Setting the Scene. Developing a Policy Agency for Sustainable Forms of Media Tourism

Description du projet

Lumières, caméra… voyage

Les gens voyagent pour toutes sortes de raisons. Certains sont inspirés par les lieux présentés dans la littérature populaire, les films, la musique ou la télévision. Ces voyages représentent une industrie de plusieurs millions de dollars et ont des répercussions considérables sur l’économie, l’environnement et la communauté d’un pays. La clé consiste à maintenir un équilibre entre les impacts positifs et négatifs de ces flux médiatiques et touristiques souvent capricieux. Dans ce contexte, le projet SETS financé par le CER apportera aux gouvernements des connaissances basées sur la recherche et des conseils critiques et holistiques afin qu’ils développent des politiques efficaces pour un tourisme médiatique durable, responsable et inclusif. L’objectif du projet est de démontrer la viabilité (financière) et la faisabilité (technique) d’une agence de développement de politiques, SETS, dont l’objectif est de fournir aux municipalités des produits et des services qui les aideront à réaliser ces politiques.

Objectif

This project focuses on media tourism: the phenomenon of people travelling to places associated with movies, television series and other forms of popular culture. Media tourism has gradually evolved into a multi-million-dollar industry, with far-reaching implications for the related locations, affecting their economy, environment and community. As a result, city governments increasingly seek strategies to manage both the positive and negative impacts of these often-capricious media and tourism flows. However, the extensive research data generated by the ERC project ?Words of Imagination? (WOI), which has been collected in multiple Western and non-Western cities (e.g. Kingston, Seoul, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and Edinburgh), confirms (1) the potential of new media tourism initiatives and (b) the need for (humanities) research-based knowledge and critical and holistic advice to develop effective policies for sustainable and inclusive media tourism. Therefore, our goal is to set up a world-leading policy development agency called Setting the Scene (SETS) that is focused on providing municipalities around the world with a set of products and services to develop their media tourism industry in an environmentally sustainable, socially responsible and culturally sensitive manner. While several agencies advising government departments on the industry exist, none of them adopt a critical and holistic (humanities) perspective and focus on the sustainability and inclusivity of media tourism. The ultimate goal of this PoC is to demonstrate the (financial) viability and (technical) feasibility of the envisioned policy development agency SETS in assisting city governments with the search for tailored research-based policies concerning sustainable and inclusive media tourism.