Tourism Development in Heritage Cities.

Of course, there is much more to that: a huge stream of research in cultural studies, for instance, analyses the relation between production and commercialisation of culture. When cultural products are packaged and distributed for tourist consumption (and profit), they are disjointed from the peculiar socio-economic and cultural conditions which determined their origin, and the magic circle may break. A heritage destination can be successful in the medium term, but this success poses on fragile grounds, is deceptive and it is doomed to an end (Bendixen, 1997). But, is there a chance for places as Venice or Bruges to survive as cities, if not as tourist destinations? Or is their ultimate destiny that of sinking in souvenirs, postcards, lace shops and picnic litter?

1. A compendium of tourism policies. From regulation to “synergetic” tourism management

Whatever the angle of observation, cultural tourism is a case for policing. Spontaneous tendencies may prove detrimental. Market failure arguments, as well as the “public good” characteristics of the heritage, demand a corrective action to “steer” the process of development towards efficiency and sustainability. Government intervention may come in different forms. Policies for tourism development vary in scope and context.

3.1        Demand-side policies and supply-side policies

Demand-side measures– both of the hard and the soft type – are typical of a short-term approach to tourism management, merely focusing on visitors’ flows. Their objective is to reduce the stress created by tourism and to smooth congestion. This approach has been a natural “first reaction” to the huge increase of mass tourism that occurred in heritage destinations in the last decades. Zoning and restrictions have been popular throughout European destinations in the years of “heavy planning”, from the 70's to the half of the 80's. Cities adopted masterplans that treated tourism as a sector to isolate from the others in order to prevent conflicts with the resident populations, minimise the occasions of “cultural confrontation” and reduce the costs of tourism management. Whole portions of the inner cities were given up to tourism development (e.g. the case of the “concentration model” in Bruges (Jansen-Verbeke, 1990)), while others were reserved to residential use. In addition, softer tools – like tourist taxation, parking restrictions and various incentives – have been implemented with varying success. Though this approach reflects the “agglomerated” nature of the cultural heritage, it has had limited success (Van der Borg and Gotti, 1995). In fact, it relies on three somewhat unrealistic assumptions and a major weak point. These assumptions are (1) that the greatest part of visitors are “staying” (residential) tourists, so that regulating the number and location of accommodation automatically constrains tourist demand; (2) that visitors are sensible to price barriers; (3) that restrictions are fully enforceable. In fact, all these three statements have proven wrong or seriously faulty. The 80's have seen the boom of “short trips” and the enlargement of tourism regions with the rise of “commuter tourism”. If the accommodation capacity is saturated in the city centre, or if prices are too high, visitors choose peripheral destinations and visit the city without spending their budgets there. In this way, limits to accommodation and other facilities are no more a constraint to demand, which is free to expand almost indefinitely as new transport technologies shorten commuting times. Tourist regions expand over regional or in some cases national borders. Moreover, excursionism – as seen above – increases the costs imposed by visits and accelerates the tendency towards decline: “bad” tourism chases away “good” tourism. In some cases, zoning and restrictions are not allowed or hardly enforceable: national constitutions guarantee free access to all citizens to historical places; licensing policies, in countries like Italy, are very clumsy, and infractions are easily dodged and rarely sanctioned. Paradoxically, policies aiming at regulating the flows ends up selecting against the most “sustainable” form of tourism, the paying, residential one, and at favouring the more mobile (and costly) crowds of day trippers.

Even soft policies (like incentives to booking in central facilities to reduce the convenience of excursionism) are easily side-stepped by excursionists who walk, consume pack-lunches and visit as less paid-for cultural attractions as possible . Anyway, there is a higher-order weakness in policies based on restrictions. It is increasingly inappropriate, for cities that wish to compete on different markets, to present their “bad-face”, discouraging visitors and repelling them. How can a city attract, for example, business travellers and at the same time make it difficult for them to freely move and consume the city's resources? And can a city justify itself as a convenient residential location if its reputation is that of an expensive, awkward place to strangers?

For the many reasons exposed above, a number of active city managers and tourism authorities in Europe and elsewhere have recently focused their attention on supply-side policies. The rationale is that if it is very difficult to enforce tourist demand, the appropriate organisation of the tourist products would stimulate its own desired market. Tourist demand is no longer taken as given, but something that must be bred in time and guided; the quality of information and their means of diffusion become the critical element of a tourist strategy (Laws et al., 1998, p. 2). This approach requires that resources are available to invest in new attractions, the capacity to plan ahead and to co-ordinate, the development of marketing skills. Needless to say, these elements are often lacking in local administrations. Their budgets for culture and promotion are shrieking and their marketing orientation is generally poor (Garrod and Fyall, 2000). Only a few cities were effective in organising new routes and products with a significant impact on the composition and spending pattern of the visitors' flow (good examples are for instance Antwerp, Bilbao, Rotterdam, Aix-en-Provence, Naples, etc.). Most cities cannot even convince private and public cultural institutions to co-ordinate calendars and events. Moreover, as we have argued before, sustainability of tourism is not sufficient for urban sustainability. That is, even if a city is very successful with its tourist sector, and manages to increase the receipts from tourism maintaining a high quality level of products and attractions, this does not guarantee that other sectors will score well. In fact, it is possible that they are crowded-out by high paying, revenue generating tourist activities, again exposing tourism itself to the unstable structural economics that contributes to a sharp life-cycle.

3.2        A “synergetic” model of tourism development: the cultural cluster

From the above, sustainability requires that the attention of tourism planners is extended to other sectors. The relation of tourism with the rest of the economy is the issue, and the orgware, the organising capacity (Van der Berg et al., 1997) of the institutions leading the change, becomes the critical element of success. Policies aiming at the harmonisation of tourism growth with the general development of the local economy imply that a “synergetic”, systemic development model of tourism is adopted, with the following characteristics:

• it focuses on the entire chain of value of cultural tourism;
• consistently with the spatial analysis of tourism development, it balances the tendency towards dispersion with the creation of a “cultural cluster”;
• it strives to maximise the impact of tourism on the other sectors of the urban economy;
• it is instrumental to the development of high added value sectors;
• it aims at optimising quality rather than maximise quantities;
• its approach is integral and of long-period.

Fig. 1 describes various potential linkages within the cultural industry and between it and the rest of the environment. The first set of relations (A in the horizontal block arrows) to be re-shaped in the cultural cluster are the intra-industrial linkages among the actors in the cultural sector, defined as strategic alliances. Co-operation and process co-ordination can be established between the different fields of cultural production, as the heritage sites, the performing and visual arts and “minority” cultures, the “creative industries” of hi-tech and hi-touch, such as design, fashion, software developers, and the events industry, as a whole set of mass-mediatic and logistic organisers.

Fig. 1 – The cultural cluster in heritage cities

The combinations and linkages between these fields are a variety. For example, new technologies are applied for the creation of services or products that are supplied together with the traditional visit to the cultural attractions to elicit cultural content (ICT access to the heritage, audio-visual and multimedia supports to cultural experiences, etc.). The system of traditional attractions can supply attractive locations for congress and meetings; the same venues can host and deliver to large audiences the sub-cultural production, achieving the diversification of the target of cultural tourism. Hi-touch industries can support pooled markets highly attractive for business tourism and events (e.g. fashion, music and fairs); design and software can be utilised for developing new and highly specialised niche segments. Cinema festivals can present the output of local schools or organise special sections about local culture and landscapes. The proximity of these activities is fundamental, for the open circulation of the human skills from one sector to the other and the reciprocal evolutionary “contamination” it implies (observed in fast growing cultural district of global metropoles, like the West End in London, the Village/Soho and, more recently, Chelsea in New York, Kreuzberg and Mitte in Berlin, etc.).

The second (B) are the vertical linkages identifying supplier-producer-consumer co-operation at any level of the chain of value of local cultural production for what regards product development from the basic inputs (education, research), the administration and the services to the distribution (in and outside the traditional tourist channels) of the assembled cultural product. The formation of partnerships and multi-purpose inter-industrial linkages are at the heart of this strategy. Strategic product disintegration (as opposed towards a trend in integration that increases the economic “rationality” of the enterprise but undermines its socio-cultural embeddedness) allows the cultural cluster to adapt to the ever-changing nature of the tourist market. The issue is the “glocalisation” of the value chain of tourism, with a closer co-operation between trans-national operators and local dealers who also act as fundamental “brokers” between the tourism market and the local communities, increasing the cultural sustainability of tourism development.

The third direction of networking (C) regards the formation of diagonal partnerships between the cultural industry and other strategic sectors. In this way other industries seek to diversify their product lines adapting to the local conditions (Poon, 1993; Buhalis, 1997). From the point of view of local businesses, such partnerships can be seen as successful efforts to reach a global market through non-local linkages.

Once identified the potentially fruitful relations between agents of the local economy, we turn to the policies that may favour the formation of clusters. The challenge is to integrate traditional “management” and “logistics” approaches to sustainable tourism in a new strategy that stimulates co-operation and cohesion between the agents involved, building “incubators” for resource-based development.

Build cultural empathy

It is necessary to identify a “common ground” where diverse groups and interests are brought together for joint participation in economic decision-making for the “good” of the host community. Local and global issues are inextricably intertwined. The organisations of cultural tourism producers tend to be highly unstable: planning is hardly found at the industry level. In other industries, it can be more straightforward to progress from individual projects to a critical mass of work that includes projects or contracts at varying stages in their production cycle. This seems to be less frequent in the cultural industries, perhaps due to the small scale and the self-employed character of typical businesses. Governments can do little to promote co-operation if the local environment is poorly co-operative: they have to convince all the players involved of the advantages of a high-quality tourism development based on culture. On another level, new facilities might be planned that serve as “cultural mediators”, increasing the “connectedness” of the cultural system and providing elicitation and dissemination of the cultural contents generated locally.

Promote the concentration of cultural producers

Dispersion is not the main problem when we are talking about heritage cities (whose population can be as low as 68.000 as in the case of Venice). However, advanced producer services find a more relevant demand basin in industrial rings rather than in the inner city, generally less dynamic, accessible and flexible. This of course create a location dilemma for small and medium companies: follow the market (and disperse elsewhere in the region), or keep a concentrated pattern? Producer services – especially if interesting for the cultural specialisation of the city – should be given the opportunity to find favourable locations in the city centre, through financial incentives, physical investments in easily accessible lots, and flexible land use regulations. The regeneration of former industrial areas as cultural quarters or meeting centres is a typical element of contemporary urban planning that gains ground also in historical cities such as Venice or Bruges.

Attack rent-seeking behaviours

Innovation is stimulated in a competitive environment. In the heritage city, monopolistic rents are generated by the proximity to the primary product and by the limited and immobile nature of the central land supply. It is therefore desirable to attack monopolistic practices by favouring a “virtual” access to the central tourist product (e.g. through the organisation of electronic malls and kiosks), promoting the diffusion of the primary product to peripheral and depressed areas (e.g. a policy of decentralisation of the museum supply, organisation of provincial itineraries), and controlling for the quality of the product offered by central activities, in such a way that location advantages are not translated into increases of the price/quality ratio.

Promote knowledge creation and circulation

University research should be directly linked with the pattern of urban production and provide a continuous input in terms of best practices and innovative management models. In principle, sub-cultures and new-cultures should integrate the educational programmes of high-schools and human science academies; business applied to arts and non-profit institutions should receive due attention. R&D in the same fields should be publicly supported to sustain urban growth; organic links should be organised between policies on culture and policies on training, education, research and development (Bianchini, 1993). The municipality should set standards with the appointment of a “locality certification” to original local production; public offices and services should be designed to meet the requirements of the industry. A public policy for patent protection in the development of new cultural products and the delivery of innovative services, though limiting the extent of competition, can increase the stimuli for innovation and foster the realisation of advanced organisational forms between producers. Knowledge circulation is favoured by information diffusion and by a flexible labour regulation with incentives to firms and workers.

Promote the local ownership of cultural production and consumption facilities

Vertical and diagonal integration in the cultural industries means that many other forms of cultural provision are owned by large companies (e.g. financial and banking companies). For instance, small record companies, that often act as R&D centres in the music industry, spotting and cultivating new trends and styles, are eventually affiliated to the major multinationals. The resulting problem is that «cultural production and consumption are increasingly externally owned and controlled, thus failing to achieve the regeneration objective for a locality» (Williams, 1997, p. 141). Then much emphasis will need to be spent to considering ways in which locally owned indigenous enterprises can be supported and developed; at the same time denser inter-industrial linkages will result, with increasing employment multipliers (indirect and induced).

Develop organising capacity

The policy changes suggested above are far from automatic. The inner dynamics of tourism, and the strength of consolidated interests, make it very difficult for policy makers to start this new cycle and implement a reformed policy program. The organising capacity of the policy leader is the issue, and it is by no means something that can be given for granted. The issue of policy changes in open systems characterised by a multitude of stakeholders has been treated by various authors (Nelson, 1989; Kooiman, 1993; Crosby, 1996). A scheme that represents in the appropriate way the requirements of a policy change in strategic planning has been developed by Van den Berg et al. (1997, pp. 4-15). These authors define as «organising capacity» the ability to enlist all actors involved, and with their help generate new ideas and develop and implement a policy designed to respond to fundamental changes and create conditions for sustainable development. Training of professionals as decision makers in highly dynamic and complex environments such as tourism localities is fundamental, and requires a prompt co-operation effort between local administrations, the private sector, and education / research institutions. It is a matter for building public-private partnerships as tools for modern governance, which imply an entrepreneurial and proactive attitude by the public sector to steer the development process that maintains the leadership that guarantees the primacy of collective good. At the same time, the private sector – including non-local actors – develops a sense of social responsibility acknowledging the strategic importance of high levels of quality of life for the industry continuity (Van den Berg, Braun and Otgaar, 2000).

2. The experience of Venice: from “hard regulation” to ICT tools for sustainable tourism development

Venice is a well-known international attraction, possibly the most famous heritage city in the world. Yet few people could imagine that its historical centre (henceforth: Venice HC) in the heart of the lagoon is a “problem area”, whereas the inland section of the city is well integrated in a booming regional economy (cfr. Fig. 3). With young households pushed out of the centre by inaccessible housing prices and lack of high rank specialised jobs, the population in Venice HC passed from 170,000 to 70,000 in the verge of half a century, and is still decreasing at an yearly rate of ca. 1%. The physical characteristics of the isolated central town provide further reasons for moving outside of the town following the jobs. The reoccurring floods are a source of economic uncertainty. At the same time, the tourist pressure on the city increases, determining to an exponential trend of the tourists/residents ratio, now reaching 50 visitors for each resident of the HC.

 Fig. 2 – The Municipality of Venice with main subdivisions

Though at a first glance the tourism economy is strong, it is perceived as volatile and knotty, at least as it organised today. The local government is indeed striving to reinvent and diversify the city's economic vocation, providing a solid alternative to tourism. The vision of Venice as the “meeting place” of an economically thriving region, infrastructure node and education centre, capital of culture and artistic production, praised by well-educated and informed visitors, is gaining ground among the circles of scholars and sensible politicians. However, this promising future has to face the reality of a city that is sold for cheap to the huge crowds of visitors, and is abandoned on a daily basis by institutions and companies.

Today, the faint illusion that tourism could re-bring Venice at the apogee of its economic power has faded once and for all. It is clear that there are two populations living in Venice as far as tourism is concerned. One, billing an estimated 35 M€ of yearly receipts from tourism, is hardly living and spending in the old city, and more often than not pays very little taxes on this enormous turnover. The other is resenting and bearing the daily costs of a city invaded by tourism, where if you need a plumber you have to make him come from a nearby city and pay double than its normal price. A signal of the “fragmented” destiny of the different areas of which Venice is composed is given by the reoccurring proposals to split it into different municipalities, until now always rejected at polls. Political instability and interest groups have dominated the local scene for years, though recently a directly elected mayor started a wide-range programme for urban recovery.

4.1 Spatial-economic traits of tourism development in Venice

At the end of the seventies, the changes in the structure of the economy – with the explosion of mass tourism – and a renovated interest in urban planning brought about a wide-range reflection about the «possible options» for the development of Venice. One result of this debate was the necessity to quantify the tolerance of the city with regard to tourism, as it seemed clear that the costs of tourism could become unsustainable and compromise the endurance of the city's functionality and economic soundness. Canestrelli and Costa (1991) adopted a linear programming method to estimate the optimal level and composition of the tourist flow which is compatible with the full functionality of the different sub-systems used by citizens and tourists alike (transports, waste collection, access to cultural institutions, etc.): the socio-economic carrying capacity. These experiments indicate that Venice could absorb a total number of about 22,500 visitors, but only a maximum of 10,700 of these should be excursionists. These limits were surpassed in 1987 for 156 days in the year (Costa 1990); the number of yearly violations has been increasing since then, despite any attempt to smooth the tourist peaks through regulation and planning. Utilising as imple indicator, it can be shown that these figures correspond to a highly concentrated – and increasing – “tourist use” of the city centre. The tourist pressure index in Fig. 3 assumes very high values that such of the HC compared to the other municipal sections.

Fig. 3 - Visitors to residents ratio per kmq in different sections of Venice municipality, logarithmic scale, years 1960-1998. Source: elaboration on ISTAT data.

The tourist region has surpassed by far the provincial scale, extending in some cases to foreign countries like Austria and Slovenia. An exam of the composition of the visitors’ flow evidences the extent of the economic leakage provoked by the expansion of the tourist region, with high-budget tourists counting only for the 35% of stays and day-trippers progressively increasing their share in the last ten years. Estimates (Manente and Rizzi, 1993) suggest that the expenditure of a staying tourist in Venice is on average 30% higher than that of an “indirect” excursionists and almost three times as much as that of a “real” day tripper. Residential visitors still increase at a rate of 3.4% each year, a pressure which saturates the occupancy rate of hotels in the city centre in prolonged periods of the year. Yet, the growth of day trips is even higher.

Rispoli and Van der Borg (1988) provide an explanation for the sustained growth in the day-trippers segment. A fair share of them finds it more convenient to stay in the periphery of the tourist region: in fact, hotel prices for a given category decrease constantly with the distance from Venice’s historical centre. A room in a four-star hotel in Padua costs about a third than in Venice. This enormous difference in tourist prices explains the emergence of this curious character, the “false” day-tripper, whose aim is to visit Venice but prefers to spend the night in its environs. Hence the high share of excursionists also in off-peak periods (touching a minimum of 47% in December, 1989 data). Their flow is stable and resembles the characteristic pattern of that of residential tourists, as well as for what regards motivations and mobility in the city (van der Borg and Russo, 2001).

Such an inefficient pattern in the visits bears a direct relation with the performance of the cultural tourism industry. As a result of the combined effect of congestion and lack of information, some cultural resources are under-utilised while some other are over-utilised. On the whole, far less visitors are able to enjoy the cultural heritage than the city could afford. The quality of the tourists’ experience is eroded by various impediments and time lost in queues. Apparently, the set of cultural resources in Venice is not working as a true “system”, fragmented as it is between a host of management and ownership bodies, without a common strategy or a unique selling point. Zago (in Di Monte and Scaramuzzi, 1997) counts at least 10 directly responsible institutions, public or private, for the museums of Venice. Only 1 out of 4 visitors comes to Venice to visit something in particular; the same percentage ever pays to get in a cultural institution during their visit (ICARE, 1997). Fig. 4 describes the extent of the mismatch between visits to the city and visits to its cultural institutions: the figures of the Accademia Gallery, possibly one of the main collection of Italian renaissance arts, are highly significant. So, even if Venice markets itself as an art city of major importance, the return of its cultural system is disappointing.

Fig. 4 - Visits to the city and visits to the main cultural institutions. (Vtot = total n. of visitors; Etot = n. of excursionists). The Duke's palace is one of the main attractions in the central S. Mark's Square; the other two institutions considered are located in less central areas. Logarithmic scale, survey data. Period 10/95-9/96. Source: ICARE, 1997.

The various analyses about the use of the cultural institutions make it quite clear that a link exists between visits to such institutions and the length of the trip (e.g., Richards, 1996). The question is quite simple: the Venetian cultural supply is so vast that it could satisfy the demands of a public with quite different preferences, if this public were adequately informed, had the possibility to book their visits, could improve the information content of the visit, and could combine their own visit with opportunities for leisure and entertainment. When the access to city becomes problematic, the very interest for its cultural supply comes less, as well as the willingness to pay for it. Therefore, the capacity of the most central cultural institutions becomes a bottleneck to the whole network. A yearly-congested Dukes’ Palace may well cause a leakage of visits to some adjacent attractions (as it is shown by survey data), but it is likely to decrease the share of tourists coming – or returning – to Venice for a cultural visit.

However, it was not just the quality (effective of perceived) of the primary tourist product of Venice to slump in the last years. A far more evident phenomenon is represented by the decline in the quality of complementary facilities and, in general, in the commercial structure of the city. This process of reorientation to meet a pervasive tourism pressure – whose economic weight is only partially captured by the chart in Fig. 3 – could escape any control or regulation targeting specific goods or categories. The result is a simplification of the economic base of the city. Available data (van der Borg and Russo, 1998) indicate an on-going concentration of tourist activities in the most central areas. What is most relevant, a noteworthy substitution of activities related to the cultural, high-quality visits with others that are oriented to the low-budget/low-elasticity segment of the visitors’ flow is observed. These data seem to contradict the simple assumption that concentration of tourist-cultural facilities results in a more viable tourism development.

Such visitor-driven reorientation of the supply ends up in curtailing the welfare of the residents, who bear the decrease in quality of the products sold: another factor that contributes to explain the persistent outflow of residents from the centre of Venice. A second consequence is that, face to the decline in quality of the venetian tourist supply, an increasing number of potential tourists will be pushed to become commuters or, in general, to neglect the “cultural” motivation. As argued in Russo (2001), the elements of distortion in the tourist use of the city become self-feeding, creating further distortions. In conclusion, evidence suggests that what now resembles an inertial growth – mainly pushed by excursionists’ visits – may eventually turn to stagnation and decline, to the extent to which the decline in the quality of the tourism product reduces the attractiveness of the city for tourism purposes.

4.2 Policies for tourism development in Venice

The spatial-economic traits of tourism development in Venice, as synthesised in the above, suggest which critical points have to be to attacked to contrast a declining drift in tourism: 1) containing the expansion of the “tourist region”, favouring overnight stays; 2) rationalising the mode of tourist use of – and access to – the city; and 3) containing the process of quality decline of tourism products. As Section 3 suggests, these points can either be dealt with adopting a demand-side approach, a supply-side approach, or a systemic or “synergetic” approach which explicitly considers how tourism is embedded in the local production and consumption systems. In too many occasions, tourism policing in Venice has insisted on the first one only of these options, merely considering demand-side management tools of the “hard” type, with noticeably poor results.

The first attempts to regulate the tourist flows resulted in a more or less explicit policy of restrictions. The number of tourist beds in the Historical Centre has been limited by law to 11,000, and the scarce capacity of parking space close to the centre further diminished the possibility of reaching Venice with private means. Moreover, whole portions of the city space have been virtually secluded to tourism. There is only one access to the city centre, commanding a limited number of “tourist routes” utilised by 90% of the visitors to reach the attractions located around St. Mark's square. The bad reputation of Venice as far as prices (and treatment) in restaurants, gondolas and other tourist facilities are concerned represents a non-explicit means of regulation to the eyes of residents annoyed by the vociferous tourist crowd.

These measures have ended up in incentivating the “excursionist” mode of use of the city, reducing the reach of hard regulation tools. At last, the poor return of this approach has been acknowledged by decision-makers and the public opinion. However, it would never have reached the top position on the political agenda were it not for a series of accidental occurrences. First of all, the boom of day visits from former communist countries occurred in the late eighties. These would spend practically nothing, pushed congestion to the extremes, and produced a lot of waste, for which Venetians pay the highest collection tax in Italy. The public resentment, misunderstood at that time for “touristic racism”, was a decisive factor to make it clear and substantial that “not all tourism is good” and that “tourism may change for the worse” if unguided. This argument was reinforced by two dramatic incidents: the disastrous concert of Pink Floyd off St. Mark Square in 1989 – an event that attracted a mob of more than 100,000, without adequate facilities for resting, sleeping or restoring being set up, paralysing the city for days – and the fire that destroyed the city's prestigious theatre La Fenice. Another mass-event threat, the International Expo 2000 advocated by part of the then-ruling political forces as a “last chance” for modernisation, was finally turned down after the mobilisation of the public opinion, supported by national and international organisations. It was then finally accepted that the way of managing tourism had to change, that the cultural heritage was a precious resource demanding preservation, and that tourism had to be a leverage to other activities and not an impediment. In many a domain, this acknowledgement led to sheer deregulation rather than to more co-ordination and more effective control, the economic strength of lobbies and groups playing a decisive role in this process. Today it is easier for private operators to get in touch with tourists, but the downturn in terms of quality and co-ordination is under the eyes of everybody. Sustainable tourism, as now various commentators accept, does not require passing from excessive regulation to no rules at all, but to wise and integral management tools (Anzuini, Strubelt et al. 2000), centred on the resources that Venice already possesses, and based on a sound strategic planning.

Supply-side policies based on soft interventions could provide the right answer, if accompanied by demand-side policies truly selecting against the bite-and-run way of visiting the city . As for quality controls, the issue is very complex and cannot be attacked but indirectly, placing adequate attention to the core Venetian tourist product. This entails a re-organisation of the cultural sector based on the concept that the value of cultural visits should be improved and that the various assets function as a system where commercial aspects are as important as – and integral to – the production and formation in culture-related fields. However, all this might be not enough: when cultural tourism is restructured, the rest of the economy must be regenerated as well. That is an even more difficult task, because it has to do with structural problems and global trends. Moreover, the organising capacity to accomplish a thorough change in policy orientation – though greatly improved in the last years – might still be insufficient. The poor reach of community involvement programs like Local Agenda 21, the frequent political crises, the declining confidence in politicians, the increased power of groups up-holding sectarian and populist stances, the continuous impediments to the realisation of a wide-range revitalisation program, the increasing disconnection between Venice and its region – these elements add up in great difficulty in the capacity to change and implement a vision for a 21st century, post-fordist, sustainable Venice.

Recently, new projects have been started, that may finally trigger off a virtuous process, as they address – and are likely to improve – the spatial and industrial configuration of the various elements of the Venetian tourism system. On the marketing side, a number of projects for the promotion and commercialisation of the cultural assets as an integrated system have been agreed upon overcoming a long-lasting fragmentation in the management and ownership structure of cultural goods (common ticketing, co-ordination of events, web-sites, creation of marketing structures, etc.). Pro-active cultural marketing is a novelty for a city that used to consider its international fame sufficient to attract a steadily-growing visitors’ flow. Moreover, there is an effort to link the existing resources through advanced communication technologies, with the provision of remote-archive and information facilities. Internal accessibility will be enhanced with the rationalisation of water transport, the diversification of access points to the HC and the creation of alternative itineraries. Today, more attention is paid to the quality and variety of cultural products. Prestigious projects (museums, concert-halls, meeting venues) have been launched, and modern architecture will add to the complex fabric of the city, providing a precious infrastructure for product diversification. On the regulation side, the 11,000-barrier to tourism accommodation expansion has been finally overcome by a new law that allows renting private rooms. This results in an enlargement of the supply targeting the lower section of the tourist market, which is indeed the one that is more likely to “relocate”, triggering unsustainable spatial tensions. These measures represent a step towards the self-reinforcing dynamics of a “cultural cluster”. Without going in depth into such projects, the next section analyses their requirements in terms of infrastructure and capacity.

4.3        A tool for the development of cluster relations: the applications of ICT in the tourist industry

In the above discussion it has been highlighted that a key problem in building a sustainable tourism cluster is the lack of cultural empathy among a) tourists; b) tour operators; c) local tourism/cultural organisations; d) local hospitality providers (esp. SME's). Beyond diverging economic interests and differences in roles, it is believed that mutual understanding can be increased utilising the proper educational and relational tools, which may exploit the possibilities offered by information and communication technologies (ICT). The multi-system nature of ICT appears promising as a vehicle to stimulate positive side-effects to tourism development and to improve the co-ordination of the involved actors and institutions. It is crucial to this aim that the ICT apparatus is diffused to the tourist sector as a whole, connecting cultural producers and linking the local network to the tourist industry. A first step in this direction has already been taken in 1998 with the formation of a public-private partnership for the electronic ticketing of four museums, the Cathedral and the Tower in St. Mark. Even if limited in scope, this project breaks a path which, if successful, can easily be extended to other levels of tourism management, such as transport, terminals, the hotel and restaurant sector, and the system of cultural resources. In particular, three “technological” projects, still in their experimental stage, represent natural extensions and refinements of this approach.

ALATA (High-Adriatic Partnership for a Sustainable Tourism) was originally set up as a system for the management of the visitors’ flow accruing to the Northern-Eastern region of Italy in occasion of the religious celebrations for the year 2000. There was the fear that an excessive number of non-organised pilgrims would cause intolerable congestion on tourist destination on their way to Rome. Venice was expecting an estimated additional flow of 3 million visitors motivated by the event; hence the opportunity to divert this flow to other peripheral but well-equipped destinations with some cultural or religious attractiveness. In synthesis, the project's aim was the realisation of a telecom infrastructure and a software for the collection, management, certification and redistribution of information on visitors' flows on the High Adriatic territory, as an input to just-in-time provision of facilities for welcoming, assisting, accommodating pilgrims and tourists and facing possible emergencies. The system connects the existing transport, hotel, catering structure realising the “links” and providing dedicated facilities. Even though the system had to operate in an emergency situation during the year of the event (which, however, is presently attracting a far inferior number of tourists than in the expectations), the ultimate aim of the ALATA partnership is to utilise this system in the “normal state”. ALATA achieves the multiple objective of co-ordination at the spatial level and promotion of selected facilities and attractions. The benefits will be even more apparent when the deregulation of the central  accommodation structure will be consolidated, with a number of small-scale private operators entering the market, and the need for co-ordination and shared facilities on the supply side increasingly accordingly.

A second project which more closely focuses on the “cluster” characteristics of the cultural tourist system, providing the adequate infrastructure, is CALYPSO. This is a project financed by the European Community (DG XIII) for the realisation of a smart card for the provision of a number of services in a co-ordinated and user-friendly way, integrating payments and banking services, urban transport, student services, any kind of bookings and information to city users. The card works as a “pass” (utilising “contact-less” technology) to access a number of facilities and functions. CALYPSO is being experimented in four European cities (including Paris, Konstanz and Lisbon). In Venice, partners in the project are the main public and private operators in the field of transport, banking, municipal services, the universities, the museums and a consortium that manages the religious heritage. The original project foresees the issue of two types of card, one for local users and one for tourists which can be “charged” with services and electronic money in the moment in which the visitors book their visit and receive the card. The tourist card focuses «on the promotion of specific types of cultural consumption and their integration with other aspect of the service economy». The card is delivered for free to tourists when they send in the booking for their accommodation. The number of cards issued will be equal to the tolerance threshold, to be periodically determined. In this way, motivated cultural tourists get a better deal because they can more easily discover what is on offer, and then arrange their itineraries expediently benefiting from free parking, access to limited-number events, reduced time in queues, reductions in transport fares, etc. Meanwhile, the city is better off because it attracts relatively high-spending and organised tourists.

Such instrument would represent a «juridically feasible and socially acceptable formula for having the visit to a heritage city paid for» (Di Monte and Scaramuzzi, 1997), which would yield an intelligent way to selectively market the city and spatially/seasonally smooth the peaks. On the other hand, the only drawback might be that opening the local market there are greater chances that non-local operators may enter (e.g. tour operators, real estate agents), facilitated by the possibility of remote operations. But that might not be a negative fact after all, if the activated “diagonal linkages” also work in the other direction and allow local producers to easily approach outside markets. Overcoming the barriers to entry would make it possible to draw on the position rent on which such a large part of the Venetian tourist sub-economy lives, thus increasing the quality of the tourist experience.

These projects attack the two dimensions of sustainable tourism identified in Section 2, namely the spatial and the industrial level. Basically, ALATA may help to spread tourism in a more efficient and rational way on the territory, realising a soft demand regulation and associating it with high quality services. CALYPSO instead favours an “integral” approach to the management of cultural tourism, unifying the services to visitors and infrastructure, lowering “information barriers” which foster quality decline, and granting access to the electronic mall to non-standardised cultural production and events, side-stepping the bottleneck represented by an intermediary sector which is not prone to invest in “novelty”. The points of integration and reciprocal self-reinforcement between the two project are immediate. If ALATA works as a “regional” infrastructure for the delivery of CALYPSO services, the cultural cluster of Venice can extend to the whole tourist region, realising an innovative “multi-polar cluster” which exploits the tourist vocation of a wider area of reference, further improving the efficiency in the organisation of tourism.

A third and last example of the potential represented by ICT for sustainable tourism is the project of a “Virtual Museum“, which is being planned by the City Department of Museums. This structure should be located in the inland part of town, as a real “access terminal” to the city. It will serve the city' cultural system as an integrated centre of cultural mediation and interpretation of the heritage, providing seamless access to the digital image of the resources that one can materially visit in the city, as well as live experiences regarding the history and environment of Venice. Looking at the heritage from such a spectacular and original angle, visitors understand the context in which this heritage has developed. In this way, the quality of their tourist experience improve enormously, as they are able to establish connections and organise their real visit around various themes and suggestions, escaping in this way the “tourist bandwagon” cliché. Therefore, the virtual museum has the potential to affect in the desired way the logistic structure of the visits and the behaviour of visitors – e.g. the willingness to pay for cultural resources and the return patterns. Finally, in the intentions of the planners, the “virtual museum” may become an incubator for local entrepreneurs in the media, design and cultural industries, generating precious knowledge and technical support for the development of an applied hi-tech vocation for the historical city.

3. Conclusions

Venice is a very good case of unsustainable tourism. What’s under threat in Venice – 250 years ago one of the most powerful and populated cities in Europe – is culture in the broadest sense. Though the primary issue is heritage preservation, both citizens and visitors presumably want the city to remain a living entity, and not transformed into an empty stage, where the sterile representation of an act of consumption – tourism – is performed. A way out from this empasse stands in the recognition that Venice’s cultural endowment is so vast that it can satisfy the demands of a public with quite different preferences. However, greater efforts need to be made to promote and sell this richness. The most expedient method is to set up an information technology infrastructure allowing visitors to access details about city sites as well as events, and to make advance bookings.

Fig. 5 - The new project for a bridge over the Grand Canal by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. Bridging Venice to a better future?

At the moment within the Venice city administration the idea of “soft controls” exploiting the versatility of ICT seems to be gaining support. Pilot projects are underway for the creation of a network infrastructure connecting cultural institutions. The ALATA partnership of North-eastern Italian cities will use an information system designed to manage and distribute visitor flows. CALYPSO represents a fundamental infrastructure to a cluster economy where co-operation and competition go hand in hand. The Virtual Museum project promises to bring forward a new attitude of visitors towards the cultural heritage of Venice, increasing its attractiveness and comprehensibility, and therefore its capacity to generate value, while at the same time making tourists more curious and less predictable in the organisations of their cultural itineraries. Much more needs to be done.

Despite the gloomy picture that today's Venice conveys, especially to its inhabitants, the debate about these topics is fascinating and rather productive. Venice needs not only to manage its tourism better, but also to diversify its economy. In a review of sustainable development options for Venice, scholars Rullani and Micelli (2001) suggest that Venice could become the capital of a metropolitan area specialising in producer services, from data processing to software design and finance; cultural industries such as musical and theatrical productions; and other activities from research to providing convention services. This requires a system of fast transport to reconnect Venice, an island that is relatively difficult to get to and from, to the rest of the region. Another vision is that of Venice as the capital of hi-tech and data processing, overcoming its physical isolation through electronic accessibility. Whatever path is chosen, it is now recognised that if the culture of Venice is to remain a living entity the city needs to be refashioned into a place that exists for more than tourism.

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