Civic Tourism in Northeast Minneapolis

(UPDATE 8/29: The walking tours are available for download here: http://www.newalkingtours.com/)

I'm excited to attend the launch party this weekend for the new neighborhood walking tours of Northeast Minneapolis. I wrote about the project here. The folks at ArtShare pulled together a diverse group of volunteers to comb the community for stories and present them to neighbors and visitors alike via walking tours.

It seems the artists who conceived this project already understood something that the tourism industry has only recently started mulling over. It's called Civic Tourism.

I stumbled across this description today for an upcoming conference in Colorado:

"Civic Tourism’s mission is to 'reframe' tourism's purpose from an economic goal to a tool that can help the public enhance what they love about their place. It provides a forum for citizens to decide if, how, and for what purpose the ingredients of place (cultural, built, natural) can be integrated to create a dynamic, distinctive, and prosperous community. Ideally, Civic Tourism involves all stakeholders to build strong partnerships..." (emphesis added)

In other words, place matters because it is what every member of a community has in common. Communities that embrace place will have stronger internal ties (call it "culture") while appealing to visitors seeking an authentic experience.

But isn't that obvious?

I think the hyper-development of places like Wisconsin Dells, Branson, Missouri or Pigeon Forge, Tennessee indicates otherwise. Places once visited for their unique natural features now sprout indoor water parks and T-shirt shops. These attractions are economically successful, but they do not enhance the place around them (indeed, usually quite the opposite).

The Civic Tourism conference organizers seem to be proposing a different way to measure the benefit a communiy receives from the appeal of its place.

(As a journalist, I can't help but compare this notion to civic journalism -- the movement to treat readers and the community as participants in journalism rather than just consumers or advertisers. I also wonder if its fate will be the same...a good idea that is nearly impossible to implement in the context of a successful business model.)

Northeast Minneapolis is an up-and-coming neighborhood that isn't drawing tourists yet, but it is getting visitors from the rest of the city. So let's see what happens when the community is proactive about embracing place. I bet business can learn quite a bit from the artists.

The ArtShare walking tour release event is Saturday 8/29 from 10 to noon. Details here.

More on civic tourism here: http://www.civictourism.org/

When placecasting becomes overkill

Right idea. Totally overbuilt. Watch...

The driving force behind placecasting (see my concept post) is that people are hungry for information about the world around them. Technology that knows where we are can help us get answers to those questions while we're in that world. BUT, one important guiding principal is that the technology should not actually obscure the real world.

Thus, the woman on a beautiful ocean overlook who chooses to look instead at a kiosk computer screen is kind of missing the point. Take away the giant kiosk and replace it with a 3G cell phone with the right app, and I bet she could have gotten the same information without encasing herself in a cocoon of overbuilt technology. I wrote about this a couple months ago.

That said, it's exciting that more and more people are working on this notion. In fact, my simple placecasting idea seems to be just one cornor of a larger concept called Augmented Reality. I'll be looking through more of Wired Magazine's coverage of this evolving notion to see where audio might fit in.

(h/t Wired Magazine via Steve Mullis)

More Mississippi: River walking tour in the Quad Cities

Cities up and down the Mississippi River are re-embracing their riverfronts for tourism and business. I just found a nice walking/biking tour of the river in the Quad Cities. (Quick, can you name all four...??)

The folks at RiverAction do a lot of education and programming along the river here and they've put together a cell phone tour that takes you on a loop from Davenport, Iowa to Rock Island, Illinois and back, starting at the famous Arsenal Island. (If you want to see Moline and Bettendorf, you'll have to head upstream on your own.) According to a rough Google Map I made, the full tour route is about 3 miles. A printable map of the route is available here.

But there's no need to do this tour in the order from start to finish. Each stop gives information about a couple of the sites nearby (the clocktower on the island, the lock & dam, the Rock Island Line railroad -- even a stop on Main Street), but it weaves no larger narrative from stop to stop.

I appreciate that you can spontaniously take the tour with your cell phone when you see the signs on-site, but that you can ALSO download MP3s of the tour stops before you go and listen on your iPod. As more and more organizations turn to cell phone tours, the smart ones are posting the audio on-line as well. It's strange that the MP3s in this case are still just telephone-quality audio, but the content is just voice reading a script, so fidelity isn't critical to the experience.

I listened to a few of the stops on this tour and was impressed with the breadth of information -- from history to architecture to the environment. Stop #1, for example, talks about the history of iconic clock tower on Arsenal Island, but also includes information about an eco-friendly parking lot nearby. The tour stops are heavy on superlatives (the first..., the biggest..., the most...) and statistics without always putting them in context. It also often fails to take advantage of the fact that it knows exactly where its listeners are standing. There isn't much "look at this...", "you'll notice that...," or "now turn around to see...". These kinds of devices are really engaging to users and are a unique advantage placecasting has over broadcasting.

I spend a fair amount of time in Iowa, and I look forward to getting to the Quad cities to enjoy this good tour on-site.

Link to the Quad Cities Riverway Audio tour

New audio tour at Ellis Island

One of the best audio tours I ever took was at Ellis Island. It was full of music, interpretation and oral histories. It made the mostly-empty rooms of this amazing site come alive.

I think it was narrated by Tom Brokaw, who could make a dictionary sound interesting...but I'm pretty sure the writing was solid, too.  I recall spending so much time listening to the audio "extras" included on the device that I nearly missed the boat back to NYC.

That was in 2000. I see now that they've just updated the tour. I wonder if it's as good as I remember it.

Shared via AddThis

Web project needs our help: take photos of your local Main Street!

(If I'm writing about placecasting, maybe this is placeumentary?)

Main Street is NOT the most popular street name in the U.S. (#1 is actually Second Street...go figure), but is IS right up there on the list. And how many times have we heard politicians and pundits refer to "Main Street America" and "Main Street Values"?

The creators of Mapping Main Street heard that, too, and they wanted to find out just what Main Street America looks like and sounds like.  Turns out there are over 10,000 answers to that questions...and these folks are going to visit each one.  At least, they'll visit them with our help.  MMS is asking for your stories, photos or videos about a Main Street near you.  Not sure if your town has one? There's a search box on the  Mapping Main Street Web site that will find the Main Streets nearest you.


What a great idea! I'm excited to see such a down-to-earth emphasis on flyover country. I hope this project gets attention from users and the media (maybe politicians, too??).

Now I wonder why the project isn't asking for audio submissions as well.  They have a good way of uploading photos and videos.  So why not audio?  We know they respect audio as a medium...the creators are radio producers AND there's a great companion series of radio stories that launched yesterday on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday.  The story is about Main Street in Chattanooga, TN, which -- at least in parts -- is a popular place to pick up drugs and prostitutes.  The story talks with the people who live and "work" on Main Street and trust me, these aren't the folks politicians are probably talking about.

I may go hunting for stories along the Main Street in Minneapolis, which is tucked away along the riverfront across from downtown...it is NOT a major street.

Fort Vancouver audio tour

Here's one you won't find on-line, even if you try.

Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, in Vancouver, Washington features a recreated 1860s fur trading post on the banks of the Columbia River.  They created a very good audio tour of the post buildings a few years ago -- before everyone had an iPod.  So you have to check out a little audio player as you enter the post.  The site's Web site has some podcasts created by its ambitious chief  ranger, but the audio tour isn't available for download.  

The full tour takes about an hour and it introduces us to the buildings on the fort site by telling the stories of the people who used them.  The fort commander's big white house is brought to life by telling the story of the officers' dinners he would host in the main dining room (and of the intimate lunches his wife hosted elsewhere in the house).  

Each stop on the tour is a couple minutes long, and some stops give you the option to hear more information about a particular subject by keying in a number on the device.  Otherwise, it tells you where to walk next and when next to hit the "play" button.

The narrator is excellent and the script is obviously written for the ear.  It uses place well, often beginning with a statement like "Notice the expensive china on the table..." to focus your attention on one detail and then it broadens the narrative to make a larger point (in this case, it used the china to explain why certain luxuries were important to the people, even this far out on the frontier).  The tour goes through the main buildings on the fort and talks a bit about modern-day archeology.  It uses music and sound effects to good effect without going too far overboard.

I especially like the point as I walked between two buildings where the tour guide asks, "How many logs do you think make up the fort wall?"  It acknowledged where I was and gave me a chance to look up and consider the scene in front of me in a way I wouldn't have otherwise.

When I visited, it was late on a weekday afternoon and there were very few visitors rangers around to interpret the site.  So the tour was a huge help in understanding the hidden meanings behind the sights I was seeing.

In many ways the dedicated player is better than an iPod because it pauses automatically after each track and has an easy interface for getting more information.  You don't want to spend too much of an audio tour explaining button-pushes and logistics.  This device was well-suited to its content...and vice versa.   Still, I wish it was available for download so people could come prepared...or listen to tour stops they missed after they leave.


There's more to this site than just the Hudson Bay Company fur trading fort, so plan on a few hours if you're visiting this neat park.