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  Rambling: An Avenue to a Human and Competitive Tourism

Alexandre MIGNOTTE - "Grande Traversée des Alpes" Association - University of Geneva, Faculty of Economics and Social Science, Geography Department, Geneva, Switzerland

 

The organisation of the day is the fruit of a partnership between the GTA, the Mission Développement Prospective de Savoie (Savoie Future Development Mission), and CAFI.
Let me start with a few words on these last two organisations, since Mr. Lyard spoke to us about the GTA.
The Savoie Mission Développement Prospective (MDP) is a consulting body for Savoie communities, and more widely in the Alps, in the field of territorial development.
Highly involved in cross-border cooperation measures, it is participating in the elaboration of an interregional plan of the Alps Massif and in the Sillon Alpin metropolitan cooperation project. The MDP is also conducting forecasts on Savoie (Savoie 2020), as well as the Chambéry regional centre conurbation plan.
In the area of tourism development, the MDP is leading the "Sentinels of the Alps" project, which was presented in Valloire.

The French-Italian Alps Conference (CAFI) was founded in 2000 by the French départements of Alpes Maritimes, Alpes de Haute-Provence, Hautes-Alpes, Isère, Savoie, and Haute-Savoie, in association with the Italian provinces of Imperia, Cuneo, and Torino, and the Autonomous Region of Valle d'Aosta. The CAFI is a tool that aims to make operational a policy of cross-border cooperation implemented during the '90s. The association is putting a lot into various programmes of collective interest and towards the construction of a common cultural, economic, and social identity on both sides of the French-Italian border.

In addition to efforts previously centred on the theme of transportation (and in particular on the Lyon-Turin link) or on the question of legal tools for cross-border cooperation, CAFI has expanded its actions and its skills on the question of tourism, and especially on the question of rambling tourism, as a direct echo of the symbolism of the traveller, of the person who passes borders—this border that constitutes the CAFI's reason to exist.
The experiments presented in Valloire showed how rambling, and tourist rambling in particular, requires more or less extensive and costly infrastructures, facilities, and therefore means, space, and time.
Therefore, the heart of the day's themes was right at the intersection of all these terms.

I cannot, nor do I wish to, give a briefing here for each of the projects presented, in spite of their great quality. It also seems to me that the exercise of summarizing will not fit into this.
But if a summary of this day has to be offered, I will recall two essential questions in an attempt to do so:

• were we really talking about tourism, rambling, and networks?
• did we respond to the (pre-established) idea that behind all this there are forms of tourism appropriate to the French-Italian Alps?

--> in short, and in the spirit of Mr. Fouquet's introductory speech:
"What are we talking about?"

To take up my first question again: yes, undeniably, tourism, rambling, and networks were the subject.

Whether we are talking about the tour of Mont Thabor between Savoie, Hautes-Alpes, and Italy; the Contemporary Art Road in the Alpes de Haute-Provence; the Pyrenean Road; the fortified heritage in the "Sentinels of the Alps" project; the not-to-be-missed (especially here) tour of Mont Blanc, or of the Via Alpina; each project in its own way revealed the growing significance of rambling as a full-fledged tourism industry, and for this reason, the importance of appropriate travel infrastructures, i.e., primarily networks of quality roads and paths.
In this sense, the innovation is to search in terms of interoperability, compatibility, and consistency of networks, in order to best combine tourists' many choices with the potentialities and objectives of the territories they traverse.
On the other hand, the innovation is evident when the experiments that were presented assert themselves as true tourism "products", when they lead to modern and effective devices, like online reservation centres, or to original and remarkable artistic installations, as for the Contemporary Art Road in the Alpes de Haute-Provence or the Pyrenean Road.
From a practical as well as theoretical viewpoint, the question then truly revolved around rambling, tourism, and networks. Hence, we are definitely in a genuine work area for a multitude of players, whatever their occupations, interests, sensibilities, training, territories, etc.

Allow me to address my second question in a few minutes, in a slightly roundabout way, because I especially want to say that, during this day, it was especially a question of something obvious and omnipresent, and yet missing from all the presentations: it was especially a question of regional planning.
Regional planning in the full and even noble sense of the term—in other words, voluntary intervention across a territory, within the framework of a project intended for the well-being of society.
We are not then talking about regional planning principally for technical and economic purposes, which has earned it many criticisms for its principles as well as its realisation, but a planning that takes into consideration all social, cultural, political, historical, and of course, economic dimensions of the territory, or rather territories, concerned.

So this question of tourist rambling is a very interesting one, but this is precisely where things get complicated.

Things get complicated because the networks of paths, for example, didn't experience such a craze even twenty years ago. With a few exceptions, those that hadn't disappeared were nearly invisible. They had their own life, governed by the seasons, and were set apart from the true concerns of the communities (i.e. jobs, economic activities, services for the population, education, safety, etc.).
Today, things are very different, since they can find a place within general tourism policies, as could be seen from the projects presented.
And these projects are not simple or trivial; they are in the image of projects revolving around large infrastructure networks and for which people speak openly of regional planning.

All of these tourist rambling projects are as complex as they are rich. Rich because they only exist through networks that advance the idea of movement and travel, in order to link different points, different areas, and different countries. The wealth is then truly there, in the discovery of others and of someplace else.
The tour of Mont Thabor, like other routes, indeed presents landscapes, lights, and sounds, but also assorted players, histories, issues, objectives, and interests.

Hence, it becomes a matter of finding meaning in all of this. And it is perhaps from this search for meaning that adaptation can come, the idea of this adapted tourism.
Finding a shared meaning, in other words, a meaning that would take into consideration the specificities of the Alps, its histories, its natural and cultural heritages, its women and men, and all this in accordance with the time that has shaped this mountain. A meaning that creates collective membership, a meaning that is expressed in a unifying and non-divisive mobilisation of the network or route where each element works in its niche, under its banner, and within its capabilities.
This shared meaning, which could give birth to an appropriate tourism, consequently brings to light the idea of a common good—a strange and thorny notion in an era of intense privatisation, and which can be paradoxical when we speak of tourism, and hence of responding precisely to the customer's expectations, and of personifying the tourism offer.

The stakes are therefore great, all the more so given that there are no ready-made "formulas" for thinking out the local adaptation of a tourism development. This can hardly be achieved in the rapid and systematic application of methods supposed to be suitable everywhere and for everyone. French mountain areas have already undergone this bitter experience in the past.

This day in Valloire and the tourist rambling experiments that have been presented truly plunge us into the question posed by this 7th session of the Tourism Summits.
How do you combine the "human" and competition?

Competition takes place between territories trying to heighten and even build their appeal. So they hardly play on "local advantages" anymore, or on types of gifts, but rather on constructs, products. These processes of building local advantages make competitive relationships between territories emerge, confronting each other on a sort of marketplace of territories where three problems arise:

• territories are not equal in the tools and means they have available to develop their "charm capital”.
• the competitiveness of a specific product—the tourist appeal of a rural Alpine territory, for example—is defined by outside parties. How then to consider that this competitiveness and appeal truly fit the internal nature of the product, or fit the local identity?
• competition between the territories can lead to very short-lived local management, for example when in order to win, a community agrees to establish facilities, a housing development, or so forth, without considering the social and environmental consequences, the costs for setting it up, maintaining it, even removing it. Can competition between territories lead to a sort of "territorial dumping"? Or would local territories be no more than an available resource, ready to be consumed?

But in the end, don't mistake my intentions and the meaning of my remarks. These comments and questions are not expressed in order to deny, or indeed destroy, the undeniable contributions of tourism to numerous territories and the remarkable projects to which it gives rise. The experiments presented in Valloire, or the ones that could be observed in CIPRA's "Future in the Alps" programme, prove this without question.
I mean quite the opposite: to my mind, these questions are to be asked if one really wishes to raise the challenge of a tourism that is both human and competitive.

Thank you.