I have started a new blog and a new twitter account to record the progress of my PhD research into the cultural regeneration of seaside towns in the UK. I’ll be posting fairly regular updates on my research, which is now into its last 12 months, and also using them as a forum for discussion and dissemination of my results.
The very talented Rachel Holland, eco-stylist and founder of La Luminata, the sustainable design and trends online magazine, has published a book called ‘Future Visions’. This contains “A view of the future from some of today’s top blogger’s, trendwatchers, artists, designers, philosophers, experts and free-thinkers in the eco world”.
20 individuals have contributed their observations on the state of eco design, fashion and society and Rachel has put these together as a set of views on the future in a beautifully designed book.
You can view a preview of the book online here, where you can also order copies. If you click on the image of the front cover below, you can go straight through to a lovely digital version of the book.
My contribution to the book is on page 17 and is heavily indebted to Mike Davis’ latest writing about the ‘ecological genius of cities’ in the New Left Review and recent actions by the Climate Camp group in the UK.
I’m going to be appearing on the BBC1 TV programme ‘The Politics Show South East’ on Sunday 14th February. I’ve been invited on to discuss the role of regeneration spending in seaside towns, for an article that has been prompted by the publication of the Centre For Cities ‘Cities Outlook 2010′ report.
The Centre for Cities are a think-tank who investigate economic development issues with a focus on British cities and they publish an annual ‘Cities Outlook’ report which sets out the performance and prospects of the UK’s 64 main cities. Their latest report was published a couple of weeks ago.
Like everything in this field at the moment, it makes for quite depressing reading. Unemployment has risen to around 8%. Retail, financial services and construction are the hardest hit sectors so far, all of which are key aspects of city economies. The centre forecasts that it will take around 5 years for employment to return to pre-crisis levels. We can add to this by noting that there is probably still some way to go before we hit the bottom of the unemployment curve. With cuts still to come to the public sector and the commercial property market due to underperform significantly this year it is likely that unemployment will reach 10% by the end of the year, before it begins to pick up again in 2011.
A Key focus of the report is on what they describe as “public sector cities”, those urban centres whose recent growth has involved the re-location or creation of large numbers of public sector jobs. As we all know, the pain of this crisis is going to be felt most strongly by the public sector. The Government is now taking steps to address the budget deficit produced by the bailouts of the banking sector and the programme of quantitative easing that is still ongoing, and necessary to keep the hyper-capitalist juggernaut rolling. The graph below, taken from the report, places cities into categories of vulnerability according to their exposure to the effects of public sector cutbacks:
From a seaside perspective, the two cities that jump out here are Brighton and Hastings seperated by only35 miles of coastline, but representing the most insulated and the most exposed groups of cities in terms of the risks associated with the coming cutbacks.
Brighton has seen highest contribution of any city in the country from the private sector to job creation -70.4% of all recent new jobs have been in the private sector, with a 20.8% growth in job creation since 2008, and also the 6th highest rate of new business creation in the country. Hastings, 39th on the list in terms of private sector contribution, saw a net loss of 0.3% of jobs in the same period. In Hastings, only 57.5% of new jobs have been created in the private sector.
Hastings is the 2nd highest ranked city for earnings growth in the country, but 63rd in terms of average income, suggesting that the job creation is still taking place in the lower reaches of the earning scale. This is supported by the city’s occupation of 58th place in the rankings for knowledge economy jobs (9.7% of the workforce), comparing poorly to Brighton in 10th place with 23.2%. This contrast in the skills and profile of the two neighbouring cities is also reflected in the percentage of high skills (NVQ4+) in the local labour market: Brighton is 6th on the list with 38.1% and Hastings is 40th with 22.5%.
It is clear from data like this that Brighton has a built-in resilience to the kind of economic shocks that Hastings is particularly exposed to in the current climate. Brighton has been undergoing a renaissance since the early 1990s, with the regeneration of the town facilitated by good transport links to London, a growing creative industries sector and high levels of entrepreneurship. Hastings, however, is still struggling to deal with the repercussions of the restructuring of the tourism industry following the recessions of the late 1970s and early 1980s. As the report says, “Many of the cities that have been hit hardest are places still suffering from the legacy of industrial restructuring and previous recessions”.
The regeneration of Hastings, which has recently embraced the cultural route to redevelopment, has been extensively supported by the public sector, notably the local authority and SEEDA, the regional development agency. One of the reasons that the economic impacts of regeneration are so difficult to pin down in the short-medium terms is the effect of increasing public spending on job creation. Major regeneration projects require investments in human, as well as physical capital, and these projects create employment by virtue of their existence. Increasing the capacity of the local public sector to deliver change and bringing new facilities and projects online, often means increasing the size of publically subsidised sectors through the creation of new agencies, administrative structures and individual posts. This growth in local employment is now at risk.
It would seem that Hastings, which has seen huge public sector investment over the last 5 years, is now in a precarious position. No doubt, without the massive government interventions that the city has benefited from, Hastings would be in a far worse position. Assuming that the funding continues to flow, the regeneration of the Harbour area and the presence of the new Jerwood contemporary art gallery will help to drive tourism in Hastings and begin to create secondary employment in the accommodation, catering and other tourism services sectors. The real question for Hastings is can it weather the storm of the coming period of public-sector cuts without losing momentum?
The reinvention of Brighton has been high-profile and dramatic; a more dramatic commercial-sector crash may have (and still might) jeopardise its future sustainability. If public sector investment can be maintained in Hastings then this will help to maintain local development capacity and enable the city to push on with its ambitious plans when we come out of the other side of this crisis. Eventually, the public investment will begin to lever in private money and the city can look forward to the development of a more balanced economy. If momentum is lost in Hastings it may never catch up with its more glamorous neighbour.
The Centre for Cities report emphasises that the recovery, when it comes, will be uneven. This will be no less true for our seaside towns. In the south-east alone, the development of formerly bustling resorts is a patchwork of public, private, charitable and organic approaches to regeneration. There will be winners and losers in the competition to become the next Brighton, but it appears that the city that has provide a template for so much current thinking about seaside cultural development will be on top for some time to come.
A colleague and I have had a paper accepted for the ‘Global Events Congress IV: Events and Festivals Research: The State of the Art’ event, to be held in Leeds from 14-16 July 2010.
Our paper looks at how the application of methods from ethnography can contribute to events management research. Bekah carried out participant observation, photographic and auto-photographic research during the Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee in the US. You can read our abstract here
My review of Poynter & MacRury’s edited collection ‘Olympic Cities: 2012 and the Remaking of London’ has just been published in this month’s edition of New Start Magazine, a publication for the regeneration sector.
“Like all pre-games publications, this text suffers from the problem of grappling with an event that is yet to happen, in a policy environment subject to radical change. However, by bringing together a diversity of perspectives on the relationship between hosting the games and urban development in one volume, it forms an excellent resource for anyone trying to understand how and why we got to where we are today in East London and the regeneration potential of a successful Games in 2012.”
I’ve posted on here about tourism and the economic crisis, and have taught about it this year as well. One of the things that strikes me regularly about the crisis is the unsystematic way in which it tends be analysed – one day a report of bankrupt airline, another day stories of industrial action or falling visitor numbers.
I’m going to use this post to apply David Harvey’s ’seven moments’ model of the economic restructuring process that I heard him speak about here and that he has most recently outlined in an essay for the Monthly Review that you can read online here. I have adapted these seven moments to analyse the tourism industry in this period of restructuring; it will be interesting to see whether this adds some clarity or helps us to think about how the tourism industry will emerge from the crisis.
Some of these topics I’ve already written about, some have suggested new areas of investigation. Over the next few months I’m going to post on each of these topics and then, eventually, bring them all together to summarise this period of restructuring in the tourism industry.
1. The organisation and technological forms involved in producing tourism products and services
It is likely that technological changes within the tourism industry will accelerate during this period of restructuring. The effects of an increasingly competitive marketplace and problems of over-supply are combining to produce a favourable climate for innovations in the online packaging and knowledge-gathering aspects of the industry and price-concious customers are driving an increase in competition between web sites, which seems to be providing a stimulus for big providers to move into web 2.0 provision, so as not to lose their competitive advantage. Where the previous waves of web development have increased efficiencies for tourism businesses and helped to reduce prices for consumers, it is likely that this next wave of web 2.0-style developments will illuminate differences between providers and give new prominence to tourists as expert reviewers of tourism products.
Another aspect of tourism development that it might be interesting to focus on here will be the emergence of new destinations. This will be driven by three factors, as we have seen in previous crises:
2. The relationship to the environment
From the mid-1990s onwards, the concepts of sustainable development and eco-tourism have been central to debates about the future of tourism and have provided acres of newsprint for the broadsheets’ travel supplements as middle-class tourists have differentiated themselves from the masses by seeking our ‘responsible’, ‘ethical’, ’sustainable’, or ‘green’ holidays. With predicted declines in the market for organic food, ethical fashion and fairly-traded products – has this mode of tourism development also suffered and what is the future for this sector after the downturn?
3. Social relationships within tourism
Along with the rising importance of green perspectives on tourism, ethical concerns over the social relationships brought about through tourism have been a key element of tourism discourse since the 1990s.
This area has mainly been focused on the nature of the host-guest interaction within destinations, but has also included concerns over representation in and governance of tourism destinations, authenticity and exploitation. As with sustainable / eco-tourism, it remains to be seen how organisations that work in this area will fare during a depression. Recent problems at Tourism Concern are hopefully not indicative of a gradual lessening of support for ethical tourism initiatives from the public and the tourism industry.
4. Conceptions of tourism and its values
The core question to be answered here is ‘what is tourism for?’ Historically, tourism has been seen variously as a privelege, a human right, a leisure activity, a cultural form and as a social practice. I wrote here about contemporary developments in the relationship between tourism, social policy and regeneration. The current crisis provides two non-exclusive conceptions of tourism within the public sphere.
Firstly, and most likely to gain prominence quickly, is the assertion of the direct and indirect economic benefits of tourism. In a period of a weak national currency tourism can be a key export for the UK economy and a parallel rise in domestic tourism places tourism in a position of potential growth, even if that growth is relative rather than absolute. This potential could see tourism taking a stronger role in economic and regional development strategies, perhaps displacing retail and creative industries development in the development zeitgeist.
Secondly, it is possible that the new economics of tourism, if coupled with a sense of corporate social responsibility or development levies of some kind, could create a more favourable climate for social tourism in the UK. In many European countries, tourism plays an important role in social policy. Social tourism can take many forms: In France, subsidised tourism channels tourism spending to particular destinations whilst in many part of Scandanavia tourism is seen as a human right, creating obligations on the state to secure this right for its citizens. In the UK, organisations like the Family Holiday Association have a history of providing tourism opportunities for disadvantaged groups, but this approach has never been mainstreamed into public policy.
5. Industrial relations within tourism
We have seen a sharpening of industrial relations within many sections of the economy over the last twelve months. Disputes at Visteon, Vestas, Lindsey and the Royal Mail appear to be the harbingers of a new period of renewed labour militancy in the UK, but the mixture of compromises and legalistic disputes that have postponed resolution of the BA strike and the Royal Mail strikes mean that it is unclear as yet whether unions are likely to become more or less powerful through the restrucuring currently underway in response to the economic crisis. The activities of unions in the travel and public sectors are likely to have the greatest impact on the tourism industry, but rising worker militancy generally could lead to changes in the way that non-unionised workers (the majority of tourism employees) react to threats of closures, job losses, pay cuts and work intensification, as the employees of Thomas Cook in Dublin show in the video below:
6. Tourism policy and politics
In the UK, most public agencies are in a state of paralysis at the moment as they wait for an election and the almost inevitable period of regime change that will follow it. The smart money seems to be on an early election in March, so until then it is going to be very difficult to get a feel for how tourism policy in the UK is going to develop. The incoming conservative party have let it be known through various outlets that they plan a ‘bonfire of the quangos’ and no doubt this will hit our tourism agencies. However, every incoming government since 1979 has promised exactly this and then, faced with the prospect of losing control over spending or developing truely accountable structures of governance, has tended to spend a lot of money on the restruturing and rebranding of the quangos instead.
7. The social reproduction of tourism
Within Harvey’s model, this seventh term relates to the social reproduction of labour within capitalism and the way in which systems of production are maintained and developed through social processes. Within this adaptation, I will develop the final category as a synthetic product of the preceding areas of analysis. Once the 6 areas above have been considered dialectically, it will be possible to draw some initial conclusions about the ways in which the tourism industry is being maintained and developed as the crisis progresses and the strategies of restructuring become more clear.
Each of these seven areas will provide material for blog posts throughout 2010, with a final article being produced towards the end of the year.
Most years since 2000 I have remembered to post a list up online of my favourite things of the year. I make no claims to authority but hope, as always, that by doing this I will be able to reconstruct my awful memory at some point in the future when digital archiving means that I can collect all of these things in one place…click on the images if you want to find out more about any of these obsessions….
Music: The Hospital Records podcasts. These are simply unbelievably good. Every week or so you get a free hour-long show of drum and bass, mixed up with some more leftfield quirky bits and pieces and occasional restaurant reviews. Earlier in the year I went to their night, Hospitality, at the 02 in London - after realising that I really have become the old guy at the back of the rave muttering about how nothing is as good as it used to be, I now content myself with playing the Hospital Records podcast in the office at full volume when there is no-one else around. Sometimes I even sneak a cheeky dance in at the end of the day.
Book: Tony Bennet et al’s ‘Culture, Class, Distinction’. This is a work of cultural research that is almost terrifying in its achievements. A team of researchers developed a methodology with which to investigate Bourdieu’s theories of cultural capital, power and class in 21st century Britain and, after 4 years or so, wrote it all up in a book. Coming to the conclusions that ‘class matters’ and that cultural participation is the key concept for understanding the role of culture in producing and defining social divisions in contemporary Britain, they have updated and refined Bourdieu’s work.
Film: Star Trek. I know, I know…..but it was really good, honest. It’s simply not true that I would have enjoyed it even if nothing had happened at all and at some point a door had made that ‘proper’ star trek door-opening noise.
Website: Global Tourism Issues. Two of our students at Greenwich put together this blog as part of their 2nd year studies. Now that course has finished they are carrying on with what has become a hugely popular website. Every day they update the site with snippits of news, images and usually amusing commentary about up-to-the-minute issues in the global tourism industry. They also have a twitter presence, for those of us with 140 character attention spans! I’ve been referring students and colleague to this site for the last few months and it is a great resource for anyone researching or working in tourism.
Three short films were commissioned as part of the Sea Change initiative, which have been produced by the very creative people at Animate Projects. Each of the films presents a perspective on a seaside town that is currently going through the regeneration process. If you click on the picture below, you will be taken to the wonderful film about Teignmouth - a small town on the south coast of Devon in the UK – made by Kayla Parker.
Smells like Teign Spirit
I’ve written about Teignmouth before on the Arcades / Promenades project blog, for those of you with an interest in finding out more about this quirky seaside town. On the Animate Projects website you can also watch films about Bridlington and Hastings – enjoy!
Along with two colleagues, Elizabeth Booth and Charles Bladen, I have edited a collection of papers from our Olympic Legacy conference held last year at the University of Greenwich. The collection contains seven substantial, refereed papers on Olympic legacy issues, including information about London 2012, Beijing 2008, Torino 2006, the Cultural Olympiad, volunteering and an overview of the meanings of ‘olympic legacy’. You can download the publication for free by clicking on the image below. If you would like a hard copy for your library or reference use, please leave a comment on this post and I will get in touch.
My delicious Currently on my bookshelf
