A paper delivered by Greg Richards to the II International Conference on Creative Economy and Public Policy, Belém, Brazil, 6th November 2024.
In the past, much cultural and creative tourism development has taken place in urban areas, which generally have greater concentrations of tangible and intangible heritage resources than rural areas. Cities are also seen as hotbeds of creativity, with a critical mass of creative producers and consumers to support the growth of the creative industries. The culture and creativity of rural, and particularly remote and less accessible regions, have received less attention.
The CROCUS Project aims to focus more attention on the development of Cultural and Creative Tourism (CCT) in Rural and Remote Areas (RRA) in Europe. Funded by the Horizon Europe Programme of the European Union, it covers ten different European countries, and brings together case studies related to many different kinds of tangible and intangible heritage.
Rural and Remote Areas of Europe are rich in cultural heritage, but many also suffer from socio-economic problems such as an ageing population, out-migration, and low incomes. Cultural and creative tourism could help address these problems by creating sustainable jobs and investment, but three key challenges and associated knowledge gaps must be overcome:
(1) How to create place-specific business models that suit different types of cultural heritage and community needs;
(2) How to stimulate balanced and sustainable tourism development in Rural and Remote Areas;
(3) Designing policies at different scales to support cooperation between different regions.
CROCUS addresses these key challenges by generating knowledge about which CCT business models are most appropriate for different types of heritage and rural areas. New sustainable CCT business models will be created and prototyped in eight cross-border living labs, and cross-border policy scenarios will be developed for each of the four EU macro-regions (Baltic Sea, Adriatic and Ionian, Alpine, and Danube). Finally, the knowledge and experience generated by the project will be used to create tools and resources to support sustainable and inclusive CCT development in the future.
As a first step in this process, we conducted a literature review of the fields of cultural and creative tourism, focussing on work in rural and remote areas. Searches were also conducted for literature in languages other than English, in an attempt to address the Anglo-Saxon bias of international databases. We identified a total of 760 sources, which after refinement for relevance were reduced to 430 sources. Available full texts were then subjected to analysis with ATLASTi software.
We found that the previous focus on tangible heritage in CCT research, or what Richards (2021) referred to as the ‘museums and monuments’ is increasingly being supplemented by studies of intangible heritage. Since 2015, the number of tangible heritage references in the Crocus database has grown by 100%, while intangible heritage research increased by 166%. Gastronomy, food, wine and related terms were particularly important in this growth, particularly in Southern Europe. This underlines the increasing use of gastronomy as a tourism development tool in recent years.
Publications dealing with tangible and intangible cultural heritage in the Crocus database
One of the main drivers for the growth in intangible cultural heritage valorisation has been the rise of the experience economy. Experiences were at the heart of most of the CCT products analysed by the Crocus team.
Value propositions of CCT business models analysed by Crocus partners.
An important reason for this is the increase in economic value and distinction created by the experience format. In the case of Brazil, for example, açai as become an internationally-known ‘super food’, which is exported all over the world. But the value of the raw product is very low, and this only increases when the açai berries are transformed into goods or services. In terms of tourism açai can also be offered as a form of creative tourism, where visitors get involved in the preparation, processing and consumption of the food. This transformative experience can be sold at a much higher price than the raw product, and it adds memorability to the experience for visitors.
The increased economic value of creative experiences with açai
But injecting creativity into experiences doesn’t just offer increased economic value, but also other forms of value, such as increased creative capacity, increased visibility and awareness of the importance of sociobiodiversity in areas such as the Amazon. This in turn increases the links between the visitor and the destination, and their willingness to return and also to become involved in social and ecological initiatives related to the destination.
These are principles that the Crocus Project is also hoping to develop in Europe, using CCT as a means of linking visitors to rural and remote places. By thinking about visitors as a potential resource for the destination, rather than simple consumers of place, we hope to develop new and more positive perspectives on the relationships between urban and rural areas.
Reference
Richards, G. (2021) Rethinking Cultural Tourism. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.