Xerado Pereiro indicated that his university in Portugal would be willing to host future meetings.
There will also be a short meeting of CTRG members present at the Naples conference in April 2004. This meeting will focus on the development of the research plan for the group.
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