|
When the "Wise-Use" movement was created sixteen years ago, transferring the management of America's National Park System to the Walt Disney Company was listed as item #11 of their 25 point agenda (www.wildwilderness.org/wi/wiseuse.htm) .
In subsequent years, various representatives of the American Recreation Coalition have given Congressional Testimony in which they've called for the use "differential pricing" within the National Parks. The idea, though it is never stated in quite this way, is to provide more enjoyable access for the wealthy park visitors and higher profits to the tourism industry while shooing away those who can not be relied upon to drop big bucks as part of a park visit.
http://resourcescommittee.house.gov/archives/105cong/parks/98feb26/crandall.htm http://www.wildwilderness.org/docs/peterson.htm
Last month, an economist / columnist for London's conservative Financial Times, combined these ideas. He suggested that the City of Venice could be 'saved' if it were run as a themepark by the Walt Disney Company and if differential pricin were employed. In explaining how this could be done, he used Yosemite NP as a model.
Imagine what Yosemite would be like if it were operated by the Walt Disney Company and if Disney and the NPS used differential pricing to control use as has long been proposed --- and as is described below.
Scott
"National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst." -Wallace Stegner, 1983
--- begin quoted ---
http://www.veniceinperil.org/news_articles/newsarticles.htm
Venice’s real problem is organisation and management
Today 12m people a year pay €50 a head to visit Eurodisney. It is quite
clear...that if the Disney Corporation owned Venice, Venice would no
longer be in peril.
Venice is threatened by crumbling infrastructure and rising sea levels,
and also by the inexorable growth in the number of visitors. But with
effective management, one problem could solve the other. The gates that
let the tourists in could pay for the gates that keep the waters out.
If left unmanaged, the sea of tourists may be a lot more threatening
than the Adriatic Sea. Currently, around 15m people visit Venice each
year, while the city has a resident population of about 60,000. Around
the world literacy and cultural awareness are increasing. Incomes in
India, China and Eastern Europe are now increasing very rapidly; there
are 2.5 billion people in India and China alone who within 50 years
might have incomes comparable to ours. That means that the number of
people who want to see Venice and will be able to afford to see Venice
might very plausibly expand by a factor of three or more over the next
few decades. There is little we can do to stop that happening and I
don’t believe we want to stop it happening. If we regard Venice as one
of the crown jewels of Western European civilisation—and we should—we
want as many tourists as possible to go to there. The issue is how to
accommodate, indeed to promote, such cultural tourism without letting
visitors destroy what it is that people go to visit. Managing the flow
of tourists into Venice involves segregating in time and in space the
people who want only to be photographed in front of the campanile of St
Mark’s from people whose aspiration is to wander the streets of the
city as Ruskin did.
Managing the flow of tourists effectively would give day trippers a
proper opportunity, which they do not have at the moment, to learn
about the history, the culture, the context of what it is they see,
with well-designed exhibits, and with qualified guides. Here is a
sketch of the kind of plan which managed tourism might involve. In the
peak season—mid-June to mid-September— admission of tourists to Venice
will only be as part of a guided tour. The most popular package will be
the one-day Venice experience. Guests would arrive by train in the
modernised station from which they would cross the Grand Canal from the
ticket office to the new visitor centre, which would replace the car
park there. In the visitor centre you would get audiovisual
presentations of the culture and history of the city. There would be
libraries and lecture theatres, a shopping mall and restaurants of all
kinds and price .
In that period of June through September a wide range of other tours
focused on themes and areas, all accompanied by briefings in the
visitor centre, would be offered to people who are making their
subsequent visits to the city, and, of course, they would be free of
the crowds of guests who are doing the walk back from St Mark’s Square
to the Rialto. Outside this peak season, you would be able to buy
individual admissions to the city at €50 [$63]. There will also be
special Ruskin weeks in which there would not be any guided tours, and
the number of visitors would be strictly limited. Tickets for these
weeks would be quite expensive for the general public, probably
normally as part of a package with hotel accommodation, but a limited
number of less expensive or even free Ruskin week tickets would go to
scholars and educational institutions, and be allocated by ballot.
We already have many successful examples in the world of managed
tourism. Yosemite is a place of astounding natural beauty even though
it’s on the doorstep of the densely populated coastal strip of
California where 30m people live. In Yosemite, the National Park
Service (NPS) ensures that people who simply want to be photographed in
front of one the massive waterfalls can be rapidly bused in and out,
while people who want to spend a week hiking in the park have an
opportunity to do that also. The result is that the NPS allows large
numbers of people to visit Yosemite, while preserving the attractions
that make them want to come in the first place. Yosemite is successful
because Yosemite is managed as a park. I can already hear: “We don’t
want to turn Venice into a park”; but the blunt truth is that Venice is
already a park. It was once a great business centre; it was once a
great political force; it was once a pioneer of new cultural ideas
rather than a showcase of old ones, but in these senses Venice died
centuries ago and it is only the flow of visitors in the last century
that has brought Venice back to life.
Today, as a simple matter of arithmetic fact, most of the people who
are in the city at any time are tourists and most of the people who
work in Venice have come in for the day to serve the tourists. People
do not go to Venice to have their hair cut or to buy their groceries.
They go as tourists and the economics of the city are similar to the
economics of Yosemite and Disneyland, not the economics of a city such
as Slough.
If the mobile barrier that will provide flood protection for the city
is going to cost €4.6 billion [$5.8 billion], a longer term solution
will cost a lot more. But let us be clear that these are not large
numbers in the context of the perhaps three billion people who are
likely to visit Venice as tourists in the course of the next century.
Today 12m people a year pay €50 a head to visit Eurodisney. It is quite
clear when you see it in these terms that if the Disney Corporation
owned Venice, Venice would no longer be in peril.
We do not want Disney in Venice, but what we do want to do is to learn
some relevant and useful lessons. As so often in economic matters, the
lack of money is the manifestation of the problem rather than the
problem itself. The problems of Venice are not problems of technology
or finance; they are problems of politics, of organisation and of
management.
-- The writer is an economist and columnist
for the Financial Times. This is an abridged version of a speech he
made at the “Venice in Peril” debate held on 12 June 2006, on the side
of the motion: “Enough money has been spent on saving Venice”
|
- Various 
