Our new book, ‘Events Management: an introduction’ will be published by Routledge on 22nd February 2012.  You can view more information about it here, and pre-order it from Amazon.

“Contemporary events management is a diverse and challenging field. This major new introductory textbook is the first to fully explore the multi-disciplinary nature of events management and to provide the student with all the practical skills and professional knowledge they need to succeed in the events industry.

The book covers every type of event studied on an events management course, including areas as diverse as sports, music, the arts, corporate events, tourism, and the public and voluntary sectors. It introduces all the key issues facing the contemporary events industry, from health, safety and risk management to sustainability to developing a market-oriented business, with every topic brought to life through vivid case-studies, personal biographies and examples of best practice from the real world of events management.

Written by a team of authors with many years experience working in the events industry, the book introduces the practical skills required in every core functional area of events management, such as marketing, finance, project management, strategy, operations, event design and human resources. A companion website for the book includes a dazzling array of additional teaching and learning features, from self-test questions, audio interviews with key industry figures and additional case-studies to Powerpoint slides and an instructors’ guide. Events Management: An Introduction is the essential course text for any events management program”

How low can it go?  The devolution of economic development and the possibility of economic insurgency

This presentation provides a critique of the UK Government’s policies and plans for devolving economic development processes from the regional to the local and neighbourhood levels.  Drawing on economic development theory and experiences from Europe, Latin America, the United States and Japan, radical approaches to economic development are reviewed that suggest possibilities for innovative approaches to the problems of economic development in the cities of the UK.

International examples show that alternative models are available for growing the economies of our cities and towns that have the character of a challenging, bottom-up insurgency – a stark contrast to the conservative models of growth being offered by the new Local Enterprise Partnerships and Government departments[1].  In an economic insurgency, traditional, hierarchical institutions and frameworks come under attack from below as new economies take shape and start to re-shape places from within.  

Following the financial crisis of 2008, Western governments have struggled to develop consistently successful responses to stimulating sustainable growth in post-crash economies[2].  In the UK, the Government’s ‘local growth’ white paper appeared to promote a return to pre-crash methods of top-down economic development with an increased role for the private sector, despite the rhetorical references to a ‘new localism’[3] and economic ideas of subsidiarity and sustainability.[4] However, despite these contradictions, recent Government espousals have the potential to create an environment in which more radical approaches to economic development are becoming possible.  This presentation argues that an economic insurgency is a necessary next step in local economic development in the UK.

Despite their huge popularity as holiday destinations, seaside towns have generally been under-researched. Existing research is limited to narrow historical perspectives and is often focused at a regional level. British seaside towns have suffered a significant decline but there is little attention given to how contemporary issues are likely to shape their futures. For this paper, a sample of British seaside towns that form part of the newly approved Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) are analysed to identify how these new governance arrangements are likely to affect future development in these areas. Core-periphery theory (CPT) is used as a framework within which to analyse these  arrangements and to identify potential problems and obstacles.  Analysis reveals significant governance issues for seaside towns in terms of structural inequalities and relationships of dependency. The LEPs do not adequately recognise the peripheral nature of seaside towns and the special conditions needed for their development. There is a reliance on outdated growth models and there is a lack of innovation in their approach. From a CPT perspective, the new LEPs do not seem to provide a brighter future for the development of seaside towns.

The event has been organised by the RSA network on Tourism, Regional Development and Public Policy who are very interesting group of researchers.  I presented a paper on seaside tourism in Kent at one of their events in Aalborg, Denmark in 2008 – click here for the presentation - and the seminar was really well organised, with a great range of contributions with a Northern and Eastern European focus and lots of good discussion.

Peripherality in tourism has traditionally been a concept used to contrast remote, economically disadvantaged, often exotic locations, with the prosperous tourism generating core(s) of northern, western nations. Dependency theory highlights the tension that this creates between nations and populations whose relationships are constructed on the basis of inequality (Britton 1982). This ‘core-periphery conflict’ has produced global landscapes of tourism governance that reflect these inequalities (Jordan 2004).

There have been relatively few attempts to study the governance of domestic tourism within the context of core-periphery theory (CPT). This is a significant omission in tourism and governance literature as domestic tourism at the local level also manifests economic and social inequalities which can lead to conflict (Weaver 1998, Bianchi 2002).

This paper examines the historical and contemporary development of British seaside towns, and the governance of tourism in these towns from a CPT perspective, concentrating on three historical periods. Firstly, the mid 19th century in which their development was tied to the growth of British industrial centres. Secondly, the period in the second half of the 20th century when the growth of southern Mediterranean resorts presented a challenge to seaside towns and, finally, the first two decades of the 21st century in which attempts to regenerate seaside tourism in the UK have been governed by the spatial remits of Regional Development Agencies and the new Local Enterprise Partnerships (Kennell 2010).

You can read the abstract for our paper by clicking here.  The final paper is quite a development from this point and incorporates some of the material that we have been posting on here over the last year.

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.