Idealog: April-June 2006

Fascinatin' Rhythm - 29 June 06

British TV in the late 1950s used to show some popular short films by Slim Hewitt. They each showed industrial machines making things. It wasn't always clear just what the bobbing levers and spinning wheels were producing - the fascination was the rhythmical images, almost abstract in their style, of mechanical busy-ness.

A modern set of documentaries from a Canadian film company has similar fascination. How It Is Made usually show three or four production processes varying, for example, from cakes to carpets. They are in colour - Hewitt's work was black and white - and there is a characteristically sparse and concise commentary by Tony Hurst. They show more than just machines - occasional people appear - but the focus is literally upon the production of goods by machinery. There is no drama, no plot, hardly any human element, but the films avoid being sterile technology (especially of the often-seen 'mega-machine' genre) through the everyday nature of the goods being made - pencils and egg-boxes have featured - described by Hurst's carefully measured sentences. The French-Canadian producers use factories near at hand so they avoid the obvious - coke cans being turned out are not for you-know-who but a company probably unknown in Europe. Catch them in the UK on documentary cable channel - they're an antidote to the bizarre type of reality show and have a delightfully fresh appeal.

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Tourism Grew In Stages - 28 June 06

Motorway service stations in Britain were apparently planned to be every twelve miles, something like the maximum distance a car suddenly registering an empty fuel tank could travel before it finally stopped.

Along the western coast of North America the Spanish settlers built missions a sensible mule-ride distance apart. The missionaries could move north from San Diego de Alcala along the chain of 21 centres as far as San Francisco de Solano.

As pioneers and settlers of the United States moved into the new state of California a network of horse and wagon trails was set up. Taverns offering food and lodging were opened to serve them. Cold Springs Tavern (pictured) still supplies food to travellers near Santa Barbara, a cool shelter from the hot midday sun.

As the railroad pushed west the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe company took on English-born Fred Harvey to build hotels and restaurants the distance apart that a train would travel in a day - round about a hundred miles. The Fred Harvey Company gained a reputation for good service by well trained (no, that's not a pun) female staff - made even more famous in the stage and film musical The Harvey Girls. The Company opened up tourism in many parts of the south west by running tours from railway station stops to places with fine scenery or native American communities.

So travel development out west was driven by what can be called the four modes of travel: exploration, conquest, business travel and leisure tourism, with transport modes to match.

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On The Button! - 26 June 06

Science museums are everywhere. This display of electrical activity is at NEMO, the Science and Technology Centre opened in Amsterdam in 1997. It is housed in a building shaped like a giant ship, and given its dockside position next to the collection of the Dutch Maritime Museum it is very appropriate. Only some people might say it doesn't really look like a ship.

There are science museums in many cities from San Francisco's Exploratorium to Melbourne's Scienceworks Museum. As usual they are often thought of as the latest fad with everyone trying to jump onto the band wagon. As usual a better opinion looks back eighty years to the Deutsches Museum of Munich, opened in 1925. Another, deeper, dip in to history turns up the fact that the French revolutionaries of the 1790s wanted to have a collection of technical equipment on display with an attendant to explain how things worked. Sadly, the plan was not put in to action. Other collections were assembled during the nineteenth century, notably that of the South Kensington Museum in London, later to become the Science Museum, but they were largely collections of objects arranged in stationary exhibitions.

The point about the Deutsches Museum, established by the visionary Dr Oskar von Miller, was that it aimed at comprehensive coverage of science and technology, and many things worked. The visitor, or a museum guide, could push a button and see the wheels go round (or pistons go in and out, levers up and down and whatever). The aim now was to display not just an artefact but a process, an action, a dynamic and informative exhibition. It was still a historical viewing rather than a statement of the present or exploration of the future, but it was hugely influential. Other museums installed their own working exhibits. The Palace of Discovery (Palais de la Decouverte) in Paris opened in 1937 with university students explaining to visitors how scientific experiments worked. In Vienna, London, Chicago and Toronto teaching was the aim - or from the visitors' viewpoint, discovery. Children's museums in San Francisco, Boston and Bristol, England led the way to 'non-historic', interactive, demonstration exhibits using a growing range of new technologies. The NEMO centre in Amsterdam is a recent addition.

And it isn't about the past but the present; in fact it is as much about the future as the vast majority of its tourists are forming ideas that will shape their part within it. NEMO is about the unknown and the still-to-be discovered.

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Tourism Driving Renewal: 2 - 25 June 06

Shropshire's famous iron bridge of 1779 has given the village at one end of the bridge its name. Cast iron was used to span the River Severn here, instead of stone, in order to show off what the local ironmasters could make for their customers the length and breadth of the land. Versions of the bridge even appeared in Europe and the Caribbean.

The industry of what was then usually referred to as Coalbrookdale (a side valley nearby containing the main iron works) prospered for several decades. However, as Birmingham and other places with more extensive resources began to build their own mining and manufacturing centres, the Shropshire village and its neighbours in Madeley, Dawley and Oakengates began to struggle. By the middle of the last century there were large areas of dereliction and decay.

In 1964 the new Labour government designated the area as one of its 'new towns' and set up a publicly-funded Development Corporation to transform and develop the district. Later named Telford after the Scottish engineer who was also Surveyor of Shropshire's Roads and Bridges, the new town was given an extensive new road system linked to the railway, a new centre with shopping and offices, and factory estates.

The villages of Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale were within the Telford boundary and the achievements of the eighteenth century were used heavily to landmark the new town and give it a sense of identity based on industrial pioneering. Tourist promotion figured heavily, especially as the Development Corporation supported a new Museum Trust aimed at conserving the industrial heritage of the Severn Gorge area, a heritage which is both extensive and unique. Without the Corporation's funds, staff and activities the Museum would probably have been far less successful. From a company museum owned by Allied Ironfounders in 1959 to the Museum Trust developments, mainly between 1973 and 1978, the creation of a series of heritage-based attractions and tourist infrastructure turned a declining area into a once-again busy set of communities.

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Powering The Industrial Revolution - 25 June 06

There is an interesting argument, but unsupported by direct documentary evidence, for the view that tourism was used to create the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and therefore the world.

The River Severn cuts through a deep gorge in Shropshire where it runs fast and deep, especially at times of flood. In the 1770s a plan was advanced for a new bridge across it to be made of stone. It had to be built of a clear, single arch because of barge traffic on the river. Ironmasters such as Abraham Darby III and John Wilkinson put forward the idea of using cast iron instead. This was done and the arch was completed in 1779. At its northern end a hotel was built, funded by a 'tontine' in which members invested money. The bridge was paid for out of the fund and surplus money invested. As time went on and members of the tontine died the sum grew, to be claimed finally by the last member living.

Paintings were commissioned of the bridge, notably by the London-based artist Michaelangelo Rooker. These tended to emphasise the spectacular nature of the gorge. Engravings made from the paintings were printed and sold or given away. Even press advertisements were arranged extolling the scenery and drawing attention to the fiery iron furnaces which could be viewed during both the day and the night. Prominent visitors made the journey to Shropshire, often from London and abroad, and they took away ideas about the new, industrial, system and what it could produce. It looks likely that this activity was being deliberately fostered in order to sell industrial expansion. While it was not tourism in the modern sense and scope, all the elements appear to have been there.

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Communication Towers - 21 June 06

We are used to radio transmitters and cellphone masts and retail park signs and marquees. They're all towers built to allow communication of one kind or another. The reason they are there is to do with commercial organisation and technological advances, but the principle is not new at all. Beacons were famously used across Britain to warn of the approach of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and later to spread news of anniversaries to be celebrated. Church towers and spires were there to communicate as well. They symbolised God in heaven, above, and acted as landmarks to guide travellers towards them when roads were poor and signs non-existent. Their decoration spoke of saints and sinners, local noteworthies, and the perils of human frailties.

Secular buildings were also statements in the language of architecture: castles for power, Victorian town and city halls for civic pride and organisation. Lighthouses identified their own location by their flashing-light code while they warned ships away from rocks and shoals. Nineteenth century businessmen vied with each other to built highest inorder to flaunt their wealth and the religious and political cause that they were supporting. Disney's fairy tale castle speaks of European mythology and modern visitor management since all roads in Disneyland lead to and from its turrets. Ever since people were able to place one stone on top of another for some utilitarian purpose they have by the action made some kind of statement to those passing close by. The builders transmitted information and the viewers interpreted the messages and the world went round a little further.

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Tourism Driving Renewal: 1 - 17 June 06

In 1959, Robin Huws Jones of the University College of Wales, Swansea, was making a train journey back to the town. The route into the station took him across the lower Swansea Valley, at that time a scene of growing dereliction on a large scale. To the west of the town is Gower with 23 miles of cliffs, bays, beaches and marshland gathered in to the first UK Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty to have been declared. Those beaches attracted tourists, virtually all of whom would cross the valley by train, car or coach, being given a memory of a repellant industrial wasteland.

Huws Jones had the idea that something had to be done. With colleagues in the university and the Borough Council he pushed for the creation of a project team, a partnership which would regenerate the valley at a time when that buzz word had hardly begun to circulate. Over the next years the Lower Swansea Valley Project cleared the decay, planted trees and encouraged spending on new factory estates. Ground which had been poisoned by watse from the town's old copper industry was dug out and fresh topsoil spread. the River Tawe was confined by a barrage which created a strip suitable for water sports. A hotel was opened and a new attraction, Plantasia built where the main road route into Swansea crosses the river.

The Project was one of the earliest in the country and was owed to the realisation that visitor impressions are highly influential in industrial areas as well as tourist places. Swansea has seen many more improvements over the years since then and has itself become more of a tourist destination - the new Welsh National Waterfront Museum was recently opened there. In recognition of its status, Swansea has become a city, with the track record of having pioneered some of the earliest tourism-related regeneration in the country.

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The Environmental Cost Of Peace - 19 June 06

A group of Chinese tourists in Amsterdam in April. Large numbers of tourists from China are expected to visit countries beyond their home land over the next few years. China itself is opening up as what might turn out to be the world's biggest tourist destination. Since the last world war the Japanese have begun to travel, something few of them did before. Since the Iron Curtain rusted away and was pulled down people from eastern europe have begun to travel west and, indeed, to every other point of the compass. If, in the future, more of Africa can become prosperous enough that more of its inhabitants, not just the wealthy, can travel, then it will add to the fast-changing patterns of movement around the globe. Apart from the further expansion of the tourism industry world-wide, there must be at least three other effects. First, the chances are that guests and hosts get to understand each other better, and engage in dialogues face to face, rather than from behind heavily defended frontiers. Second, the management of those dialogues has to be seen as of primary importance if encounters between peoples are going to have any real meaning and positive effect. Third, the pressure on transport, especially by air, is going to result in a gigantic increase in traffic and pollution problems unless it is handled better. Will the cost of global peace have to be met by sacrifices to the environment?

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Glad To See You - 14 June 06

A photo taken over forty years ago in Russia prompts thoughts about ethics. A coach party of tourists under the care of an Intourist guide had stopped for a picnic lunch travelling towards Smolensk. A farm cart with three people on board came past, being overtaken by a car which was about the only other vehicle in sight for some time.

Out came the cameras. The Russians were not asked if they minded their photos being taken. They looked a little self-conscious, but was it embarrassment or shyness? It's easy now to think that here were the western tourists taking photos to show their friends back home how primitive Russia was, how simple the people, how much better and right was Britain, the USA, Canada and Ireland from which the tourists came. Questions of ethics are always loaded by prevailing ideas of morality. What if the travellers had taken no photos of such scenes, but just of the baroque palaces of the Tsars and the wealthy? Would it have been ethical not to show such conditions, but to give an impression of prosperity when there wasn't any? Should photos only be taken with the subject's permission - difficult to get if you don't share a language. And how would you photograph a happy crowd?

In Moscow the tourist party met Red Army soldiers in a park. Someone dared to move to take a photo. The soldiers waved their hands to stop him, then grouped quickly together in a suitable pose of friendliness, smiling and waving while everyone took photos. Were they really being friendly to these bourgeois travellers or just putting on a front to present their country better? What is propaganda and what is prying?

Douglas, N (1996) They Came For Savages: 100 Years Of Tourism In Melanesia, NSW, Southern Cross University

Smith, M & Duffy, R (2003) The Ethics Of Tourism Development, London, Routledge

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The New (And Unfamiliar) World - 10 June 06

A statue of the North American native Pocahontas stands at the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia. Next year marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of the first successful colony within the future United States of America. Very different cultures were to meet in the tidewater lands of the Atlantic coast, cultures which were to clash as often as they benefitted each other. Ultimately the North American native peoples lost out to the power of European settlers, leaving fragmented remains which have usually been taken over and re-presented through alien narratives. The story of Pocahontas was 'whitened' to make her a princess who loved a settler, saved his life and gladly adopted his ways as her own. T he Disney cartoon sweetened the narrative like a European fairy-tale. Close to the site of the original Jamestown settlement an open air reconstruction with buildings and three replica colony ships tries to present an accurate picture in three dimensions of the first little township. The visitor experiences the climate, the smells and even tastes which were part of the early years. They can touch objects, plants and animals known to the settlers. There are people in appropriate costume, human elements in the re-staging of the colonial beginnings. A visitor centre nearby shows a film about it.

The most recent cinema feature presentation of the story is Terrence Malik's The New World, intelligent, lyrical, evocative - and itself a world away from the style of Hollywood. It was reported that when it was released in late 2005 some cinema-goers walked out before the end because they found it boring, maybe incomprehensible. It is not a film of horse-riding redskins circling the wagon train out in the western desert. It is a realistic portrayal of how English colonisers met up with American native peoples and began the long process of living amongst them in the forests of the creeks and river valleys on that coast. Cartoon, feature film, open air museum and visitor centre each tell the stories in their own way and we make of them what we want according to our own perspectives.

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Will Work Experience Disappear? - 07 June 06

I often quote one of our students who said she thought she would come back from her placement year three years older. Spending a year in industry as part of a sandwich course in Tourism Management has a remarkable effect on students' attitudes and experience. That student was visiting her university halfway through the 48 weeks and had already realised the effect it was having on her. She knew more about the business, knew more about how well (or badly) the theories she had learnt related to the real world, and above all she was maturing. Students like her have their first professional job added to their CVs and so have an edge over those without such work experience. Many are offered permanent posts with the organisation where they spent their year - I can think of examples in local government, mueums, tour operators, museums and hotels.

Many students preparing in their first year to find a job in their time out find it a worrying prospect, which is quite undestandable. It's that rite of passage between being an amateur and becoming a professional. If they lived at home they have the security of family during the process of starting a job, but in university they are already in an unfamiliar situation if, for the first time, they live away. Of course it is a challenge and a daunting one, but having achieved the year out they gain enormous confidence and perform much better in their second academic year. Out of hundreds who have been through it I have seen almost none who was other than proud and pleased that they had done it.

Now, getting a university place has become more of a buyer's market. Open competition, pressure to recruit high numbers and to keep them is pushing the system towards allowing students to fasttrack. Instead of a degree taking four years - with the fees required - they can opt for three, academic-only years. Some courses in some universities are this year seeing large minorities take up that option. Those first-year students often say they don't feel ready for a placement. The response is to take the view that prospective students will play safe and apply to universities that offer that route, so the easier course must be available. Faced by the pressures set up by changes in governmental policy, it is of no surprise that both students and university managers find themselves in this situation. Some tutors are coming to the conclusion that within three to five years the sandwich course will be like that famous culinary one offered by British Railways - drying up, curled at the edges, and heading for the dustbin.

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Getting Into The Real World - 4 June 06

When I first taught in 1962 in a secondary school, I was told by a teacher soon to retire that the mark of success in education was the distance that teachers put between themselves and the classroom. His world-weary, perhaps realistic meaning was that advancement in education meant becoming a school manager or even a teacher-training college lecturer. Ted had spent his life in the classroom but felt that recognition only went to those who moved out.

Since then I have realised that there is a quite different meaning, at least for teachers of geography, history, natural history and a few other subjects. My own school days were enhanced by dedicated geography teachers who took us out into the world to see for ourselves what it was like. The photo here is from a very dated 8mm image shot by one of the participants in such a trip. Boys who were rowdy in class could be highly responsive once outside it in very practical sessions where things made sense. It was fun hunting for minerals in Peak District quarries. From a hillside we could see how everyday life in a village made patterns in the landscape. Between the wars as more and more teachers did put a distance between themselves, their pupils and the classroom, they opened up much more exciting vistas which beat the blackboard - and even the lantern-slide projector - hollow.

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Intent On Travel - 1 June 06

A hundred years ago, what is usually considered the first permanent UK holiday camp was set up in Norfolk. In 1906 J Fletcher-Dodd organised a camp for socialist families in Caister-on-Sea. Six years before, a men-only camp had been held for a short period in Douglas, Isle of Man. After World War II it opened for families as well. Early camps such as these were simple gatherings for political or religious groups in the same way that nineteenth century excursions had brought together people sharing similar philosophies on day trips. The camps were like informal conferences where participants could live together for a while, sharing attitudes and activities.

Seventy years ago Billy Butlin opened his famous commercial camp in Skegness, setting a new fashion for holiday entertainment, especially when it was wet having fun and games organised by those staff in red blazers, the Redcoats. Butlin's highly organised style of holidays has gone with the age that created it, but his principle of all-in accommodation and entertainment has continued and led towards modern developments such as Sandals and Club 18-30.

The principle went further, with Boy Scouts and Girl Guides after 1907 running camps and jamborees, and later, after 1941, Outward Bound Schools adding tented expeditions to their programmes. Even airplane-based package holidays to the Mediterranean owed something to canvas accommodation as the first Horizon package flew to Calvi, Corsica, in 1950, where the tourists slept in tents though using a toilet and washing block and a drinks bar made of bamboo.

The humble tent helped to pioneer much of modern tourism in the fifty years from 1900 on.

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Places Sacred And Profane - 29 May 06

The anniversary is today of the first climbing of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing. In the 1950s the British press called it "The Crowning Glory" in a link with Queen Elizabeth II's Coronation, as if it was all because of her and the British Empire. Now we are getting used to thinking of the event as the time when Tensing Norgay, a Sherpa, and Sir Ed Hillary, a New Zealander, reached the top of Chomolungma, to the Tibetans the Goddess Mother of the World. Mountaineering-tourism is big business and inspires many to follow in the ice-cut steps of the pioneers. Our perceptions of people and places has become less nationalistic, and our view of what explorers do has widened. They might go boldly where no man has gone before, but it's more likely to be a case of mum, dad and the kids venturing where they have never been and finding out just what makes places interesting.

Pope Benedict XVI has visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. The German-born Pontiff walked into the former concentration camps where over a million people, mainly Jews, were murdered, sometimes at the rate of 20,000 a day. Millions of people make their pilgrimage to Rome. The Pope has made his to Auschwitz, a symbolic and emotional personal act. Every nation and perhaps every person could identify a place sacred to them, and probably another which has more uncomfortable significance. Whether part of the everyday world or distant and inaccessible, places are given identities which accord with the triumphs and tribulations of every one of us.

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Transport's Social Account - 24 May 06

We know that each form of transport has its profit and loss account and recently we have begun to consider its environmental cost (almost always in the red). What about the social cost/benefit?

For example, flying might have social costs as well as social benefits. If there is always an environmental cost, is it - at least - partly counteracted by the social benefits? But are these benefits outweighed by disbenefits, such as the annoyance caused to people living under the flight path?

The potential benefits are wide ranging - especially if personal gains such as to someone's health are counted, since they also have social implications. There is the 'getting-to-know-you' factor of the traveller who discovers other places and peoples. Much travel is to renew old family and friends' relationships. To the host community travellers can bring new ideas, but also help support local cultural activity and a sense of pride that comes from being visited and admired. On the other hand cultures can be diluted or debased by the demands of the tourist.

It's obviously complicated, trying to calculate so many variables which have often got no numerical values, but it's extremely difficult coming up with a comprehensive understanding of environmental gains and losses. In addition, people travel either to make money or to get social benefit. At what point does social gain outweigh environmental loss?

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Re: Viewing - 19 May 06

This week’s reports of the showing of The Da Vinci Code in Cannes include a comment by Sir Ian McKellen that it is full of “potential codswallop”. The Guardian quotes McKellen, one of the film’s stars, as having read the book, closed it, and thought … careful choice of words … “potential codswallop”. Well, that’s a new concept. Not rubbish at the moment, but at some future date it might be.

Of course the same could be said for some of the other films that Sir Ian has taken part in, such as The Lord of the Rings, The X-Men, Richard III or – er – The Magic Roundabout. Whether we love ‘em or loathe ‘em depends on whether we accept their fiction because we believe they have something deeper that appears to be true.

The problem is when we can’t tell what is fiction and what is fact. We need a good framework of knowledge into which we can try placing new narratives to see if they fit or do not fit. If they don’t, we label the narrative as fiction and judge it on that basis. If the new narrative fits then we judge it to be a narrative of reality. Sometimes we must suspend judgement pending further evidence or external opinion which helps us decide our own view. At the same time, ‘facts’ are only opinions judged to be ‘true’.

Dan Brown’s book has been criticised for implying it carries a new, true, account of Jesus while at the same time sheltering under the guise of a novel. There is plenty of debate around that point – a whole industry of criticism is happily spinning off from Dan Brown’s own multi-million dollar authorship factory. The media fills its own schedules, sells lots of related books and DVDs and makes some money. Tourism has staked out its own claim in the gold rush by promoting the locations used in the novel and the film. Some of the historic sites – such as Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh – have earned facility money from the film makers and are spending it on repairs to crumbling buildings.

Where does the audience fit in when it is trying to tell what is fiction and what is fact? The answer must be the same in relation to The Da Vinci Code as to any other film, book, play, novel, tourist attraction or trail, school lesson or university lecture. All of these communication media have to be interpreted and understood in the light of the individual’s experience and accumulated knowledge. Tourism is a communication activity too when it brings people into the direct, three dimensional experience of place – something that the media cannot do. But it is subject to selectivity and opinion just as they are when it presents and communicates messages about its destinations. The management and manipulation of the tourist experience has to be subject to just as much scrutiny as the novel or the film upon which it is often based. Does anyone do that? Isn’t it time attractions and destinations were reviewed seriously like other cultural productions?

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Not A Soft Option - 15 May 06

Today I met some of the Leeds Metropolitan University students who, with a team of colleagues, I have been teaching for four years. They finish their final exams this week and one set took their last test this morning. We gathered for a group photo and some informal ones in the Students' Union bar at the Headingley Campus. A selection are now on a separate page of this web site: Celebrating 2006.

When many of these students started their four year sandwich course I expect they came across someone who said to them "A tourism degree? That's a soft option". Having worked in the industry for 19 years and education for almost as long, it's an opinion I have often heard. If there is one thing I am nearly resigned to now it is the way in which some people happily pronounce on subjects about which they know little. Say something loudly enough and people will think you know about these things, seems to be the rule.

I suspect there are few HND and degree courses which try to cover the range that tourism management attempts. There are large or small measures of geography, history, cultural studies, media theory, business planning, environmental planning, political theory and politics, transportation management, information technology, events planning, strategic management, marketing, marketing communications, human resource management, visitor management, customer service, environmental interpretration, international relations and goodness knows what else. Students need to be skilled in business and academic research and communication techniques, self management and team management. They have to have industrial experience in one or other area such as tourism operations, tourism planning, local government, hospitality, events organisation, sales, administration management or similar. Apart from the usual word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software skills they might need to handle computer-based customer service, accounting and on-line information packages. On top of these they need to be creative, determined, persistent, diplomatic and, of course, well organised.

Not every student has to do exactly all of these, but they have to do most of them. The range of theories they must be able to call upon is frightening, and their university tutors will only deal with a limited spectrum themselves. Nor are students expected to shine in all of them, and maybe not most of them, but they are expected to be competent in the majority and to shine in several. By the time they have read about, written about, discussed, visited, travelled and generally experienced the world, they are light years away from those post-adolescent school kids who arrive for four years' hard labour. By the time they have finished their final year's dissertation, exams and coursework, clocked up a year in industry and completed a team-based consultancy exercise for a real-world tourism organisation, they look, sound and behave completely differently.

And that's how today's people looked. We're proud of you, kids .... er - I mean, ladies and gentlemen. You might not go in to tourism, but you are equipped for a wide range of jobs. If you enter tourism, remember it isn't one industry as many people persist in thinking: it's a complex of industries, public services and occupations. Tourism is a human activity, part of the whole process by which people enagage in business, education, leisure and plain old getting-to-know-you. Have fun, do well - and do good.

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Futurology - 14 May 06

At the New York World's Fair in 1939 there was a famous exhibit by General Motors. Called Futurama, it was based around a huge model of what it was thought a city would look like in 1959. The designer was Norman Bel Geddes, a theatrical and industrial designer who was known amongst other work for streamlined shapes for cars, trains and consumer goods. General Motors had planned the usual exhibit which would work by showing their latest cars to people as they wandered past. Bel Geddes revolutionised the pavilion by showing not the vehicles alone but the life style in which those autos would operate. He also mechanised the visitor management by using a 600-seat conveyor system carrying people past the highly detailed model of a city of the future. Lighting and audio was added, and the feeling of movement became part of an exciting vision of the future courtesy of General Motors.

Ever since the mid nineteenth century there have been international exhibitions showing off the industrial and cultural wonders of the world. They stimulated trade and created powerful images in people's minds about the countries on show and about what the future would hold. World Expos like these still take place, as well as national shows on a smaller scale. Each one creates tourist activity, often with several million visitors been drawn from around the globe. On a smaller scale still, trade shows for all kinds of manufacturing and service industries are held in purpose built exhibition halls and hotel meeting rooms every week of the year in one place or another.

With heritage tourism so prevalent around the world it's a pity that more efforts aren't made to 'bolt on' suitable display areas about what the future might hold. Heritage centres could have futurology centres added. Wildlife centres could have a gallery devoted to alternative future scenarios where the consequences of current decision-making are projected forward. Museums have already moved from displaying ancient artifacts, through those of more recent centuries, to showcasing current fashions and trends in consumer goods.

The logical next step is to look forward, not just back. There have been several such shows on topics such as the future of the historic house, the possible options for rural land use or alternative living, and designers' ideas on the consumer fashions of the future. Disney has it's Epcot (watered down from the original concept, however). Most cities show off their ideas for urban development by holding public exhibitions with models showing the shape of things that they think are to come. These exhibitions are generally limited in time and in scope. They might invite comments, which might or might not be used to shape decisions soon to be taken. There is further potential for creating permanent exhibitions which follow on from studying the past into exploring visions of the future. Computer systems could record visitors' votes for different options and opinions about which scenario should be adopted, and why. Small display areas within libraries, heritage centres or even town halls could have displays about a whole series of local issues as part of the democratic decision-making process - not just about building schemes.

Heritage centres are important, but should be part of socio-cultural processes. Communities need to consider their visions of the future as well as their pictures of the past. They should make an exhibition of themselves!

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Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel - 9 May 06

Following my mention of The Last Vaudevillian, Jeffrey Ruoff's film about a mobile travelogue lecturer, I came across Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, and a copy has just arrived. I had regretted the lack of studies in book or TV form of the travelogue genre. This book appeared in January 2006 and is edited by Jeffrey Ruoff. Chapters cover early travel films, home made travelogues, 'ghost tours' and 'virtual voyages', and other aspects of the travel film. It will prove an important addition to the library shelves.

Ruoff, J (ed)(2006) Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, Durham NC, Duke University Press

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The Infomode is Changing - 9 May 06

In 1954 the UK was served by one TV station – the BBC. The next year ITV arrived. In 1964 came BBC2 and in 1984 Channel 4. There are now five terrestrial channels plus dozens of satellite and cable channels – hundreds if you buy a bigger satellite system.

In 1954 around 2 million trips abroad were made by British residents. By 1971 that was 6.7 million and by 2003 41.2 million. The bulk of tourist trips abroad have in the past been made through packages offered by operators, but a recent survey by the Civil Aviation Authority has suggested 24% of all Brits intend booking online in 2006.

In 1954 less than 5% of the total working population entered higher education. By 2003 it was somewhere around 40%. The Open University took its first students in 1971 and pioneered a particular flexibility of course content. The creation of an internal market in UK higher education and the upgrading of former colleges and polytechnics to university status boosted the number and range of courses by 2003 to the point that many would argue that a buyers’ market exists. Moving from one course or one university to another has transferred power towards the student.

The internet and the world wide web did not exist in 1954. By 2003 it did, with millions of users in the UK accessing, selecting and using sources from literally billions that are available online. Radio and TV stations, encyclopaedias, educational institutions, thousands of individual people, all provided information to the web. The internet surfer could choose, interact, download, obtain, all at their own command. Unlike the 1954 TV channel which streamed the information that someone else had selected, the 2003 web user was the one who decided and selected according to their own desires, and that was different – very different.

Over a very long span of time – let’s say at least a century – all information media have moved in operation and style from the producer to the consumer. Whereas in the late nineteenth century they made pronouncements and expected people to nod in agreement, they now have to offer opinion and expect people to argue back. In many parts of the world the older style is still dominant. In ‘western cultures’ there has been a shift, varying in amount, along a scale with producer at one end and consumer at the other. In communication terms, this is from the transmitter to the receiver, or, more familiarly, from the producer towards the audience. Different countries and regions within the western culture still exhibit local variations for reasons of history and acceptable norms but the basic shift is discernible.

It’s a scale which might be termed ‘didactic’ at one end and ‘heuristic’ at the other. The didactic approach to handling information makes pronouncements through speech and print and expects the audience to fall in to line . The heuristic approach is quite different. The audience is made up of individuals, and they each seek out knowledge through information from a wide range of sources. These are the explorers of the world, of the web, of the educational system. Individuals might find themselves part of different modes at one moment compared with another but overall the tendency everywhere is to shift towards the heuristic. It’s a shift in the information transfer mode that is evident on a grand scale in some societies and much smaller scale in others, but it looks to be a natural outcome of the global village.

In tourism the shift occurs as people arrange their own travel more and more through that great agency of the heuristic – the internet. World be tourists are much more confident of foreign travel thanks to the didactic influence of military service, school visits and even package holidays. The shift is towards what Eric Cohen called the explorer and the drifter, who make their own decisions and go where they want to go.

Discovery is becoming the norm rather than instruction. Finding out is gaining in importance over being told. In the media, education and travel the information mode is changing towards the heuristic end of the scale.

There – I’ve told you now. There must still be a place for the didactic – but how did you come across this little essay?

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Another 'P' in the Pod - 7 May 06

There seems much too little in the literature about public sector tourism activity, explosive though the output of recent publishing has been. When I look through the books surveying the tourism industry and tourism marketing there is little to see. Even in the books about tourism and public policy, the level is usually that of national policy making and the organisation of national units like 'Visit Britain'. One book on tourism marketing has a study of a public sector initiative which turns out to be a partnership body operating as an independent marketing entity. Those organisations don't work within public sector policy frameworks in the same way.

Within the UK at least, and even after the changes of recent years, local councils have huge responsibilities in tourism, running attractions, co-ordinating and building transport networks, protecting urban and rural environments, examining and controlling the nature of planned developments, ensuring high standards in public health, operating or overseeing cleansing schemes, educating the young visitors of the future (and often the tourist guides of today) and last, but not least, driving marketing and promotion campaigns.

Tourism must be one of the few industries where there are three types of marketing initiative: those of the commercial sector, those of the public sector, and those which are organised by commercial and private sectors together. The last one is probably unique to the industry, as it develops aims and objectives slightly different from each partner's main campaigns, and at the same time aims to sell what each partner has got to offer.

Tourism is one area where community efforts are clear and distinctive, yet they seem to be largely missing from the literature. Perhaps this is because the 'usual authors' are writing either for the commercial sector or at a detached academic level. Let's introduce another 'P' in the marketing pod - P for Policy, which decides the basics of local and regional governmental development as well as the actions of bodies like the National Trust and English Heritage who operate so many of our tourist attractions. Conservation, education and recreation are what drive so much of this work - not just making money. No wonder tourism is dismissed by so many critics as leading to a 'tea-shop economy' - perhaps they need to get out more - and to have some extra books in the library to read.

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German Travel Cultures - 5 May 06

In 2001 the population of Germany was 81 million and there were 76 million visits abroad by Germans. Even though the visits figure is accounted for by the so many Germans making multiple visits, it's still a big percentage and a big absolute total. They're counted as the world's number one travellers.

There are now some interesting studies of tourism within Germany and of Germans travelling abroad. Eric Leed's book The Mind of the Traveller came out in 1991. It's about travel world wide, but in discussing travel motivations refers to the German adjective bewandert which means 'skilled' or 'astute', but originally meant 'well travelled'. Another German word pointed out by Leed is Erfahrung which dervied from one irfaran - "to travel".

More recently, in 2000 German Travel Cultures by Rudy Koshar was published, based on a study of German guide books from 1906 to the 1950s. The role of the publisher Baedeker and the nature of tourism during the Nazi period is dealt with in detail. Last year came Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity and Conflict which has two chapters on tourism in Germany (and another on Austrian tourism between the wars). Both concern the Nazi period.

One of the key characteristics of tourism in Germany is the near-equating of travel with knowledge. German schools were pioneering school journeys in the late nineteenth century and the youth hostel movement, with important elements of experiencing new environments, was born there. John Arthos has exmined the nineteenth century studies by Wilhem Dilthey in Germany of the concept of Erlebnis (see www.janushead.org/3-1/jarthos.cfm), another German term. It referred to ideas of experiencing life events and thereby accumulating knowledge.

Much publishing on tourism has been anglocentric, dealing with Britain, North America and Australia. Work being added from a different perspective such as that of Germany will add another dimension to the knowledge of what I term 'tourism as education'.

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Beyond the End of the Pier Show - 27 April 06

Over the years the so-called heritage industry has come in for a fair bit of stick, and often quite rightly. Making lots of money from tatty and misleading excuses for historic attractions is not one of humanity’s better occupations. Turning bits of the past into saleable commodities has brought down the wrath of many a critic who sees it as breaking some kind of eleventh commandment: “thou shalt not reduce thy culture to mere commerce”. Oddly, running an antique shop doesn’t wind up those critics in the same way, perhaps because they buy their household treasures in them regularly.

In the 1980s there was a spate of books on heritage, from David Lowenthal’s knowledgeable study The Past Is A Foreign Country, through Patrick Wright’s On Living In An Old Country to Robert Hewison’s The Heritage Industry. One of the favourite examples quoted by critics like Hewison was Wigan Pier. This canal side group of buildings includes a former mill with a steam engine, a shop and a café, and The Way We Were, an evocative presentation of the Lancashire town’s past – mainly pre-world War I. There is also Opie’s Museum of Memories. Close to them is Wigan Pier, not like the Blackpool version, but a simple tipping arrangement by which railway wagons could empty loads of coal in to barges. George Orwell referred to ‘Wigan Pier’ in the 1930s as a kind of joke which began in the music halls of the north. The modern attraction is built around the joke – not a real pier, but still something for which the town was known.

The Way We Were is not a museum but a presentation. So it doesn’t qualify for intellectual status as a collection of artefacts. It’s partly theatrical. It tells stories. Some of the stories can – oh, woe! – be considered Nostalgia. And, of course, that is To Be Regretted – at least by some of the critics. When the Wigan Pier attraction opened, with the usual heavy promotion, it began to associate Wigan not with coal mining and cotton mills but tourism, and a general occupation of Looking Back.

Now, I happen to agree that that can be stifling if not also made to be part of some effective future development strategy, but it might well be that you have to create the one in order to open the way to raising resources and enthusiasm for doing the other. It might also be the case that the stories told are all along the lines of “it was better in the old days when people cared for each other and you could go to the pictures and buy a fish and chip supper and still have change out of half-a-crown, then you could sing community songs in the back street before a quick burst of Morris dancing with your neighbours”. Which is about a daft a view of history as the one that says all the mill owners were tyrants and exploited the poor mill workers – when they weren’t having it away with the nearest cotton-spinning comely wench before knocking down another row of hovels to extend t’mill. Truth lay somewhere in between the two extremes, with elements of both and a lot more that is often forgotten.

Robin Wade and Pat Read designed the narrative displays of The Way We Were and they knew what they were doing. The visitor entered a bright and cheerful display at first-floor level. The scene was of Lancashire holiday makers arriving at the seaside after a train journey, to sit on the beach and walk on the pier. Actors in suitable clothes of the period mingled with the visitors, playing the part of, for example, a quack doctor selling patent medicines. Which, I suspect, would be recognised straight away as a bit of the ‘exploit the poor workers’ category of history rather than nostalgia. The visitor then climbed down a flight of steps into a dark, dingy area. This was a representation of a coal mine. Men struggled in the dangerous conditions to mine coal. The contrast between this and the previous display was strong. It helped to show just why, released for a day or two from such toil, the Wigan people headed for the coast with its bright and cheerful vulgarity, rowdiness and fun.

Of course, just how each visitor interpreted the scene depended on them and their own viewpoint. They might have seen real, honest mining that helped supply coal to power the mills and warm the houses. They might have thought of how improved regulations, health services and insurance, and better education, helped overcome such conditions. Perhaps these visitors would take the view that these conditions were bad, but would breed men who could go out an achieve better communities out of their own efforts, rather than getting drunk, shooting drugs and mugging old ladies.

It raises the fact that many debates about the good or bad of heritage-based tourism omit two points almost entirely. The first is that television, novels and films are often all guilt of misrepresenting history one way or the other. Shakespeare was a propagandist, often inaccurate and frequently romantic, but he is still considered the greatest dramatist we have had. Jane Austen has provided more popular costume dramas than most people, full of great houses in which fashionably dressed people take polite conversation together, gossip, dance stately quadrilles and fall headlong in love with that bloke in the lake. Life wasn’t like that for most people – but it was for some, and the underlying human motivations and interactions were found at every level and corner of society. Shouldn’t a tourist attraction like The Way We Were be looked upon as a piece of theatre, not beyond a proscenium arch, not just in the round, but even all around the folk in the audience, who can walk through and even interact with the performers. Shouldn’t the judgement be based on how well it is done, how well it succeeds in illustrating aspects of the past in a theatrical sense? We don’t worry that stage or film sets are not “authentic” – they are there to help tell a story, and the audience is pretty able to understand for itself that it’s only possible to make an approximate stab at creating an accurate ambience of former days.

Second, any teacher would give his or her eye-teeth to move beyond the whiteboard, story book and slide show into a three-dimensional world with real people, working machines, the smells and sounds of the past, and the ability to ask questions of the performers who their school class will meet. Are we supposed only to rely on reading books and seeing boring objects in museums? Let’s remember that the Wigan Piers of this world are attempts to get closer to the reality of what life used to be like, and that they work by adding their version of history to a whole range that visitors have been accumulating from TV, cinema and novel, plus the efforts of the classroom teacher over the years. After all, in the old days I could spend half-a-crown on fish and chips, then go to the pictures out of the small change and still get only an hour and a half of black and white propaganda about how the British Empire brought civilisation to the world. Personally, I’d rather have Wigan Pier.

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Volunteers and Tourism - 25 April 06

As the new main season for tourism gets under way there are thousands of volunteers around the country who have polished up their prose and project work on behalf of tourism. This is an industry which has a high reliance on unpaid workers who supply attendants, desk staff, guides, administrative help, research work, heavy labour and untold other jobs to support community activities. From the National Trusts of each UK country down to tiny local attractions, all of them in the not-for-profit sector, they are the people who underpin a whole sector of the industry: except that 'industry' is a very misleading term. Tourism is a whole set of industries plus a whole range of other activities which have quite different raisons d'etre from those of the commercial organisations.

They are also often hidden from view - which is odd for people who are (the National Trusts again being the obvious example) the main points of contact for visitors. Most of tourism management text books and journals pay scant regard, if anything at all, to their existence. Yet recruiting, training and managing them is an essential occupation for so many managers. You can't treat a person who is giving up their time free to help you in the same way that you can someone who is employed. Yet their quality is often what makes a visit memorable.

I can recall an incident thirty years ago this year in a National Trust shop in the south west. We were the only people in the shop except for a young couple with children at the counter. My wife and I happened to be hidden behind tall display shelves. The other visitors had been asking questions and commenting on the property, a well known historic house. After they left the two volunteers at the counter began to discuss them in disparaging terms based on their customers' quite inoffensive, but slightly 'different' behaviour. "They weren't our kind of people" said one volunteer to the other. It didn't seem to bother them when they found out there were still other customers in the shop, or that they were giving the National Trust a condescending image.

Another example of what seems to be a characteristic problem has been noticed more than once - indeed, it seems almost unavoidable unless training levels are of high standard. In most historic houses which use volunteers it's almost impossible to get around without each room attendant delivering their particular little speech about the furniture and fittings to every visitor. no matter how hard you try to avoid eye contact and to move smartly around, they'll get you. It's fine if you want the talk, but the idea that anyone might actually want to wander round absorbed in their own thoughts is almost an affront to the volunteer's adopted role - especially if they're bored.

It's an area which demands more attention. So many of them have skills and attitudes which are of the highest standard, so it's not surprising they want to use them to the full. Let's understand and manage them accordingly.

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Travelling Back

22.04.06


Recently I taped the memories of a 93-year old relative, in what I might call the fifth of an occasional series. Now confined to a care home and reliant on other people to take him out and about, Jack's memories are keen of days when things were different. Very different.

One of the oldest memories is of walking to the woollen mill where his mother worked at a loom, and being allowed to wait, watching the belts and pulleys driving the machinery from the great steam engine, until his mother finished work and could take him home.

When he was fifteen and living in West Yorkshire as he has done for most of his long life, his dad ran a fish and chip shop. Being quite successful, dad invested £100 in a new car. This was the late 1920s, with few vehicles on the road. My uncle taught himself to drive, and so did his father, though dad wasn't very competent. It was decided that they would drive to Devon on holiday, taking a small caravan. With their son in the back and luggage stowed, the parents set off with mixed feelings. Dad wasn't sure of his driving skills and mum was quite sure he hadn't got any. Within half a mile climbing up the Ainleys they collided with a horse trough. Mum was all for turning back: they would never get to Devon, nearly 300 miles away, at this rate. But her son was ready for the challenge. "I'll drive", he announced, and did.

All went well for most of the journey. They stayed overnight in the midlands and then pressed on. In Devon they found a farmer willing to allow them to stay in his orchard, and enjoyed their holiday, though the memories there are fading for Jack. What stands out is an incident on the return journey when the radiator was boiling dry, somewhere near Exeter. They asked a someone at a house for water, which was readily supplied. Then a policeman appeared. "Who's driving?" asked the constable, seeing Jack filling the radiator. "I am", replied junior, showing his dad's licence. "How old are you, sonny?". Jack remembers that he said 16, which he thought was the legal age. "You be careful on the road, lad, and get along" was what the officer had to say on the situation. They got home without further problems.

Jack spent his life in the motor trade - not surprisingly, perhaps - except for service with the Duke of Wellington's Regiment that took him to Belgium, Holland and Germany. After the war, married and with a daughter, most holidays were taken in Blackpool. The military experience in Europe had, however, opened up a taste for travel in Jack, though not one that his wife shared. She was happy, though, to let him go on short trips on his own and booked through a local agency that took him back to the contient. He remembers going back to Amsterdam, staying in a hotel overnight next to the flower market, and on another occasion getting in to France.

One other encounter with the tourist trade was that of his father, who, some years before the famous car trip to Devon, had left wife and child at home and gone to Calgary in Canada where he found a job as a janitor in a small hotel, and did well enough to rise to become its manager. There had been some talk of his family moving out there to join him - a brother had emigrated earlier - but dad decided to return home, and did so for good.

Jack's long life had taken in many events and experiences: the memories that stayed clearest have included those of the brief travels taken by him and his family thanks to the motor car on the one hand and war time service on the other.
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The Last Vaudevillian, the Lost Medium - 21 April 06

I have been watching Jeffrey Ruoff's 1998 video called "The Last Vaudevillian" once again. The subject is John Holod, an American who travels the USA in a mobile home during the winter giving talks illustrated by travel films that he has shot in the summer. Ruoff, who teaches at Dartmouth college, regards John Holod as the last of his kind, the individual who goes in person to speak to an audence and to show films. At one time there were many itinerant enertainers who travelled the roads giving lectures and showing films or slide shows. Holod is seen using his own low-key brand of humour to speak about places most Americans will never go, such as Cuba under Fidel Castro. Holod went, and has the footage to prove it. It's a fascinating insight into the way in which an audience received information on foreign places and added another shade of opinion to their store of knowledge. In the video, people from his audiences are seen speaking about why they like his shows: they listen first-hand to someone who has travelled to places they may never see; one refers to it as vicarious travelling.

It is a reminder that there aren't many studies of the travelogue to be found, or documentaries about the genre on TV. Dan Cruikshank's series based on a Land's End to John O'Groat's film from the 1920s by Friese-Greene is currently on the BBC. Channel 4 has shown early films by Martin and Osa Johnson, the American adventurer/film-makers of items like "Congorilla", some of which is toe-curlingly condescending about African tribes in the 1930s. They also showed work by Armand and Michaela Denis, also filmed in Africa, much more sensitive but still with a rather dated attitude.

The earlier examples were cinema films, later versions being made as TV series by the Denises, Jacques Cousteau and of course David Attenborough. The TV material was mainly to do with wild life, however. Cinema audiences awaiting the main feature were treated to newsreels, travelogues and 'Look at Life'-type films, often produced and paid for by opinion makers working to a clear agenda through which they set out their own interpretation of what the world was like. They came from both ends of the political spectrum - the American Lowell Thomas to the right and the British Humphrey Jennings to the left.

John Holod is in the tradition of the Victorian magic lantern lecturer (the American vaudeville relates to it). Cinema travelogues and later the TV travel show must have had strong influence on not only the tourist's choice of destination, but also the general world viewpoint held within the community, reinforced by whatever opinions were being put forward by their teachers in school. Many films sponsored by companies like Shell and Unilever were available from libraries like Guild Sound and Vision for use in schools. Public relations staff from tourist attractions and some operators still go out, rather like John Holod, to speak to any audience - Rotarians, Womens' Institutes and the like - who will have them. It seems to be that film travelogues and public-speaker performances are both under-researched and underplayed within academic and media institutions alike.

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Tourism's Missing Link - 20 April 06

Martin Jacques, in a Guardian article last week (“Knowledge of countries acquired through tourism often consists of little more than the whereabouts of the beach”: 17 April) put his finger on what I would call the missing link of tourism. By this I mean the potential that tourism has towards promoting global understanding, but at the same time the frequent failure to link the visitor and the visited together in a meaningful way.

As a university teacher of tourism management who worked for twenty years in not-for-profit, community-based tourism, I join with a group of colleagues trying to counteract this failure. We would love to see visitors link more with the communities within destinations, but the tourism industry has other priorities, and it works within a political culture that sees creating wealth and prosperity as the main jobs to be done.

Two aspects of post-war life in Europe and elsewhere have led to this state of affairs. First, modern package travel opened up dozens of business opportunities for travel companies, hoteliers and attractions. Second, the decline of older forms of manufacturing was met with the simplistic notion that tourism would be the perfect answer to the economic problems that were caused. Both have been widely criticised by commentators, and rightly so, as being superficial concepts, but the critics themselves have generally stayed on the sidelines.

There have been very few positive views of tourism expressed recently of the kind held by people like the late Swiss writer Jost Krippendorf, who saw plenty of opportunities so long as the right steps were taken. It’s much easier to earn a few quid as a critic, but much harder to suggest alternatives based on positive, integrated management approaches. It has taken the best part of forty years to get people to accept the idea of environmental sustainability and apply it to travelling. How long will it take to re-orientate tourism to something approaching social and cultural sustainability as well?

The pilgrim, the Grand Tourist, the excursionist of the industrial world, were generally out to discover something beyond their immediate experience. Thomas Cook, T A Leonard, Henry Frame, Quentin Hogg and others from the nineteenth century had visions of how to help people do that. In the twentieth century leaders like Richard Schirmann and Kurt Hahn in Germany, and Baden-Powell, Francis Butler and Jack Longland in Britain helped to develop diverse reasons for travelling which had self-development and interpersonal understanding at their core. The USA had Fisher Harris, Lewis Miller and much later, Freeman Tilden.

It’s not to say that there hasn’t been a growth in travelling away from the resort-based or coach-bound tourist. Special interest tourism is one of the expanding areas identified by the industry. Sadly, that label sums up the problem – having an interest in the people and places visited is seen as niche marketing, a relatively minor way of making money. Yet all tourism is based on some form of special interest, even if it is focused on the beach and the bar. What needs to be done is to build on that.

The pioneers mentioned above shared another perspective in their varied ways – that travel was, in Cook’s phrase, a way in which “to unite man with man”. In the USA Miller wanted everyone “to be all that he can be - to know all that he can know”. Tilden wrote in the 1950s about the importance of communicating about people and places with those visitors who encountered them. His views remain crucial to any debate about the blight or the blessing that tourism can build.

Yet mention these ideas to those politicians and business leaders in the industry – and, dare I say it, many of those training future tourism leaders – and you can see their eyes glaze over. At best they will murmur something about social responsibility and sustainability. The huge industry that is tourism today needs better leadership than that. It needs to understand, develop and manage the encounters between people and places with stronger visions and strategies.

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