2008 SELLING OR TELLING?:
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REVIEW
University of Brighton Hosts 2008 ATLAS Heritage Conference
The 2008 ATLAS Heritage Conference was held at the Grand Parade site July 2-4, 2008. A total of 130 delegates from the UK, Europe and further a field including Kenya, Japan, Egypt and Canada attended the conference, whose title was “Selling or Telling? Paradoxes in Tourism, Culture and Heritage”.
It was the first time that the ATLAS (Association for Tourism and Leisure Education) conference was held in the U.K. The event was held in conjunction with EPOCH’s annual conference since the research themes appealed to both groups. EPOCH established a Network of Excellence joining academic, research and cultural institutions to improve the quality and effectiveness of the use of IT for Cultural Heritage. The University of Brighton is the coordinator of EPOCH and the team are currently in contract negotiation for an integrated project to follow on from EPOCH involving 19 partners worth €8.45 million.
Professor Peter Burns, Director, Centre for Tourism Policy Studies at the School of Service Management, and Professor David Arnold, Dean of the Faculty of Management and Information Systems and Professor of Computing Science and leader of EPOCH at the University, cordially invited delegates to present papers related to four key streams: 1) Dynamic Heritage Impact, which focused on the crucial, yet complex issue of assessing the socio-economic impact of cultural heritage at the site, city and regional levels, 2) Diversification and Regeneration, which explored debates on the production and consumption of leisure and tourism landscapes and environments with a focus on economic sustainability, community development and social cohesion, urban and coastal regeneration, rural diversification and renaissance, culture-led regeneration and marketing, 3) Culture, Heritage and Representation, which focused on the problematic relationship between these three areas, and 4) Conflict, which acknowledged that while tourism is often talked about in positive terms, there are also paradoxes that arise from the confluence of leisure mobility, residents, activists, scientists, business and politics.
The programme was supported by five keynote speakers. Professor Gregory Ashworth from the University of Groningen opened the conference with a provocative session on paradigms and paradoxes in planning the past. He argued the conference counterposed the uses of the past as a vehicle for the transmission of narratives with its commodification for sale on markets, specifically in tourism. Gregory stated this was a flawed dichotomy, in that all uses of the past, whether for economic objectives or not, can be viewed as commodities produced from the raw materials of relict artefacts, structures, and significantly, narratives for contemporary use within imaginable markets.
Nick Dodds, Chair of the British Arts Festival Association, explored the potential of festivals for event-led cultural tourism, and also talked about local issues attached to the Brighton Festival since he was the former Chief Executive for the past eight years. Here he talked about the tensions that the Brighton Festival was getting away from its local roots. Professor Mike Robinson, Leeds Metropolitan University, discussed memories, meanings and mess from a heritage site in Jordan. He claimed that for tourism developers and marketers there is mess – a state of complexity, contestation and never-ending negotiation.
Michael Bedingfield, Marketing Director of VisitBritain, presented how Britain’s heritage is marketed as its unique selling point. He identified Britain was ranked as the sixth best nation (out of 38) for built heritage in the Anholt-GMI Nation Brand Index and third best country for contemporary culture (music, film, arts and literature). Finally, Professor John Tunbridge, Carleton University, debated the problems of marketing heritage for tourism and examined how excessive heritage endowment, overriding redevelopment priorities and politicised heritage dissonances variously compromise the heritage resources officially favoured for marketing.
- Dr. Nigel Jarvis, Co-organiser
Senior Lecturer, School of Service Management