Heritage property, tourism and the UK Disability Discrimination Act

Heritage tourism depends on a physical resource based primarily on listed buildings and scheduled monuments. Visiting or staying in a historic building provides a rich tourism experience, but historic environments date from eras when access for disabled people was not a consideration. Current UK Government policy now promotes social inclusion via an array of equal opportunities, widening participation and anti-discrimination policies. Historic environments enjoy considerable legislative protection from adverse change, but now need to balance conservation with public access for all. This paper discusses the basis of research being undertaken by The College of Estate Management funded by the Mercers Company of London and the Harold Samuel Trust. It assesses how the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act has changed the legal obligations of owners/operators in managing access to listed buildings in tourism use. It also examines the key stakeholders and power structures in the management of historic buildings and distinguishes other important players in the management process.

The Victoria Falls 1900-1940: Landscape, tourism and the geographical imagination

This article is about the politics of landscape ideas, and the relationship between landscape, identity and memory. It explores these themes through the history of the Victoria Falls, and the tourist resort that developed around the waterfall after 1900. Drawing on oral and archival sources, including popular natural history writing and tourist guides, it investigates African and European ideas about the waterfall, and the ways that these interacted and changed in the course of colonial appropriations of the Falls area. The tourist experience of the resort and the landscape ideas promoted through it were linked to Edwardian notions of Britishness and empire, ideas of whiteness and settler identities that transcended new colonial borders, and to the subject identities accommodated or excluded. Cultures of colonial authority did not develop by simply overriding local ideas, they involved fusions, exchanges and selective appropriations of them. The two main African groups I am concerned with here are the Leya, who lived in small groups around the Falls under a number of separate chiefs, and the powerful Lozi rulers, to whom they paid tribute in the nineteenth century. The article highlights colonial authorities' celebration of aspects of the Lozi aristocracy's relationship with the river, and their exclusion of the Leya people who had a longer and closer relationship with the waterfall. It also touches on the politics of recent attempts to reverse this exclusion, and the controversial rewriting of history this has involved.

Responsible tourism and sustainability: the case of Kumarakom in Kerala, India

This paper discusses the notion of ‘responsible tourism’ and its current use within the tourism literature. We argue that the concept as used currently means everything and therefore adds nothing to the conceptual terrain of tourism trends and nomenclatures. We then introduce our own understanding of the concept arguing that while responsible tourism is linked to sustainability initiatives such as alternative tourism, ecotourism, ethical tourism, green tourism, soft tourism, pro-poor tourism, geo-tourism, integrated tourism, community-based tourism, etc it also demarcates an analytical realm of its own. We suggest that the practical use of the term in areas where it has been adopted (such as South Africa and Kerala for instance) suggests a rather restricted use. We identified this realm as the tourism sector-specific manifestation of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda. Following Flyvberg's [(2006). Five misunderstandings about case-study research. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 219–245] call for exemplars and paradigmatic case studies to advance knowledge in a particular domain, the responsible tourism initiative in Kumarakon, Kerala, is presented. Discussion of the case study traces the particular governance context of Kerala and the position of tourism in the state economy. The responsible tourism initiatives at the state level and local level are then described highlighting the ‘how’ of the implementation and the impact that it has produced. Generic, non-prescriptive principles that could be said to be necessary in some form for the successful translation of responsible tourism principles to practices are then identified. Such an approach is contrasted with one that places faith in the voluntary adoption of ‘responsible’ practices by the private sector on its own. It is argued that responsible tourism can make a contribution to practice provided the conceptual terrain is delineated against other forms of tourism and if research within the terrain can unpack the particular forms of challenges that are thrown up by the delineation itself.

Risk and price in the bidding process of contractors

Formal and analytical risk models prescribe how risk should be incorporated in construction bids. However, the actual process of how contractors and their clients negotiate and agree on price is complex, and not clearly articulated in the literature. Using participant observation, the entire tender process was shadowed in two leading UK construction firms. This was compared to propositions in analytical models and significant differences were found. 670 hours of work observed in both firms revealed three stages of the bidding process. Bidding activities were categorized and their extent estimated as deskwork (32%), calculations (19%), meetings (14%), documents (13%), off-days (11%), conversations (7%), correspondence (3%) and travel (1%). Risk allowances of 1-2% were priced in some bids and three tiers of risk apportionment in bids were identified. However, priced risks may sometimes be excluded from the final bidding price to enhance competitiveness. Thus, although risk apportionment affects a contractor’s pricing strategy, other complex, microeconomic factors also affect price. Instead of pricing in contingencies, risk was priced mostly through contractual rather than price mechanisms, to reflect commercial imperatives. The findings explain why some assumptions underpinning analytical models may not be sustainable in practice and why what actually happens in practice is important for those who seek to model the pricing of construction bids.

Commuting, CO2 and the location of offices

This paper investigates the extent to which office activity contributes to travel-related CO2 emission. Using ‘end-user’ figures[1], travel accounts for 32% of UK CO2 emission (Commission for Integrated Transport, 2007) and commuting and business travel accounts for a fifth of transport-related CO2 emissions, equating to 6.4% of total UK emissions (Building Research Establishment, 2000). Figures from the Department for Transport (2006) report that 70% of commuting trips were made by car, accounting for 73% of all commuting miles travelled. In assessing the environmental performance of an office building, the paper questions whether commuting and business travel-related CO2 emission is being properly assessed. For example, are office buildings in locations that are easily accessible by public transport being sufficiently rewarded? The de facto method for assessing the environmental performance of office buildings in the UK is the Building Research Establishment’s Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM). Using data for Bristol, this paper examines firstly whether BREEAM places sufficient weight on travel-related CO2 emission in comparison with building operation-related CO2 emission, and secondly whether the methodology for assigning credits for travel-related CO2 emission efficiency is capable of discerning intra-urban differences in location such as city centre and out-of-town. The results show that, despite CO2 emission per worker from building operation and travel being comparable, there is a substantial difference in the credit-weighting allocated to each. Under the current version of BREEAM for offices, only a maximum of 4% of the available credits can be awarded for ensuring the office location is environmentally sustainable. The results also show that all locations within the established city centre of Bristol will receive maximum BREEAM credits. Given the parameters of the test there is little to distinguish one city centre location from another and out of town only one office location receives any credits. It would appear from these results that the assessment method is not able to discern subtle differences in the sustainability of office locations

Utopia and education in the seventeenth century: Bacon’s 'Salomon’s House' and its influence

New Worlds Reflected provides a significant contribution both to the history of utopian literature and travel, and to the wider cultural and intellectual history of the time, assembling original essays from scholars interested in representations of the globe and new and ideal worlds in the period from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and in the imaginative reciprocal responsiveness of utopian and travel writing. Chapter 7 looks at the influence of Salomon’s House in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) on later seventeenth-century educational utopias.

The UK Department of National Heritage: a model for the development and integration of leisure policy in the new Europe?

Leisure is in the vanguard of a social and cultural revolution which is replacing the former East/West political bipolarity with a globalised economic system in which the new Europe has a central rôle. Within this revolution, leisure, including recreation, culture and tourism, is constructed as the epitome of successful capitalist development; the very legitimisation of the global transmogrification from a production to a consumption orientation. While acting as a direct encouragement to the political transformation in many eastern European states, it is uncertain how the issue of leisure policy is being handled, given its centrality to the new economic order. This paper therefore examines the experience of western Europe, considering in particular the degree to which the newly-created Department of National Heritage in the UK provides a potential model for leisure development and policy integration in the new Europe. Despite an official rhetoric of support and promotion of leisure activities, reflecting the growing economic significance of tourism and the positive relationship between leisure provision and regional economic development, the paper establishes that in the place of the traditional rôle of the state in promoting leisure interests, the introduction of the Department has signified a shift to the use of leisure to promote the Government's interests, particularly in regenerating citizen rights claims towards the market. While an institution such as the Department of National Heritage may have relevance to emerging states as a element in the maintenance of political hegemony, therefore, it is questionable how far it can be viewed as a promoter or protector of leisure as a signifier of a newly-won political, economic and cultural freedom throughout Europe.

The timing and societal synchronisation of energy demand

It is increasingly important to know about when energy is used in the home, at work and on the move. Issues of time and timing have not featured strongly in energy policy analysis and in modelling, much of which has focused on estimating and reducing total average annual demand per capita. If smarter ways of balancing supply and demand are to take hold, and if we are to make better use of decarbonised forms of supply, it is essential to understand and intervene in patterns of societal synchronisation. This calls for detailed knowledge of when, and on what occasions many people engage in the same activities at the same time, of how such patterns are changing, and of how might they be shaped. In addition, the impact of smart meters and controls partly depends on whether there is, in fact scope for shifting the timing of what people do, and for changing the rhythm of the day. Is the scheduling of daily life an arena that policy can influence, and if so how? The DEMAND Centre has been linking time use, energy consumption and travel diary data as a means of addressing these questions and in this working paper we present some of the issues and results arising from that exercise.