I noticed this interesting article recently on the BBC website about (from a UK perspective) the ‘other’ EU Capital of Culture this year: Stavanger. For those of you not familiar with the Capital of Culture concept, it probably best explained as an opportunity for selected European cities to showcase themselves and raise their profile as visitor destinations and investment opportunities.
The BBC article made me think not so much the differences in ‘artistic’ emphasis between Liverpool and Stavanger as ‘rival’ Capitals of Culture but what those differences say about how a destination responds to its unique set of social and economic circumstances.
To put it simply, Liverpool’s response is one that recognizes the value of tourism in a local economy that’s had a rough time over the last 30 years while Stavanger’s response seems to be one that is preparing the ground for diversification of the local economy in the future.
While Stavanger is a rich economy at the moment, people I spoke to when I did some tourism research work there a few years ago seemed aware that, before the North Sea oil boom (the basis for the present wealth), the area was considerably different. These same people were also aware that North Sea oil was declining as a resource and that the economy would need to diversify in order to pick up some of this slack.
An example of this was in the excellent Oil Museum that acts not only as an educative, cultural and visitor resource but also hosts activities that are looking to retain sector expertise locally and develop value added services in the sector beyond the ‘natural’ lifecycle of the product.
So what is this saying to me from a tourism perspective? Well, it saying that big facts need big solutions but that you often have enough time to respond to them if you read your intelligence correctly.
I noted recently that Vancouver was facing the big issue of an aging population by improving physical access through the excuse of the forthcoming Paralympics. Likewise, I suspect that Stavanger is facing up to a future without the benefit of oil through exploitation of it natural visitor benefits and City of Culture status is a good excuse to get this transition underway.
Both cities are using publicly available data in order to (probably) formulate long-term strategic destination decisions. In Scotland, VisitScotland has led the charge through its formidable scenario planning team to identify future trends, challenges and opportunities and I suspect other countries and regions have done something similar. For many savvy destinations, their prospects are clear enough but the challenge will be in making sure they are not overtaken by future.
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Image courtesy of Stavanger 2008
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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Destination research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.