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It is an exciting time for tourism in Kent. The transformation of the traditional seaside holiday and the growth of cultural tourism create opportunities for a wider range of businesses than ever to be part of the visitor economy. ‘Sense of place’ is now a key ingredient of contemporary experience based tourism, but delivering that sense of place requires a new way of working, connecting with sectors of the local economy and community that may previously have regarded themselves as unrelated.

Kent has its own share of pioneers setting new benchmarks for building sustainable destinations based on networking and collaboration. The Culture Kent project, led by Turner Contemporary and funded by Arts Council England and Visit England, is a cross arts and tourism project which aims to create and support new strategic relationships between the cultural and tourism sectors in order to drive economic growth, and to promote Kent as a national and international cultural destination by building culture and the arts into the Kent tourism offer. And Produced in Kent works to join up food, drink, product and service providers to deliver the authentic taste of Kent to residents and visitors alike. Both these initiatives recognise the importance of ending the ‘silo mentality’ and building strategic relationships across multiple sectors in order to deliver the sense of place that is the hallmark of the sustainable destination. But breaking out of the silo can be a challenge, and many of the SME and micro-enterprises that dominate the tourism and hospitality sectors often struggle in isolation.

The Smartour Erasmus+ Project aims to help by providing a free on-line training package and sustainable management tool, enabling businesses to gain the skills and knowledge they need to run their businesses sustainably and generate long term benefits for the wider community. Our module sustainable supply chains and local connections demonstrates, with examples of good practice from around the country, how to go about building local sourcing and value chains, and how this can help businesses overcome problems of seasonality, reduce costs, retain staff, and raise service quality.

If you’d like to know more, come along to our free half-day event at Canterbury Christ Church University from 12.45 to 5pm on Thursday 1st June.  Contributions to this interactive workshop event will be led by speakers from Visit Kent, Culture Kent, and the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. National and international participants will also be sharing their experiences of sustainable tourism networking from elsewhere in Britain, and around the world. There will be opportunities to exchange views and experience, and to register for the on-line training.

For further information and to register for the event, please visit:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smart-tourism-sustainable-businesses-and-destinations-tickets-34063312284

Links:

https://twitter.com/tourismsu & #SMARTOUR

https://www.facebook.com/smartourproject

http://www.producedinkent.co.uk

https://culturekent.net

Touch TD are a busy partner in the ERASMUS+ project called 'Sustainable MAnageR in TOURism Sector' - SMARTOUR. To see what we and our partners have been up to in the opening phase of the project, please read the first edition of our newsletter either online or download the pdf to view at your leisure...

http://smartourproject.eu/news/Newsletter_March_2016.pdf

And don't forget to look through the SMARTOUR webpages www.smartourproject.eu - to find out more on the project and partners, and see what activities are lined up.

Cumalıkızık is the best preserved of one of seven historic ‘Kızık’ villages, of which five are still extant, situated in the northern foothills of Uludağ to the east of Bursa and about 10km from the city centre.  A Waqf village established by Orhan Gazi with its origins in the 14th century C.E., Cumalıkızık serves as an historic example of the model of rural-urban integration under the Ottomans which underpinned the development of Bursa and, subsequently, the Ottoman Empire. The 700 year old village is regarded as one of the best preserved examples of rural architecture from the Ottoman Empire, with traditional houses that have retained their original plans and construction materials and techniques, and, with its water courses and steeply cobbled streets, which give access to wide areas of village garden cultivation, the whole village creates the ‘feel’ of the Early Ottoman Period. A number of successful films and TV series made in the village from the 1970s onward have capitalised on and popularised the historical ambience and authenticity of the village, and contributed to its growing popularity with visitors over the past 15 years, primarily as a day-trip destination for domestic Turkish tourists, and, increasingly, for international visitors from Europe and the Gulf States.

Cumalıkızık’s reputation and attraction as an ‘open air museum’ is based not only on the tangible texture of its buildings, cobbled streets and narrow alleyways, but on the intangible values of its social and cultural fabric. Continuous habitation by five or six extended families has resulted in a dense web of kinship relations and property ownership within the village. Houses and property in the village have been kept in village hands, and, although the area of village land under cultivation has declined over recent years, the villagers’ innate conservatism and continued commitment to maintaining the traditions of forestry and horticultural cultivation and production, on which the village was founded, are credited with having created and sustained a unique balance between urban and rural systems of production and consumption.  Cumalıkızık’s significance was acknowledged in 2014 with the UNESCO World Heritage Site designation of Bursa and Cumalıkızık – The Birth of the Ottoman Empire.

In 2015 the village was selected as one of the pilot destinations for implementing the model of sustainable community based tourism (SCBT) being developed as part of the project Touch TD is working on with UNDP Turkey and the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Tourism is becoming an increasingly dominant activity in the life of the village, and is drawing back villagers who left years ago for work and education in nearby Bursa or in Istanbul.  The tourists are providing an important market for the village’s agricultural products, with market stalls selling the home made jams, linden tea, chestnut honey, fruit and dried goods produced from the village gardens and the surrounding forest. But at the same time, tourism is now starting to compete with the village horticulture for scarce resources, including space. Tractors are unable to get out into their gardens because of the crowds of tourists in the streets, and there are complaints of damage and theft of crops. Some of these losses are blamed on the encroaching urban settlement from Bursa, whose expanding industries have been a magnet for rural migrants from all over Turkey, as well as the growing refugee population from Syria. Residents of the nearby settlement, which has grown up on former village land, also look to the tourists visiting the World Heritage Site as a potential income stream, although, so far, they have been unable to capture any of the benefits. Visiting the site, we were confronted with a number of questions: how can Cumalıkızık sustain the values of place and identity, for which it has been listed, in times of such dramatic change? How inclusive is the notion of ‘World Heritage’ – does it extend to the new settlers across the fields? Where does ‘the community’ start and end? And how does it work?

Having at one time apparently been all for the idea of bounded communities and holistic community-based studies, anthropologists now tend to be very cagey about the notion, and quite forensic in deconstructing the basis for claims of ‘community’. On the one hand, it has an atavistic appeal, in the case of Cumalıkızık harking back to the centuries of continuous settlement and the sense of place that has emerged from that. On the other hand, it represents a localised form of informal, grassroots governance, sitting somewhat uneasily with more formal governance structures. In the case of SCBT models, it can easily be confused with a kind of niche tourism product, based on selling a nostalgic idea of the community to outsiders. Finally, policy makers, consultants, and other outside agencies, may be operating with a model of ‘community’ entirely different from the social maps according to which local people live their lives and set their priorities. In connection with tourism, which frequently gives rise to conflicts of interest and resources, the terminology of ‘community’ and ‘cooperation’ may conceal individualised competition and social rifts, and sometimes surprising alliances and convergences of interest across ‘community’ boundaries; whilst the association of ‘community’ with settled places underplays the extent to which large groups of people are increasingly on the move, as evidenced by Europe’s current preoccupation with its ‘refugee crisis’.

Whilst its UNESCO listing references a particular moment in Ottoman civilisation, the tensions in the relationship between urban and rural, mobility and stability, which Cumalıkızık continues to embody, have entirely global and contemporary relevance, at a point in human history where the balance between the urban and the rural has tipped inexorably towards the urban. The idea of ‘community’ continues to exert a fascinating hold, but the pressures of bridging the gap between adaptation to the modern world, and sustaining the heritage values of the past, stretch even this elastic concept close to breaking point.

After almost a decade of dating, UNESCO and the Global Geoparks Network are engaged, and have finally set the date for their wedding. Here at Touch TD we are really happy about it, and we're going to tell you why.

Earlier in April the UNESCO Executive Board sat for its 196th session where it made the recommendation for the UNESCO General Conference in November 2015, that geoparks should sit within a restructured earth sciences programme. The new structure will be known by the title of the International Geoscience & Geoparks Programme (IGGP). All that’s needed to seal the deal is for the member states to vote through that recommendation. It will still be a nervous few months for the Geoparks family, particularly in the knowledge of past false starts, but the ceremony in November will represent a new and important phase for a remarkable endeavor that first set sail in the late 1990s.

So, what is a Geopark, anyway?

This has long been the challenge for this slightly complex, mulit-pronged effort to place and popularise geological heritage and conservation in the public eye. Rather than add to the growing number of attempts to explain the term in less than 10,000 words, for a full and rigorous explanation as to what geoparks are all about, I’m going to steer you over to the European Geoparks Network pages. There you can relax and mull over the nuances of the concept, its network and if you so wish, the recipe for ‘how to make a geopark'. Or better still, you could visit a geopark and make up your own definition.

In this blog, we present a snap shot of the beasty. Then we'll point in some directions where we think the super brand of UNESCO may take its first new offspring since 1972, and what challenges that could bring.

• Geoparks are a geological juggling team, keeping conservation – education – sustainable development (especially via geotourism) up in the air all at the same time. Covering an area of roughly several hundreds to several thousands of square kilometers
• Geoparks begin with inspiring geology and draw together numerous elements of physical, environmental and cultural heritage within a defined territory. Interwoven, these provide a complete perspective of a geopark’s landscapes.  
• Geoparks should be founded by a grouping that springs from that location’s grassroots. In turn that core is supported by national conservation and heritage organisations, including the respective UNESCO national commission.
• Geoparks don’t sit in isolation. Each territory is an active partner in a regional and worldwide network of geoparks

In a nutshell, geoparks share a unifying philosophy that guides how to manage the diverse stories that a landscape can tell us. The geoparks network brings together a global anthology of such stories, which together express humankind’s (re)connections with its geological roots.

Looking to the future

Now, let's look to the future and speculate where this marriage to UNESCO might take things for the geopark family?

You don’t need specialized GIS applications to see that geoparks are at present heavily stacked in two corners, Europe and East Asia. That means for the Geoparks Network (GGN) to be truly global, there has to be a lot of awareness and capacity building for Geoparks to maintain significant growth in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

Geology & Society

Foremost, there is a need to bring together diverse voices and experiences that reach beyond the earth sciences communities alone. As Geoparks look to present all facets of heritage, I think there is an even greater need for individuals and groups to break outside of their disciplinary bunkers. It is a tale of geology AND society. That means earth and social sciences working together. In turn civil society and governmental structures, bottom up and top down segments, also need to sing from the same sheet and formulate a collective approach.

That’s a big enough ask in strong economies and stable political environments. Drawing those partnerships together in geologically rich corners of Latin America, Africa or the Middle East will be a challenge if geoparks are truly to become global.

A 3-way balance

The ideal position promoted by the Geoparks movement, would be for a territory to find a three-way balance between the core pillars of conservation, education and sustainable development. However, with local circumstances varying dramatically around each geopark territory, it comes as no surprise that a particular preference or bias is often taken by each managing consortium.  

For instance, many geoparks in Japan, which sits on a highly active tectonic foundation, are utilized to convey strongly educational and awareness building messages about geological hazards. The message from Chinese Geoparks is the search for a pathway to sustainable development in rural corners of provinces that have not hitched the whole ride on the Chinese economic boom. They do however possess rich geological and environmental resources.

Nonetheless, as long as the other two remaining components are not totally neglected, then the model does offer a helpful degree of flexibility. After all, the relationship between the earth sciences and society is clearly not one-dimensional.  Rising global populations and climate change impacts, have prompted an ever more urgent push towards addressing disaster risk reduction (DRR). Meanwhile, the demands of existing and newly emerging economies places an enormous strain on the need to sustainably manage the earth’s natural resources. Geoparks sometimes find themselves right on this front line with the extractive industries as they seek to popularise geological science and understanding, whilst simultaneously promote sustainable approaches for development. Building a strategy that can respond to such a range of issues is thus not only advantageous, but essential. 

Geopark consultancy with Touch TD

Here at Touch TD we draw on a diverse skill-set and experience from across the earth and social sciences. Through our web of friends and associates we construct ideas and creative responses that draw on data from inside and outside of the geoparks community. You get the best of both worlds, with a well-worked balance between internal and external perspectives. 

We’d love to hear your views on this blog and the challenges facing geoparks in the coming period (anthropocene?) 

Drop us a line on our contact page or Tweet us a reply @TouchTD