The Principles of Heritage Tourism and Preservation - Sonderegger Symposium 2022

The Principles of Heritage Tourism and Preservation - Sonderegger Symposium 2022

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uh just a couple of uh reminders after this presentation we'll be having lunch next door in uh Ballroom four you're all welcome to join in uh there's no charge she'll be sandwiches I think it might be soup I hope there's soup and other goodies uh and then uh we at that luncheon we'll be presenting the Upper Peninsula Folklife Awards uh to two wonderful recipients so we look forward to that um but our next presenter is our keynote presenter uh back this past summer I started contacting various people to see if they're interested and one of the people I contacted was Paul Edmondson who is the CEO of the National Trust for historic preservation I didn't expect to ever hear back from him I got a wonderful email back from him saying you know I'm sorry I wish I could make it I can't but I think you need to invite Donovan ripkama to be your speaker Donovan is the president of Heritage strategies International and principal of place economics working at the Nexus of Heritage conservation and economic development rifkema has undertaken assignments in 49 U.S states in more than 50 countries among recent projects include studies of the impact of historic preservation in New York and Los Angeles and recommendations for incentives for modern Heritage in Abu Dhabi he serves on the real estate market advisory committee of the U.N economic commission for Europe the board of directors of global Urban Development and a member of icomos icomos International scientific committee on economics of conservation and The Advisory Board of doain a Myanmar based Heritage development NGO he is the author of the economics of historic preservation of community leaders guide which has been translated into Russian Korean Georgian and the feasibility assessment manual for reusing historic buildings U.S clients have included the Urban Land

Institute the mayor's Institute on city of design the American Planning Association the U.S state Department Departments of interior and defense uh Housing and Urban Development and the advisory Council on historic preservation is in international clients include the World Bank European Development Bank the inter-american Development Bank the Council of Europe and the United Nations development program he teaches preservation economics at the University of Pennsylvania where he received the G homes Perkins award for distinguished teaching in 2012. he was the recipient of the co the crown and shield award for from The National Trust the crown and shield is the nation's highest preservation award and is presented for Lifetime contributions to the field of historic preservation would you please welcome Donovan repkema foreign thank for being here and I'm thrilled to be here although I my my daughter's son-in-law and two grandchildren live in Ann Arbor and so yesterday morning I drove from Ann Arbor up to up to where I went to some some am City on the other side uh for uh for a afternoon thing and then like 10 000 miles from there to here today last night but I'm happy to be here I have to say that I've I heard the last two presentations and they were fabulous but the second one I know a lot of you are Scholars and just on awe of all that you gonna be able to tap there it scared the hell out of me here's the reason I remember in grade school the principal saying this will go on your permanent record and I always dismiss that there's no such thing well obviously there is a permanent record and now I'm frightened that my my youth will come back to me so I'm most pleased to to to be here uh and greatly appreciate being invited to this wonderful Symposium and I want to begin my my remarks by making it absolutely clear that I am not a tourism expert I am however a very very frequent traveler in normal times pre the plague I spent around 230 nights a year in hotel rooms uh although in the last two years not so much uh but those of us in my small uh firm are finally back on the road and nobody is happier with that than my wife uh we live in an apartment Loft Department in downtown Washington DC and she had more than enough of me over the last two years so she's thrilled that I can travel again so my business is not tourism we make our living by advising on real estate and economic development activities and increasingly by analyzing uh economic impact and because the bulk of my assignments are in downtowns or Inner City commercial districts I'm generally working within the context of historic buildings hence the Heritage connection but I will attempt to identify findings some of those analyzes that have been undertaken that may help you understand and your understanding of the economic ramifications of Heritage tourism strategies in northern Michigan and further give you some additional premises not based on statistical compilations but on selective observations I have made when visiting 100 or so towns and cities each year but I begin by suggesting two things to you one is that Heritage tourism absolutely Can Be an Effective tool for Community preservation promotion and progress but two it is not axiomatic that it will be if I'm not a tourism expert and I promise you I'm not uh then I'm even less of a Biblical scholar but when I was writing this presentation I recalled the Bible verse that turns out to be Matthew 16 26 and you'll recognize it so what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul I would suggest to you that that verse can be altered just a little bit to ask the question so what is a community profited if it shall gain the whole world and lose its own soul and that in the end may be the most difficult question for those involved in tourism how do we profitably capitalize on our communities cultural resources without losing our community's soul and if you were climbing on the Heritage bandwagon just because it's a segment of the tourism industry that happens to be hot at the moment I sincerely believe you are doing a great disservice to the Heritage resources of your community the history of the people who built those resources and the succeeding generations of citizens from your town who shouldn't be deprived of their rightful Heritage because it could be excessively exploited a year or two uh if it's a tourism strategy that needs to be approached with unusually amount of care I have tried to make a list of yeah I've tried to make a list of what I think to be common denominators necessary for a Heritage tourism strategy that would enhance not diminish the soul of a community so here are some basic premises upon which the rest of my remarks will be based and there are five of them uh premise one Heritage tourism has to be a long-term sustainable strategy not a short-term solution to Jour Quick Fix tactic second people are tourists in order to visit a place nobody goes anywhere to go down a water slide or buy a garment that says my folks went to the up and all I got was this lousy t-shirt they may do those things but that was not the reason they went there premise three the ultimate test of successful tourism is when on departure the visitor wants to return to that place and I don't think it matters whether that's a desire to visit again to relocate there to retire there but to wish to return someday is the test of success it certainly cannot be a coincidence that many of the places that are in high demand internationally as tourism destinations are also in high demand as Retirement locations Cuenca Ecuador Algarve Portugal Georgetown Malaysia Chiang Mai Thailand and other places you could probably name premise 4. for a place to draw people on a sustainable basis it must be a valuable place that has to be have value to those who live there and those who visit there and you can Define the word value any way you want I once was on a panel with a British guy who spent his entire life in tourism and what he said struck me and was this build it for the locals and the tourists will come build it for the tourists and only the tourists will come premise five uh to survive we have to make sure that there is a merger between place and Community Heritage tourism is based on assets that are not owned by the tourism industry the tourism industry is not create those assets now that's different than other kinds of Tourism tourism entrepreneur built a water slide and a golf course but in Heritage tourism those assets that are drawing people do not belong to the tourism entrepreneur and so they are the communities assets and therefore a community at large absolutely must have a place at the Heritage tourism strategy table so when re-reading those five premises it becomes obvious that the word that keeps popping up is place and I would suggest to you that at least in the developed World there are few more powerfully emerging forces today than the renewed understanding of the importance of place and I'd further suggest that if we're going to have successful cultural tourism successful historic preservation successful Economic Development we have to spend a lot of time considering our place what it is what's important about it how to maintain that which is important and what are we going to be doing individually and communally to secure our place in a very rapidly evolving history there is no place for which there is no memory successful Heritage tourism requires a triggering of memory but memory is also an Irreplaceable component in building Community that's why I've Done Right Heritage tourism is the singular form of Tourism that at least has the potential to build community locally as it is attracting visitors from elsewhere in a great book called Place ways sociologist Evie Walter writes this the quality of place depends on a human context shaped by memories and Expectations by the stories of real and imagined events that is by the historical experience located there in other words the quality of the place comes directly from its recognition of its history later he writes towns may die for all sorts of reasons but expressive Vitality depends on how a place engages the imagination clearly from a community perspective preservation perspective we want to preserve and enhance Community quality and that means capitalizing on those memories a visitor certainly looks for expressive Vitality we need to engage the imagination an appropriate approach to cultural tourism is to do both of those things at once earlier I said that that one of my basic premises was that communities that want successful tourism must be valuable places well the word value comes from the Latin Valeri which means to be strong vigorous in good health to have Force Avail Prevail to mean to signify but this word value has become double speak value days at Kmart aren't about value they're about cheap and the same kafka-esque double speak is affecting many of our communities and particularly their historic resources in many of our cities like Alice in Wonderland we are told that cheat means value valuable has become worthless and values have been dismissed as Superfluous Pastiche inappropriate as architectural ornamentation value means to mean to signify is the community without meaning that is the valueless community the same concept of value I think is what makes cultural tourism a viable long-term Economic Development strategy in many communities I am not an expert on tourism but I can share you with some findings from analyzes that we've looked at tourism impacts San Antonio Texas is important in both the U.S and Mexico history the Alamo is

in San Antonio and six years ago San Antonio got their collection of Spanish missions placed on the world heritage list we estimated that nearly 60 percent of the overnight visitors and almost half of the day visitors would fall under the definition of Heritage visitors to San Antonio more important however was the expenditure patterns in the U.S tourists spend nearly all of their money on five things lodging food and beverage Local transportation retail purchases and Recreation which includes things like admissions going to a museum whatever in every one of those categories Heritage visitors spent more per day than tourists in San Antonio who had no interest in Heritage for New York City one of the most visited places in the world more than 30 percent of the day visitors and nearly 40 percent of overnight visitors fall into the Heritage category and this only includes domestic not foreign visitors the expenditure by these Heritage visitors is more than eight billion dollars annually before the pandemic we conducted a Statewide study of impacts of historic preservation in Rhode Island the smallest of the 50 states it has a well-established tourism industry based on its beaches not surprisingly the number one activity of visitors in Rhode Island is shopping clearly followed by fine dining but we found that 16 of the top 25 fine dining restaurants rated on Yelp were in fact in historic districts so it's clearly not just the food but the character of those places where the food is being served Beach Activity is next but that sense of the that that season is four months at most visiting landmarks historic sites was the next most uh popular activity among both day and overnight visitors but that is much more time spread over the year stabilizing what otherwise would be a very volatile industry The Firm from which we purchased the survey data also asked Rhode Island Travelers what are your areas of special interest and at the top of the list was historic places followed by cultural activities and attractions in this small state the direct and indirect expenditures of Heritage visitors is nearly 1.4 billion dollars annually that creates a total of 26 000 jobs with paychecks of nearly a billion dollars in the U.S the U.S national Park service has developed a program called Heritage corridors one of them is in South Carolina and is made up of mostly small rural towns uh part of the reasoning behind this Corridor program is that many of these communities are just too small to try to make themselves a destination they need to team up with other places to make a tourism industry viable well they began on pretty sophisticated basis identifying five categories of targeted visitors outdoor recreation Heritage special events culinary and nature best based a good uh a good aspect of this targeting is none of these groups is mutually exclusive well after they had opened for a Opera for a couple of years they commissioned a study about what the expenditure patterns were of the groups which spent the most by more than a third over the next type of visitor Heritage visitors but then look at this next finding how those visitors spent their money well almost none was spent on lodging meaning that they were mostly all day visitors but where they spent their money was in retail purchases now no one goes shopping while traveling just to buy something they could get at the shopping mall in their hometown these are purchases of Specialty Group goods from independent Merchants merchants in mostly small towns Utah is a state large state with 60 percent of its population in Salt Lake City but they're a wonderful Heritage sites that are located all around the state but here's what we found those historic sites in Rural and small towns in Utah were often the magnet that attracted the visitor but those sites weren't the major beneficiaries they only received about seven percent of the daily visitor expenditure the rest going to hotels gas stations restaurants and Shop it was the historic site that brought them there but they were not they weren't the ones who reaped the major benefits the U.S Department of Commerce surveys International visitors arriving by plane and they distinguish between cultural Travelers and other Travelers they identified cultural Travelers as those who visited art galleries concert plays Heritage sites historic sites or national park uh well what did they find well approximately a third of all visitors were cultural visitors but what did they find between those visitors and other tourists cultural tourists spent an average of 21.3 nights in the U.S

compared with 13 for other visitors 470 thousand more U.S visitors visit an historic place than an amusement park 785 000 more visitors to the U.S visit an historic place than spending time on the beach for every visitor that stopped in a casino three visited an historic place for every visitor that played golf for vision historic place but citing statistics is just part of the story I want to move to a less numerican numerical analysis of Heritage tourism my credentials for these remarks such as they are are only three one I travel 90 of the time and those 220 nights a year in hotel rooms and a quarter of those are overseas virtually all of my work deals with Local Economic Development and three among my few skills is being able to raise questions for which I have no answers and to make observations for which I have only anecdotal evidence so here in random order are 16 characteristics observations questions unsupported opinions about tourism Heritage tourism and sustainable Local Economic Development first tourism is the most competitive Economic Development strategy a community can Undertake and in some form or another virtually every community in the country does not every town can afford an industrial park but they can all afford a tourism brochure in many cases the Chamber of Commerce May self-define its efforts as successful but by any objective measurement they are failures second as an individual strategy you do not have to have quality tourism to make money there's still plenty of buyers of rubber tomahawks and plastic boomerangs but it is gresham's law of Tourism economics the lower quality will drive the higher quality out of circulation third tourism if tourism is to be a sustainable component as a component of communities overall Economic Development strategy it must be based on three principles it must be real fake old west towns or Bavarian Villages may work for a while but they won't last two it must have quality if it is to survive as a communal as opposed to an individual success and three it needs to be differentiated it is what is unique about a community that needs to be identified preserved enhanced and marketed Robert persick is best known as the author of the book Zen In The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance after 20 years of invisibility Percy re-emerged with another book called a few years ago called Lila and in it he writes beauty isn't things looking like something else beauty is things being just what they are next choices have to be made even if that means foregoing short-term profits a combination KFC and gas station store in the heart of downtown historic district might serve many needs gasoline for visitors early morning coffee for construction workers and donuts for cops tax revenues for the city and a way to fill up that empty lot that's been on the market for 15 years but to the extent that KFC adversely affects the differentiation of your downtown it will be too expensive in the long run to allow even more than General retailing individual tourism-related businesses are not independent but highly interdependent targeting the customer marketing to the customer meeting the needs of the customer responding to changes in customer preferences require group not individual choices as in every business everybody is not the customer to proceed on that presumption is a sure way to fail next a community that Imports more than an exports will eventually dry up and blow away but Services can be exported as well as Goods tourism is an export that can stem Community withering one of the ways to alter the the export import ratio is referred to as import substitution creating and buying locally what had previously been brought in think about jellies in restaurants I can get half ounce packages of Smuckers anywhere in America maybe it's only in Marquette that I can get Grandma's blackberry jam think about what that simple decision of the restaurant owner use a local jam instead of Smuckers would mean first jobs are created in Michigan making the jam second the dollars are that used to go to a Smuckers Factory somewhere stay at home and third that business has reinforced the three principles of sustainable Economic Development it's real it's quality and it's differentiation every product used and sold by every tourism related business in town should be examined for the opportunity of import substitution not out of some Goofy and dubious shop local at home strategy but rather as a fundamental strategy in Heritage tourism efforts carrying capacity I originally come from Western South Dakota cattle country and their Ranch Land is sold based on its carrying capacity carrying capacity is how many acres it will take to raise a pair a cow and a calf for a year in Western South Dakota that would typically be between 15 and 30 Acres in Nevada they have land they call 40 and eight land for a cow to survive it has to be able to run 40 miles an hour and have a mouth eight feet wide but when land is used Beyond its capacity here's what happens the first year there are extra profits more calves are available to be sold in the fall but starting in the second year three things begin to happen first the cows and the calves both get both get smaller too many cattle eating too little grass second because their nutrition declines fewer cows give birth to healthy calves and third the ability to produce grass declines because it's been overgrazed I would suggest to you that a community dealing with tourism has a carrying capacity how many visitors per year a community can host without giving up what brought tourists in the first place is very finite embedded in tourism planning process the estimates of carrying capacity and then implemented even against the cries of more tourists more tourists more tourists Heritage assets are particularly vulnerable to overuse it makes no sense to exploit them to a level where they are no longer able to productively contribute to the local economy next tourism is a very labor-intensive industry largely at the lower end of the pay scale every Community needs to address how it intends to respond to the labor needs tourism will generate and that is even more true in places where the cost of living is very high we will have to look for non-traditional workers to make up the needs segments of the workforce that have been underutilized in the past very few communities can survive on tourism alone those that do were most adversely affected by the pandemic every business that serves tourists should also look for ways to better serve their local community some of you may know about the Main Street program and Michigan has one of the great state Ministry programs Main Street is commercial District revitalization within the context of historic buildings one of the early steps in mainstream becoming a mainstream Community is an evaluation called a resource team the first Main Street research team wherever participated in was in 1981 in Manitou Springs Colorado a tourist town between Colorado Springs and Pikes Peak during the walking tour one of the team members searched in every down store downtown for a tube of toothpaste and items certainly everybody needs the only kind available was the tiny tubes only good for traveling and then only if the trip isn't for two or three nights there was not a tube of toothpaste in downtown Manitou Springs for the people that lived there they had to drive to a shopping center in Colorado Springs or something's wrong there tourism is often sold as a Costless form of Economic Development well they come and they spend their money and they leave we don't have to build new schools or water lines or add sewer capacity it's all gravy well that just ain't so tourism has real cost and not just economic among those costs are traffic condition congestion displacement of local businesses and residents loss of sense of community local antagonism towards visitors and more police public facilities parking lots and street lights this does not mean the tourism strategy should not be pursued it does mean that these costs should be measured and weighed against the tourism benefits so what if the community is profited if it shall gain the whole world and lose its own soul for decades we have tacitly equated economic growth with population growth in some places in Michigan the net population growth in the next 10 years will be nominal and as an economic development strategy strategy then that presupposes population growth becomes a zero-sum game that for me is is you have to win you have to lose that is certainly a very questionable public policy tourism along with the quality of local education increased productivity and the internet are some ways there can be economic growth more dollars in local Pockets without necessarily having population growth and its parallel requirements slow population growth notwithstanding people continue to move from one point to another if it is desirable that a community-grown population then the tourism strategy should be part of the means to attract people as residents not just visitors everything about the environment of being a visitor puts one in the psychological mindset to be persuaded to be a resident they are relaxed interested in your community or wouldn't be there are in fact escaping from where they live and work now and both spouses are generally present those visitors are the best frame in mind they will ever be to be attracted to your community if population growth is part of the economic development strategy the tourism component of the effort should be structured to further that strategy as well the U.S state of Vermont has an organized effort to attract visitors as full-time residents to compensate for both a labor shortage and an aging of the population the visitor needs to receive more not less than expected to oversell what you have to offer will only work once the long-term adverse effect will be costly indeed finally sustainable tourism must be a community-wide strategy even among those who are not directly involved the hardware dealer the high school student the retirement home the bank none of which immediately come to mind is tourism destinations need to be part of the process one unpleasant encounter with one visitor will be vastly more expensive to a community than five ads in Conde Nash traveler can make up for well here's one more list that's what I really do for a living I make lists mostly I cost them off as if I actually knew something but for a moment I'd ask you to to ponder a word rather than a list it's a curious word in the English language in that it has very different meanings think of the word integrity in one definition it means the quality of being honest upright truthful but in another context integrity means soundness uh uh completeness strength as in the structural Integrity of a bridge I would suggest to you that if we want a cultural tourism strategy that is sound lasting sustainable strong it is cultural tourism strategy that has to have structural Integrity our representation of our heritage resources must be done with Integrity tell and reflect our own community's unique Heritage in an honest truthful way both in the story itself and in the buildings that contain those stories Heritage tourism is a particular challenge because in many ways it is the polar opposite of other types of Tourism we go to the beach or the golf course the water slides specifically not to think we want an experience where our brain can take a vacation as well as our body further often we take those types of trips to close our eyes and see nothing if you picture yourself on a beach I can almost guarantee you are thinking of a shell yourself lying down with your eyes closed and there's nothing wrong with that but that is very different from a hear from Heritage tourism for Heritage children to be successful it must engage the mind and capture the eye to be sustainably successful it must be engaged with Integrity I don't care what you call it if it's artificial it's not Heritage tourism the widely respected American Author Eudora Welty in her collection of essays entitled The Eye of the story writes this it is our describable outside that defines us willy-nilly to others that may save us or destroy us in the world it may be our Shield against chaos our mask against exposure but whatever it is the move we make in the place we live has to signify our intent and meaning successful cultural tourism needs to find a way to to uh to signify our intent and meaning thank you all very much wow again [Applause] that's not food for thought it's a banquet For Thought Donovan I just say that I'm sure we have some great questions and comments uh who would like to ask questions got really overwhelmed um should I speak a lot slower would that helper you know working for the city and trying to Steward this idea of a cultural Trail but yes I liked how you said it doing it authentically and real and how important that is and how it's such difficult for people that are interested in history and culture in our community to always Advocate people understand that history Heritage art is a a good thing but advocating we're always trying to show the economic justification and especially right now the city is undergoing this community master plan and I'm I just texted someone okay they're all the steering committee has to watch this because we're at that delicate point and I you know I don't even know how to ask you like can you give us some advice you just did but um you gave us a lot to think about and hopefully we can engage you in giving our community uh leaders but Tina you in your presentation you talked about uh Heritage and arts and culture being Economic Development and you're absolutely right they're not the icing on the cake they are the cake and when you when you're fortunate enough to have those resources locally they really need to be exploited in the most positive way so then advice means a lot smaller well yeah I I do have to yeah I I do have to say it's it's not a it's it's not uncommon and and what I have to tell you about a recent lesson that I've learned I'm I'm working preparing in fact the first live version is next week a master class virtual master class on use of public-private Partnerships for the development of Heritage resources and it's the sponsor of this is UNESCO office in Bangkok and their case study is a wonderful Fort 1850s or 60s fort in Georgetown Malaysia uh and that's the site and they they put it out for tender they found a very successful person a very successful business person who came and on a public-private partnership arrangement to kind of run this run this forward well what did they want to do they I mean the mistake was there was no requirement in the RFP that they have people who really understood Heritage and Heritage tourism on the team making the proposal so this developer good developer nice guy had plenty of experience a successful experience but they wanted to do things like bring in dinosaur exhibits into the fort things just kind of weren't related at all well no surprise this you know collapsed you know four years into the 20-year cycle so it really is critical if you're going to use these resources then you need to involve people in that process who really understand what the resources are how they're used how they can be be adaptively reused but not exploited so they lose their integrity and their you know structure so do we have any other questions as I make my way over that's part of the reason I ask you to be here Donovan and and be part of this is and this whole idea is we need to be at the table we need the communities here to really think of arts and culture and Heritage in their planning thank you it was a great uh great program thank you presentation how do you strike a balance between uh becoming sort of a a one economic Community Based on either historical preservation tourism versus uh development of higher paying jobs and so on a great question and again the the places that suffered the most in the pandemic worldwide were those that were one industry tourism cities and so resiliency is critical uh element and if we are over dependent on one industry and particularly over dependent on on tourism were really vulnerable to them what I'd say say to you is that tourism needs to be a component but it can't be the component of a Local Economic Development strategy and because I come from the kind of Heritage conservation as economic development world uh I think among the things that we have learned is how attractive Heritage buildings are on uh on all kinds of whole range of Economic Development activities in fact when we when we first talked about my coming up here I said well yeah any you know we're told what the what the subject matter was I said well I can talk about tourism but my goal in life and I got to reach it pretty soon because I'm really old is that when you say economics and historic preservation in the same sentence that the automatic default response is not always oh you must mean Heritage tourism it really is important but it's just one of the ways and so that the issue about what we've found in studies now big cities small places all over the country there is a any any Economist in here anybody of scholarly Economist oh yes okay well there's a there's a even in forestry economics there is a concept called revealed preference and we could put up some mathematical formula but but let me give you my stupid version uh definition that if I would ask you all uh do you like do you like chocolate ice cream better than or vanilla better well I'd say chocolate some of you'd raise your hands and say vanilla others raise your hand well that's statement preference I raised my hand I like chocolate better but there's another way that we could do that we could roll in a cart with a bunch of ice cream cones some of them chocolate some of vanilla and you take one well that's not stating your preference but it's revealing your preference by saying oh I talk a chocolate cone well a lot of the work that we do in in measuring the impacts of historic preservation is reveal preference and what we found big cities little cities all parts of the country uh and the US and Canada by the way as well is that there is a revealed preference for historic buildings and historic districts by particularly concentrated in among knowledge workers and in the kind of creative class workers whatever share those Industries are in any City's economy there will be a greater share of them in historic buildings and historic resources so I think we need to say not to say okay we got some Heritage building so we should have tourism I think the question is we got great historic buildings how do we use that to to kind of tap the marketplaces reveal preference for being in those so we're attracting you know people not to go to college here for four years or six and leave how do we get them to stay here how do we how do we tie them in to use our historic resources it makes us much less vulnerable to just tourism and we can broaden our economic base uh to to things utilizing so so my argument is not we make the decisions between historic preservation or Economic Development the premise ought to be how do we use historic preservation as the tool to enhance and to provide Economic Development so I that's a kind of long-winded answer and there's no easy say way to say here's how we diversify our accounting but really really important uh we do this is again this is a for what it's worth you can like the Saudis or not like the Saudis I don't care but we've done a bunch of work with ey Ernst young the gargantuan consulting firm who's been Consulting with the Saudi culture Ministry they Saudis have decided you know oil it's only lasts so long and that's what 100 of our economy has been so we have to diversify our economy and the top of the list of economic diversity strategies in the Saudi Kingdom Saudi Arabia is Heritage resources for people to see them so they really see this as a means to diversify kind of in the other direction wow any other questions or comments we're done with so at lunch time everybody wants to go and get their soups well I I don't know I think that they're all just like wow I don't know how to process all this um you know for me I I talk about this a lot when I speak at communities and like the rotary and groups of the importance of historic preservation in a community and it it reminded me I lived in Sioux City Iowa which has it had this wonderful downtown with a main street called Fourth Street with these huge Roman richardsonian Romanesque buildings and then as urban renewal came in they replaced a lot of them and including put a Convention Center in the middle of the street the main street of town blocking it off from this one edge of the street that was known as the red light district kind of the bad District of town fast forward to late 90s 2000s guess which part of town is the historic district the old red light district is now the history that's where the shops and the businesses and restaurants and and offices are starting to develop because they saw wow people want this but the downtown is dead because they basically tore it all up so it's one of those examples of people want that authenticity of the actual thing they don't want well what happened to so many other communities yeah Yeah well yeah I I know we have districts in that and that's uh you know we there's there's we we are our firm there's only six of us we we have a the same six people working on two different firm names one in the US and one every place else uh but but there's lots of preservation consulting firms around the country that do preservation plans for local I mean we don't do those we we're very disciplined about staying in our little area but when I when I was listening to this wonderful presentation just before now I thought what a great tool to incorporate for the firms who are doing preservation plans to incorporate that kind of analysis that gets people really excited instead of saying oh you're going to hurt my property values or you're going to make when property taxes go up or blah blah blah the reason that would really personalize the whole uh issue would be great tool to merge with preservation planning and and that technology absolutely any other further comments everyone's got that hungry look in their eye don't they well we will be next door in here for lunch around 12 30 we'll be presenting the uh the Folklife Awards uh so uh please go get yourself something to eat and then we'll do that and then we'll come back here for the next presentations Donovan thank you so much [Applause]

2022-12-03 15:06

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