Dan Shilling worked at the Arizona Humanities Council from 1984 until 2003, the last 14 years as director. He guided Arizona’s early research on heritage tourism, editing three publications and earning several awards, including the Arizona Office of Tourism “Person of the Year Award” and the Museum Association of Arizona “Distinguished Service Award.” Dan recently directed a three-year project on place-based tourism, resulting in the book Civic Tourism. He teaches a seminar at Arizona State University (ASU) on sustainability, and he recently received an ASU fellowship to research the connections between Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic and sustainability.
How do you define the term “civic tourism”?
We present it as a tool for communities that are already doing place-based tourism, but maybe it’s not working as well as they had hoped. Civic tourism is a way for communities to figure out how to do place-based tourism better. It involves rethinking what tourism is for, reframing the purpose of tourism.
I had been researching and practicing cultural heritage tourism for a long time, and after about 10 years, I asked, “Why isn’t it working?” The questions I kept coming back to were: “If place is so important to tourism, why are our places being destroyed?” (Drive around the West and you’ll see what I’m talking about.); and “If museums, parks, cultural sites and heritage institutions are so important to tourism, why is their funding always in jeopardy? (In many places it’s been decreasing for the last 10 to 20 years.)
What do you mean when you say that the mission of civic tourism is to “reframe” tourism’s purpose—from an end to a means?
If you look at the way most communities talk about tourism, their annual report says, “This is how many people came, and this is how much they spent, and this is the bed taxes that were generated, etc.” That’s what we mean by seeing tourism as an end.
What we say is, don’t look at the industry as an end in itself, but look at tourism as a tool that can help people preserve and enhance the things they love, admire, and respect about their place. That’s a difficult frame flip for some in the traditional hospitality industry. If you go to most tourism conferences and listen to the people thumping their chests about what a great program they have, what they’re generally saying is, “This is how we got more people to come to Yuma, Arizona.” They are not saying, “This is how we used the industry to help the people of Yuma preserve their Native American culture.” That’s a different way of looking at tourism.
How does a community go about “investing in place”?
First we need to know what place is, and that’s what interpretation is about, telling the story of a place. We should invest in the very thing we are marketing, both conceptually and financially. In most states, funding has increased significantly in the last decade for offices of tourism, convention and visitors bureaus (CVBs), and chambers of commerce, while museums, state and national parks, heritage centers, and cultural institutions—their funding has been stagnant or actually declined.
What the heck is place and who gets to define it? That’s where the word “civic” comes in. The people most affected by the tourism industry are those who live in the community, and yet most tourism conversations are very narrow. It’s typically your chamber of commerce, and we know who sits on those boards—car dealers, hoteliers, realtors, developers, the growth industry. They’re not in the place-making business.
The question I raise naively when I talk to communities is, “If your tourism product is historic Main Street, why isn’t your office of tourism with the historical society?” Chambers of commerce are about growth, and that’s okay, but sometimes growth can get in the way of quality tourism. Tourists don’t generally travel to go to sprawl and Wal-Mart.
My friend Mark McDermott, who used to be the tourism director here in Arizona, is fond of saying, “More is not better; better is better.” If we build healthy places for our residents, tourists will come. But if we focus on designing a community to attract tourists, we may do that, but we may also alienate locals, creating an ugly us-and-them dynamic.
How does a place prevent itself from being defined by tourism instead of its tourism being defined by the place?
When we get everybody in the room, that is the question we ask: Does place serve tourism or does tourism serve place? If you look at the way many communities’ programs are designed, it is not done by locals. It’s outside corporate forces and consultants saying, “This is how to get more people to come to Tombstone.”
And look at the results: Tombstone, which has about 1,200 residents, attracts 500,000 visitors a year. Every day there are more tourists in town than residents. But they stay about two hours and spend $10. That’s no way to build a tourism economy. The National Park Service threatened to withdraw the town’s National Register status because they had so compromised their history. I mean the town had just become schlock—I call it rubber tomahawk tourism. Happily, things are changing in Tombstone.
One way to effect change is to create something like a place committee. Get this conversation out of your CVB. Get it out of your chamber of commerce and create something that’s driven by people, by citizens who care, not distant corporations.
What is the “creative economy” and what does tourism have to do with it?
Economists like Richard Florida, Herman Daly, and Paul Hawken say if you invest in the thing that makes your place special—its history, culture, environment—ultimately it is good for the economy. I argue that the tourism industry is basically out to lunch on this—still trapped in industrial-age economics. But what sector is better positioned to take advantage of history, culture, and sense of place than tourism? What industry benefits more from uniqueness, distinctiveness, character, and culture? Who gains more from a clean, healthy environment? My challenge to the tourism industry is to align yourselves not so much with the asphalt paving companies and the folks who just want to grow your town. You should be standing shoulder to shoulder with The Nature Conservancy and the museums and the sense-of-place crowd because that ultimately is going to be better for the industry and your community.
I was just in a little town called Baraboo, Wisconsin, where the Aldo Leopold Foundation is. I applaud Baraboo, there are wonderful projects going on there, but you can’t become complacent. Scott Sanders says the making of place is never done, you have to remain vigilant. One mission of civic tourism is to create an ethic in the community so that when good chamber of commerce directors like the one in Baraboo leave, or when office of tourism directors change, there is a community ethic that remains, one that says, “This is what we care about.”
Incidentally, the tourism business can learn a lot from Aldo Leopold because he was a leading voice for sustainability and community building. He wrote about our relationship to the environment and our responsibility to it, and that’s a big part of civic tourism—being responsible for place.
What is the role of heritage interpretation in civic tourism?
I’m afraid most people in the tourism business don’t know how hard place-making is. Anyone who’s worked in a museum knows that. Interpretation is not just marketing and it’s not only a financial investment—it’s conceptual, too. I go into too many museums and heritage centers where I leave and I still don’t know what their story is. It’s the “grandma’s attic” thing, where there are some cowboy boots here, a sewing machine there that says, “Circa 1872,” and I am trying to figure out what their story is, what they are proud of. We should focus on telling the story of the community so that it engages people and keeps them there. With civic tourism we talk a lot about trying to recreate the experience of place. It’s easy to get that great “Ah hah!” standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon. But how do you create that experience on Main Street in Flagstaff? Leopold said to be a good forester, you have to know more than soil and trees. You have to know the history and culture of the place, and you have to be committed to that story. It’s an attachment born of love and respect, something that should inspire interpretation.
Some towns, unfortunately, do it backwards. They bring in a consultant and pay him a ridiculous sum to come up with a brand. My sense is that a brand should grow organically. If there is a brand, it is something that emerges naturally from what you already are, not somebody holding a focus group and dumping a label on your town.
Is there economic research that compares heritage tourism with other kinds of tourism?
Oh, sure. Most states do their own research on ecotourism, cultural tourism, and heritage tourism. And while we may argue over categories and parse definitions, there is enough research out there that shows these travelers stay longer and spend more. When we did our first studies about 10 years ago, we learned that about 40 percent of people who visit Arizona come specifically to experience our history, culture, and environment. What our studies showed was that those visitors stay on average three and a half times longer than the people who come to play golf and hang out at a Scottsdale resort, and they spend considerably more money.
For those reasons alone, I doubt there is an office of tourism today that doesn’t have a cultural heritage tourism program—or at least the means to track the staying and spending habits of these visitors.
What are some places that you think are positive examples of civic tourism?
The shame is there are not a lot of them. Many are in other countries, such as Ireland or Australia. One area where we stumble is rallying communities politically. It’s one thing to sit around and talk about our history and culture, but when I say, “You need to be at the legislature. You need to be lobbying,” there is often a reluctance to do that. To which I say, “You know, there are people at the legislature every day who are lobbying for stuff that is not friendly to your mission.”
Richard Sims is the director of the historical society in Montana and he is collaborating with the office of tourism there, trying to get the conversation going in small towns, in particular. If you are in Montana, there is no doubt your tourism is place-based. Ohio and Texas have pilot programs under way as well. Iowa has a wonderful initiative called “Iowa Great Places.” The program is the perfect example of state agencies coming together to invest in the culture of communities for economic development, mostly built around tourism.
The one I consider the granddaddy of them all is what Bruce Fraser does in Connecticut. If you manage a heritage site there, you can apply to the Connecticut Humanities Council for a large grant to support a cultural tourism program—to help with capacity building, planning, product development.
Unfortunately, if you operate a museum in Colorado or Arizona, whose economies are tourism-dependent and whose tourism is largely place-based, there is often nowhere to turn. If you are in Denver, you might ask a corporation or foundation, but if you are out in Trinidad, Colorado, where do you get $100,000 for a cultural tourism program? And the funding that does exist for culture and preservation generally has no tourism connection. Why isn’t there a product development program that is the equivalent of most states’ tourism marketing agency?
What do you envision for the future of civic tourism?
The civic part is essential. When I got into tourism, the first thing I noticed was there wasn’t much public conversation about tourism, even though it’s a giant economic engine. There was a pretty narrow slice of people who were determining policy for a whole town, and they were not necessarily the people who had sense of place as their most important criteria. I also felt many tourism officials didn’t appreciate how difficult place-making is.
But things are changing; I am hopeful. First, there are exciting, creative programs being developed around the country—efforts that focus on public engagement and resource development. Also, when I visit universities today the hospitality students are reading Richard Florida and other creative economic texts. They realize that tourism is not just refrigerator magnets and T-shirt shops. They’re studying the cultural, political, and environmental consequences of tourism. As the next generation of tourism professionals, they appreciate the value of “place,” and many now understand that the industry is an important player in the whole social network.
Dan Shilling will be a keynote speaker at the 2008 NAI National Workshop in Portland, Oregon, this November. Visit www.interpnet.com/workshop for details.
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