OECD Culture and Local Development.pdf - PACA

2. LOCAL DEVELOPMENT BASED ON ATTRACTING VISITORS AND TOURISTS
they participate in the works, and at the end of the normal three-year term of the
“school workshop” they can move on to work with other firms, or in other sectors
of the economy, starting with public works, where they can put their acquired skills
to good use. The school-workshop system accomplishes three objectives: heritage
restoration; creation, upgrading and transmission of skills and know-how; and a
higher quality of output in all economic sectors through the spread of such knowhow.
A number of civil and religious buildings in Castile and Andalusia have been
renovated in this way, thereby preserving highly useful trades such as wood
sculpture, ceramic tiling, restorative carpentry, skills that would have disappeared
without these projects, and that can be used in future conservation work.
An even more original example is to be found in the Canary Islands. Tourism has
exacted a heavy toll on heritage and on the environment both along the coast
and in the interior of Grand Canary: advertising billboards are everywhere,
handicrafts have been internationalised, buildings sprout up everywhere in
complete disregard of existing structures and vernacular architecture. Since there
was no question of trying to do without the great inflow of tourists to the island,
the strategy selected was to supplement the dominant form of tourism with an
alternative approach to tourism, based on heritage appreciation. This has involved
redeveloping a number of villages, rehabilitating heritage buildings, and protecting
exceptional flora. Specialised school workshops were set up to rehabilitate urban
or rural properties that had ethnographic or architectural value, such as stone roads,
walls, hedges, traditional barns, and the handicraft potential was renewed. Interest
in the school workshops has not disappeared with the achievement of these
initial objectives, and already a series of traditional crafts have been revived, offering
high-quality services in trades as varied as construction, gardening, pottery and
lace-making, where nearly 400 jobs or skills have been created
These programmes, often socially funded, are criticised because they are costly
and because their beneficiaries do not always set up their own businesses, and
may not even be able to find a job. Yet costs and outcomes are hardly different
here from what they are in other fields, as the OECD evaluation showed 45 . In fact,
the impact can be measured in terms of better heritage conservation, with the
expected positive economic and social spin-offs in terms of employment (after
one year, 75% of students found a job, 55% of them in the specialty for which they
were trained), and in terms of the enhanced quality of human resources 46 .
- The combination of all these effects suggests that the conservation and upgrading
of heritage buildings is a major economic activity. To demonstrate this, we
return to the analysis undertaken in France by the Ministry of Culture (Greffe
and Pflieger, 2003).
CULTURE AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT - ISBN 92-64-00990-6 - © OECD 2005 65