CREATIVE CITY NEWSLETTER: JULY 2001

ISSUE 2: DEFINING THE NEW ECONOMY

Creative City Top Five Issue Areas
Topical Articles and Studies
COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT: Rochester, NY
Meeting Notes from the First Creative City Meeting


CREATIVE CITY TOP FIVE ISSUE AREAS

1. REGIONALISM

A. AMENITIES AND REGIONAL THINKING
Regional cooperation is finally being recognized as an essential element for communities that endeavor to be competitive in the global marketplace. Amenity strategies can contribute greatly toward regional improvement, image, and competitiveness. But amenity strategies are also valuable tools for initiating and navigating the sometimes-bumpy road of regional cooperation.

Environmental Agendas: Local environmental strategies necessarily need to mesh with regional and statewide environmental goals. Municipalities and developers need to seek win/win negotiation so that legitimate concerns about the environment are balanced with local realities. Green areas and urban nature preserves are one way to provide for inner city residents, enhance livability, and serve the environment.

Suburbs-New Urban Centers: Most of the growth over the past fifty years has come in suburban areas. This presents special problems in design and sustainable livability. The emphasis on the homogenous nature of new development makes suburbs seems like the place with no sense of place. Attempts to humanize the suburbs often include physical improvements, like public art, parks, and civic centers. In the future, suburban areas will have to cope with a transportation system that will be unable to serve an increasingly elderly population and increasingly dense settlements. New transportation options and a new emphasis on sustainable planning are required.

Alternative Transportation: New transportation doesn't have to mean an extra lane for the freeway. Many regions are exploring alternative methods of public transportation. Where mass transit systems like the subway are too expensive and too costly, cities can try public transportation that is appropriately scaled. This might be a trolley line or adapting an abandoned railroad right-of-way for foot and bike traffic.

B. HERITAGE AND CULTURAL TOURISM
Partners believes that tourism begins at home. Tourism is both an economic engine and a community development strategy. First you invest in resources that your local citizens will enjoy; then you share them with others. These resources can be the catalyst for the formation of a new community image, for attracting new business development, and for stimulating the in-migration of new residents: once the good word gets out, people soon come to visit. Those first-time visitors are called tourists; the second-time visitors are called friends; the third-time visitor may be an investor; the fourth-time visitor might be a new resident of your community.Partners' initiatives have involved heritage, culture, and discovery tourism. Let Partners take a look at your tourism strategy and explore who the players are, the investment opportunities for the next decade, and the marketing and information needs.

Cultural Tourism Agenda Development: More than twenty years ago New York Yankees' manager Billy Martin shocked fans when he said that arts and cultural events drew more people through their doors than all professional sports combined. Surprising as this may seem, it is true. A recent study of arts and culture in New England revealed that cultural events outdistanced professional sports by about 20 to 1. Partners works to help cities and developing areas to build tourism and local pride through sensitive development and marketing of their arts and cultural resources as well as all of their other amenity assets.

Heritage Tourism / Development: Events and other cultural activities of ethnic groups are currently willing recognition as important resources for tourism as well as serving as a building block of community empowerment. However, because these neighborhoods often suffer from poor public image, planners and tourism promoters frequently overlook the cultural strengths that exist in these areas.

Cultural heritage is an important component of not only understanding our neighbors but also of strengthening economic and community development agendas. Partners can show you how your local heritage and culture is tied into convention and visitor marketing, the development of facilities and special events.

Special Place Tourism Management: How do you protect a special place from being inundated by people coming to see it?

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