Community and Tourism
Thinking about Regenerative Tourism and placemaking for visitors and residents
I am writing this on my iPhone from a hotel room on Sao Miguel, in the Azores of Portugal. Please excuse the mistakes as a result.. I brought my Bluetooth keyboard, but editing links and things on a phone is well, not ideal.
Yesterday was our first day “as a tourist” here. We arrived Friday morning, but after a red eye flight we couldn’t stomach much more than wandering the city and sipping espresso in a cafe. Not really a bad start to a vacation to be fair, but no matter how much I think I can handle red eyes, I have yet to figure out how to be human the next day.
Anyway, the weather looked favourable yesterday, so armed with our Google Maps, guidebook and full backpacks, we set out on our first day of adventure.
We’ve been talking about tourists a lot lately at home. Tourism is one of the main drivers of our local economy. While many in our village would like to welcome more tourists, there’s also many conversations happening right now in our region about how we can better manage the numbers of tourists coming. You can have too much of a good thing. Particularly north of us, where the infrastructure cannot handle hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.
This not something I ever spent much time thinking about as a traveler previous to owning a restaurant and being on council.
But as we went about our travels yesterday, I found myself thinking about it a lot.
Throughout the day, I was looking for garbage bins along paths, interpretive signage and public washrooms. Along the highway, carved out of sweeping hillsides that make our steepest fields at home look like bunny hills, there are look outs with picnic tables and parking.
They’re well prepared for tourists here, but even in this shoulder season there are many of us and I wonder how busy it is in summer.
At the Chá Gorreana, the only tea plantation in Europe, we fall in with several other car loads of tourists from all over Europe, streaming through the building like a school of fish. After a short walk past big, old machines for tea-making, we spill into the “tasting room”, where a looping video explains the process of making tea.
I feel myself slightly disgusted at how we have no idea what we just looked at, the history of the place or why we’re here as we greedily fill mugs of tea. A few linger to watch the video. Most drink the tea and then proceed to the gift shop. I drop a couple Euros in the tip box before shuffling to the side to watch the video.
Outside, a couple dozen people are dispersed throughout the fields of tea on some of the many trails that snake through the plants. The sun is shining and it’s a great day for being outside.
I’m both surprised by this and also not. My farmer brain can’t help but think how much damage hundreds of people tromping through your fields must cause. Especially for a plant as delicate as tea, where only the top three leaves are harvested, which I learned from the video. Is this actually a working tea plantation or is it a tea and gift shop? I suspect the latter, but there is no one around to ask, short of two young people at the front who watched us all stream in. I regret not stopping to talk to them and learning more.
This is the challenge of tourism.
So often the focus of it is only on the economic benefits. The money it brings into a community and jobs it can create. But on the whole, it’s extractive.
People in places that aren’t meant to have thousands of people cause excess damage and strain on the environment. There’s social issues as those who once lived in those places can no longer afford to live and work there. We read of places like Barcelona, and even Old Quebec City where I once lived, and it’s no longer viable to offer businesses that serve locals so it becomes impossible to live there, even it you can afford it.
Then there’s just the lack of care for a place when you’re just passing through. No matter how conscientious we are as travellers, can we ever fully appreciate a place we don’t intend to wake up in tomorrow?
I’m embarrassed to admit, even I walked over garbage yesterday, when I quite easily could have picked it up and tossed it in the next bin. I need to do better.
Building community for community sake benefits all
My friends who teach youth the foundations of community cover several different areas, including environment, civics, education, commerce, health, faith, arts and heritage.
I find myself thinking about how the best guided tours in my travels have often covered many of these topics. It’s why I bought a guidebook for this trip; I want to learn and understand the background and context of a place when I’m there. I need an experience that is richer and deeper than just beautiful views and checking off all the sights.
To this day, the best tour I’ve done was given by a former tech bro living in Dublin who shared the modern social and economic history of the city. How it came to be a global tech centre, the good, bad and the ugly of living and working in a tech neighbourhood, as well as the historical events and sights of the city. I like learning the history of a place, and I also like knowing what is happening today. What is living here like? What is that experience, good and bad?
I’m not alone in this desire as bloggers and tour guides all over the Internet claim to provide experiences of places “like a local”. But can you really ever experience a place like a local? I am having deja vu and am sure I’ve written this before when I travel blogged.
What does it mean to live like a local?
When I think about home and what I love there, it runs so much deeper than the surface that presents itself to visitors. While we have a beautiful little town, it’s the rural experience and people that brought me back.
I can do outdoorsy things in many places. But, it’s the Tuesday night at the fall fair and peaceful Sunday mornings at my old church, exchanging smiles and quick chats with old neighbours after the service, that make it special. This is an experience that can be put on for tourists, but it won’t feel the same.
And as I think about the two young people standing at the front counter of the tea plantation, I wonder, why would you?
Why would you give this to visitors? It’s this deep level of connection that people are craving and the best travel experiences aim to offer, but when so many of us pass through these places, eyes glazed over searching for “the thing” and then moving onto the next, why would you make this much effort?
If I am willing to put more of an effort forth though, as a traveler, I often find it rewarded. I think of Ireland again, where we went off the beaten path and spent a few days with a cheese maker on her family’s dairy farm. Of course, language made this all the more easy.
But even when we can speak the same language, do we make this effort as often as we can? I think of home and the rifts between those who spend their weekends in a place versus those who are there year-round. Can you attend enough community breakfasts to make deep connections and forge common ground, despite sometimes competing interests?
I think you can. The regenerative tourism model says you can.
“Billed as an antidote to the sort of extractive tourism that leaves local residents wary and the environment depleted, regenerative tourism is the concept of developing travel experiences that ensure employees, businesses, communities and ecosystems can flourish in a long-term and sustainable way, and even make things better for residents.” Writes Diane Selkirk in “How to Stop a Gold Rush” in the June 2022 Canadian Geographic.
“Based on this model, tourism is a tool that can be used to create thriving destination communities and to regenerate and heal damaged resources. At its best, regenerative tourism should bring wealth into a community, offer good jobs, protect the local culture and play a role in rebalancing and protecting the environment. This can happen in many ways, but a major component is attracting businesses that are invested in a place for the long run, ensuring money stays in the host community and the tourism jobs being created benefit the entire community.”
In many ways, this is the work I think our village set out to do nearly a decade ago. Residents got together, and with the help of some local consultants, decided on what they wanted to be.
It wasn’t perfect, and there were disagreements as there always are, but the brand of free-thinking creatives pursuing their own path was spot on. Our community is not bound by colour palettes or design guidelines. This can cause frustration to many, including myself at times, but it is who we are. And there is a charm to it that makes us unique.
And even though there is a “guide” that tells you these things, many people don’t get that. They see faded playground equipment and overgrown trails and wonder, does no one care to fix that?
I thought these things for a time.
If we could just fix “x” or do “y”, we would be there. Like there was an endpoint that made the town “done”.
But of course it’s not that way and communities evolve. One of the greatest challenges today is attracting businesses and we have that, but we didn’t always. And I learned differently as I became involved in the community through our business.
People have been doing what they can for a long time. But for a long time, there weren’t people. Young people left small towns and didn’t move back. Volunteers are aging and no one stepped forward to take their place.
Then there was a pandemic and many of the groups were unable to meet, and there weren’t good ways to get this kind of information out. So, it appears on the surface, like things aren’t happening.
Even though they are.
I think we sometimes falsely believe that making a place desirable for visitors will make it thrive. And while this has been a strategy for many economic developers, more are recognizing that it has to be desirable to live in a place before it will ever be sustainable for visitors. People want to visit places that are alive. Where things happen.
People make places alive. People put on events. People take initiative to update trails and parks. We can ask government to do it and spend our tax dollars there, but it still takes people. And when we only focus on visitors, at best we risk alienating the residents who do these things and at worst, we push them out all together and it becomes nearly impossible to keep the things open they’re coming for.
There has to be a balance. Just as we were kindly asked to park elsewhere in old Ponta Delgada, because the spaces were reserved for local business customers, there has to be a recognition of the different needs of residents and visitors and desire to serve both.
It can absolutely be done and done well. But I think it takes a strong vision and knowledge of who you are as a place. You cannot copy what others are doing but have to forge a path that is unique and true to the community.
You have to have an open mind.
I find myself thinking this as I read Caitlin Moran’s words in “How to Be Famous”; she is writing about London, but the sentiment resonates.
“We’re trying, in whatever, tiny way we can, to make new connections between things. That is the job of a capital city: to invent possible futures, and then offer them up to the rest of the world: “We Could be like this? Or this? We could say these words, or wear these clothes - we could have people like this if we wanted?”
Link Roundup
What I'm reading, listening to and generally enjoying and challenged by this week. It’s a short list because I’m on the road.
How to Be Famous by Caitlin Moran - Maybe a little heavier than I planned for a vacation read, but as a teenage of the 90’s, I’m enjoying it all the same. Caitlin’s dry humour and gritty, working class British upbringing shapes her writing in a way that isn’t elegant but is raw, albeit a little crass, but real. I found her autobiography, “How to Be a Woman”, in a Free Little Library in Ottawa and loved it so much I kept it as one of the books I want to give my nieces one day.
Sidebar: Are you allowed to take books from Free Little Libraries too keep? I replaced it with another book, so thought that was “even”?
Substack Reads This Week:
On the war in the Middle East - Last weekend, I wrote about what I was grateful for and didn’t acknowledge the privilege of my safety and distance from the atrocities happening right now in Gaza and Israel. There is nothing of value my voice can add on this topic. The terror and atrocities being faced by millions of innocent people makes my heart hurt.
As Deborah Reid writes in her Today- “Many people live through unthinkable hardship. Our privilege is being sheltered from those horrors.”
And these words from the White Pages gave me pause and maybe they will help give you words to some things you’re feeling.
As I battle with municipal policy about what is agriculture and what is tourism, So many thoughts roll through my mind. But at the core people want to find meaning and participate in farming however they can. The more authentic and more integrated into the culture of a place a farm can create and tell their story the more successful it becomes. But at what point is the story more than the actual farm.