A few years ago when some of us were trying to articulate this thing called “Civic Tourism,” we imagined that the culminating activity for this project would be a nice little meeting of a few kindred spirits. Next month we’ll welcome several hundred people, from 40 states, Canada, and Mexico, to Prescott. Although we’re still very much in the process of defining what Civic Tourism is (or isn’t), it’s clear that the fundamental concepts that underpin this approach—the importance of “place,” the role of the public, the notion of “using” tourism to preserve heritage, etc.—are ones that other tourism approaches celebrate as well.

What we’ve discovered during dozens of public meetings, however, is that, while communities know that “sense of place” and public engagement are vital to their economic future and quality of life, they often don’t know how to go about doing it. That’s what we want to investigate next month: What IS the process of place-making within a tourism context? How CAN we best involve residents in that process? How DO we reframe tourism as something other than an economic development tool? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) There are no easy answers: place-making is tough, and civic engagement is challenging. So come with an open mind—a willingness to step outside the boundaries in which we routinely operate. But one thing remains central: our pride in place and our pride in sharing place. How do we do that to benefit residents as well as visitors? There’s the rub.

As a boy growing up in Pennsylvania, I knew Benton MacKaye as one of the architects of the Appalachian Trail (for a year I lived right next to the trail). Years later I discovered MacKaye (1879-1975) had been a regional planner, and one of his recommendations we’ve taken to heart for the Civic Tourism approach. Writing to other planners, MacKaye said the best way to create a healthy community “is not to plan, but to reveal.” He suggests, in other words, that most regions already have an intrinsic sense of place – natural, cultural, built – and that what planners should do is figure out how to allow these qualities to emerge organically, rather than just “planning” more stuff – stuff that might actually bury the most unique and appropriate characteristics.

That doesn’t mean, we’d argue, that towns don’t grow or evolve, but that they do so within a community’s agreed-upon values and traditions; and who gets to define that space where agreement resides shouldn’t be left only to a small number of people. It’s no wonder that new developments that don’t seem appropriate for a region are referred to as “out of place,” because they don’t fit into the accepted natural, cultural, or built ingredients (and here one sees how this little word, “place,” takes on a multi-dimensional quality).

The tourism industry, like the “growth industry” in general, is sometimes enamored with just building more stuff, and there’s often a copycat mentality that drives this work. “If the aquarium draws tourists to Baltimore, let’s built one in Tucson!” Excuse me? Tucson and marine life? The planned-for aquarium was eventually dropped from Tucson’s downtown revitalization plan, and they are now “using” the features that make Tucson Tucson. Southern Arizona has a desert and heritage found nowhere else, so find a way to let those special qualities “reveal” themselves, instead of paving over them with a plan that worked elsewhere.

Dan Shilling’s comments on the insensitivity of “disaster tours” in New Orleans were well thought, and the situation of tourism in that city is precarious. This posting is by Gary Esolen, who was a founding director of the modern tourism marketing program in New Orleans, led the coalition to full funding, and ran the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Program for a decade as its Executive Director before leaving to establish a consulting practice in place-based tourism. Esolen lived in the lower Ninth Ward and owned a home there for twenty years. The memorandum that follows was prepared for and at the request of Wesley LeBlanc of Economic Research Associates in Chicago (who is working on the recovery effort) and Wynton Marsalis, co-chair of the committee on restoring the culture of New Orleans.

Memorandum:
The Risks of Tourism Recovery in New Orleans,
and the Role of New Orleans Culture in a Successful Recovery

The recent announcement that $50 million will soon be allocated from Community Development Block Grant money to bring tourism back to New Orleans and Louisiana could set the stage for either recovery or disaster, depending on how that money is used.
If the money is used to advertise, declaring essentially that New Orleans is back and ready for visitors, it will be disastrous, for reasons discussed below. If instead the money is used to support a series of events that begin to actually achieve the return of musicians and other cultural exemplars to New Orleans, it will lay the foundations of recovery for the city, its culture, and its tourism industry. Which means that a successful tourism recovery will depend on the goals of cultural recovery being foremost.

The press release issued by the office of the Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana, whose office is charged with overseeing the state’s Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism, is not encouraging. That release speaks of countering tourists’ perceptions that might hold them back from visiting New Orleans and Louisiana. Unfortunately, however, the perceptions in question are quite realistic and well-founded. Some 20% fear coming for a visit during the hurricane season, and while most hurricanes allow plenty of leeway for planning and escape, it is not unreasonable to hesitate before committing well in advance to the dates of an annual vacation in a hurricane-prone place. Similarly, about half of those surveyed thought the scenery and attractions might be less fully available than usual, an understatement if anything. Perceptions that are grounded in reality cannot be advertised away.
There is grave danger that the New Orleans tourism industry will make the mistake of understating the depth of the problems the city faces, instead trying to put the best face on the situation and prematurely claim that all is well, the city is ready for visitors, and the celebration is back. It is well established as conventional wisdom in the industry that you bounce back as quickly as possible from disaster, and that at the earliest opportunity you let the world know that you are open and ready to welcome visitors. Because variations on that strategy have worked or almost worked for others who have faced natural disasters, and because variations on that strategy have been used in New Orleans and in the Gulf South after actual or near-miss hurricanes in the past, the path of “minimize the story of the damage and tell them all is well and the party has resumed” is deeply grooved and will almost inevitably be the first response of the tourism industry. Preliminary signs are that that response is already shaping up. In this case it is tragically wrong.

Premature celebration could have two devastating consequences. First, visitors who believe the promise and find it false will bear witness to the true state of the city and word of mouth will do even more damage than Katrina has already done. Second, New Orleans residents, displaced from home and watching the culture they lived and loved being starved out, will rebel against the false bonhomie of a “made for tourism” recovery.

There has long been a deeply rooted resentment of the tourism industry in New Orleans, to a considerable extent based on mistaken premises, and until now balanced by how much benefit the industry gave the city and its residents. For every angry critic there were two people making a handsome living from tourism, and two more keeping their families housed, fed, and cared for because they had steady, reliable jobs. But those natural protections are not active now, and tourism could become the next villain in the story of what happened to New Orleans. There is a growing belief among displaced black New Orleanians that the city’s power structure is deliberately scheming to keep black residents from returning to the city.

Furthermore, pretending all is well will quickly fail as a strategy for promoting tourism. For an extended period of time, New Orleans will remain visibly devastated, and the dislocation of its people will remain tragic. Visiting New Orleans even when its streets again begin to come alive with people and music and energy will be an experience that mixes pleasure and pain. Pretending that isn’t so will not work.
Instead, the tourism industry must openly invite people to come to New Orleans to be part of its process of recovery. Those who come will see and share in the deep creative spirit of the city. They will become true insiders, proven friends of New Orleans and all that it represents. They will participate in history, and young people who come will experience things to tell their grandchildren. If we invite people to come and pretend all is well, they will leave hurt and disillusioned; if we invite them to come help us in a slow, painful, but deeply meaningful process of rebuilding, they will leave with a lifelong bond to New Orleans.

There is, in fact, an element of desperation and denial in the eagerness to recover tourism. The city’s convention business will be slow to come back; indeed cancellations are still happening for events into 2008. Even though there is widespread good will toward New Orleans in the industry, meeting planners will prudently wait until recovery has visibly produced a working hall with adequate hotel and infrastructure support before booking large conventions and trade shows; and once they book the actual meetings will be at least a year later. It would be optimistic to think the threshold of credibility for a major meeting to rebook New Orleans would be reached by the third quarter of 2006; it is more likely to be early 2007; and the meetings might start late in 2007 or early in 2008. There will be few if any truly citywide conventions or trade shows in New Orleans in 2006, and there will be few in 2007. Smaller meetings can and will be held both at the Morial Convention Center and at individual hotels, but the powerful magnetism of New Orleans will not be operative as it has been in the past. Sales will be harder, and service will have to be tightly focused to the needs of a given meeting.

The best hope for the recovery of tourism is leisure travel, and for leisure travelers New Orleans has one thing and one thing only to sell: its character of place, which is to say its distinctive geography and ecology, its architecture and built environment, and its unique culture, including food, music, vibrant street life, and folkways. So for tourism to succeed, the genuine culture of New Orleans must be kept alive and brought back.

The tourism industry has a vital interest in making certain not only that the visible manifestations of that culture are brought back as soon as possible, but also that the deeper community that underlies the creativity of New Orleans is kept alive and restored. That deeper community includes the Mardi Gras Indian tribes, the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, Second Line Dance Clubs, churches (especially the “spirit” churches with their full gospel traditions), extended families, and strong neighborhood bonds. In the past the tourism industry has mostly taken those institutions for granted, as indeed has the entire city. They were, after all, never aimed at visitors (though visitors did experience them some of the time). In fact, they were never institutions of civic leadership, they did not take positions on public issues or try to influence policy. They existed in and for the communities they inhabited. Sometimes they came in conflict with the civil structures of the community, as when the police broke up practice sessions of the Mardi Gras Indians, and the tourism industry never played a particularly enlightened role in those situations. That complacency is a luxury that tourism can no longer afford.

If we intend to invite leisure travelers back to New Orleans, we must invite them back to share in the recovery of the culture. The current debate over Mardi Gras in New Orleans offers a perspective on the dangers and the opportunities. There has already been a full blown controversy about whether or not to stage a tourist-oriented Mardi Gras celebration in 2006, and the sides in that argument as it emerged are stereotypical: on the one hand, the tourist industry argued that this is business, and will help bring back the city’s economy. Residents who are in New Orleans are saying Mardi Gras is part of New Orleans culture and they want and need to keep it alive. But many of those who are displaced are saying angrily that it is obscene to celebrate Mardi Gras for tourists when the city’s residents cannot return. The outcome is an uneasy compromise: a limited set of parades, a tourism industry which has invited visitors to come, and ongoing angry disagreement.

Instead, the tourism industry should devote itself to restoring the local Mardi Gras traditions. The industry should fund the most grass-roots, indigenous parades such as the walking parades of the Krewe de Vieux (which walks through the French Quarter in outrageous costumes) or Barkus (where it is the dogs who wear the costumes). The tourism industry should go to whatever lengths are necessary to bring back the Mardi Gras Indians in full regalia, not only for Fat Tuesday but for the several weeks afterward culiminating in Super Sunday in mid March. Probably few in the tourism industry are aware that the Tipitina’s Foundation has been providing Indians with five pound bags of colored glass beads to sew their costumes, and in the midst of the most difficult privation of post Katrina life many of them have been making their artful costumes. Bringing back those artists and traditions means finding housing, temporary or longer term, and providing a way for them to make a living.

Inviting the press to come and see the return of the Indians to Claiborne and St. Bernard, in the midst of the devastation, and inviting those adventurous visitors who want to join them, will offend no one, will disappoint no one, and will send a true signal of rebirth to the world in a way that staged-for-tourists celebrations cannot.

That simple strategy, repeated over and over, is the key to a successful tourism recovery in New Orleans. It helps that the New Orleans calendar is filled with a succession of deeply rooted local events that are tightly linked to the culture and can provide the occasion to bring back the performers and other artists who celebrate that culture. Mardi Gras. St. Patrick’s Day and Super Sunday and St. Joseph’s Day, all in mid-March. The French Quarter Festival and Jazz Fest in April and May. The celebration and auction of the first Creole Tomatoes around Memorial Day. A relatively new festival, Satchmo Fest, honoring traditional jazz in the summer. A host of local summer festivals celebrating everything from strawberries to gumbo. Southern Decadence on Labor Day weekend. Halloween. The Bayou Classic at Thanksgiving. Christmas (which has become a month-long festival of music and historic characters), Twelfth Night, and back to Mardi Gras. An almost uninterrupted series of happy events, each one clearly and recognizably local and each one providing an occasion to bring back New Orleans musicians, actors, visual artists, and other cultural exemplars. And it will not require genius to add more, similar, events if it seems desirable. The point is to celebrate the return of the culture and people of New Orleans, and let visitors look over the shoulders of locals.

It is a strategy and an outcome worth fighting for.

One challenge we face with Civic Tourism is moving from concept (the idea or philosophy of Civic Tourism) to practice (how it actually plays out on the ground). We’ve held dozens of meetings throughout Arizona where, with our attractive PowerPoint presentations and video programs, we introduce citizens to the IDEA. Once people grasp Civic Tourism at the conceptual level, most agree it’s a good thing and, yes, “We should have a Civic Tourism program in our community” (whether they call it that is not the issue).

Moving from idea to reality, however, can be tricky, and that’s one of the things we want to talk about at the March 16-18 conference. Many of the presenters already do something like Civic Tourism, and we’ve certainly borrowed from their best IDEAS in order to sketch our IDEA. What we’re interested in now, however, is how the programs that work got everyone on the same page, a process that allowed the community to move in a different direction. Face it, Civic Tourism asks us to think about tourism differently, and any time you question the status quo, you’ll encounter some resistance.

What strategies are communities using, what tools are organizations proposing, what arguments are individuals making? Is it only the economic argument? That’s always been part of tourism’s advocacy arsenal, but we think the discussion needs to move beyond economics alone.

We’ve got a bit of an issue with all the Richard Florida “creative class” stuff as it relates to tourism. In the economist Florida’s popular books, THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS and THE FLIGHT OF THE CREATIVE CLASS, he encourages cities to invest in their “sense of place” in order to attract well-paying companies, the kind of business every community desires. When it comes to tourism, Florida’s tone is generally dismissive, suggesting that communities should not go down that road. Invest in the knowledge economy, he says, not the service industry.

That’s all well and good, but some communities are never going to lure a high-tech company or another knowledge-based industry, unless they create a healthy community first. Practiced wisely, tourism can be one of the building blocks to help cities create the vibrant environment knowledge industries are looking for. It’s the typical chicken-and-egg dilemma, but since tourism IS ALREADY IN most places (the egg), let’s begin with it and “use” it appropriately.

Florida apparently only sees tourism as hotels, restaurants, gift shops, and other obvious “tourism” businesses, and he falls into the trap of thinking these are all low-wage jobs. Tourism is much more than the standard hospitality sector; it’s museums, historic districts, environmental programs, arts festivals, and the like – what we call the ingredients of a “sense of place.” Museum directors ARE PART OF the tourism business, as are preservationists, cultural practitioners, park supervisors, and many others. The tourism industry is ingrained into most other community sectors, and, as the earlier Katrina post suggested, we need to start talking about it as such.

The truth is, many towns, especially rural ones, have historically relied on tourism dollars, and they will likely continue to do so. It’s here, get used to it, and figure out how to do it right. Civic Tourism argues that communities can practice tourism “creatively” too – the same process Florida puts forth to lure high-value employers.

Tourism can no longer be viewed as a benign little slice of community development – one that’s often ignored or relegated solely to the chamber of commerce. Tourism is ingrained into nearly every region’s social, economic, and cultural infrastructure, and we should discuss it as such. Both the good and the bad. The necessity of broadening the “tourism conversation” was only made more apparent by the recent tour bus controversy in New Orleans following hurricane Katrina. Sure, the tour companies could make the argument – which they did – that they were bringing needed dollars back to the region, thereby helping the 9th Ward and other areas recover. But that’s not the way it played out on the national media, and the industry as a whole got a black eye. News footage of tourists in Bermuda shorts taking photos while standing in the front yard of homes where people lost everything (including, perhaps, their lives) made the industry look like a voyeuristic leech. The companies’ websites shouting SEE THE LEVEE BREAKS and other sensational hype were equally in poor taste. Finally, the homeowners’ handmade signs hanging from destroyed dwellings, reading “This is my home, not a tourist attraction!” demonstrated that, despite the tour companies’ goodwill effort to bring dollars back to New Orleans, the residents weren’t buying it, and they didn’t appreciate their tragedy thought of as just another “tourist attraction.”

This is the industry at its worst – exploitative and clueless. In the Civic Tourism project we often say there’s an appropriate and inappropriate way to go about tourism development, and WHO DECIDES where that fine line is can’t only be left to the chamber of commerce, the tourism bureau, or a bus company. The Katrina episode is a clear example of where it would have been a good idea to engage residents, to discuss IF, and HOW, and WHERE, and WHEN the tours might take place, as well as how the tourism industry could come together to genuinely help the neighborhood. An inclusive process – bringing the people often most affected by the industry’s actions into the discussion – demonstrates that we’re capable of seeing tourism as something more than an economic tool. It’s also a corporate citizen responsible to community values, at the same time it can help residents preserve what they love about their place.

That same kind of conversation can happen in every community. Let’s be honest enough to acknowledge that some people aren’t particularly fond of tourism, griping about “how it changed my town” or how it engages in bad-taste practices like the Katrina example. If we keep doing tourism TO residents instead of WITH them, the industry will continue to get more black eyes, and it will never engender the public and political support it needs. Giving residents some ownership in the conversation – which, afterall, is a conversation about THEIR place – will only help tourism in the long run.