Opportunities
COLIN believes that creative tourism offers several opportunities for the cultural and creative field of Noord-Brabant, especially in the light of the ECoC bid.
Creative tourism can help in creating stories, routes and programmes that link the urban and rural areas.
Via creative tourism programmes, inhabitants and visitors of BrabantStad can meet, interact and experience the area. It provides a platform for (among others) creative businesses to show themselves, to collaborate, and to generate business.
By creative tourism programmes or using creative tourism methods (cultural) infrastructure can be strengthened: different audiences can be reached, new market opportunities can be explored, and entrepreneurship is stimulated.
Cities can use creative tourism as an instrument for branding the area, the city, or the entire province (as long as been build upon the strengths or DNA of that specific place).
Most importantly, it shows persons to look differently, to experience the environment in another way.
Therefore, it leads to connections: between people, sectors, disciplines and areas.
COLIN: experiments with creative tourism
The above-mentioned opportunities led to a variety of actions and experiments.
COLIN started with practically-oriented research into the opportunities creative tourism offers Breda.
This research included several experiments, among which the design of two creative tourism routes in an upcoming neighbourhood in Breda during the Graphic Design Festival Breda.
It also led to an article in a trend report (see De Wijs and Dings, 2010) and two think tanks. Furthermore, COLIN took creative tourism from the city to the countryside by supervising a research group of eight students who developed an inspiration magazine containing several creative tourism routes through Noord-Brabant on the basis of Brabant icons such as carnival, fairytales, burgundian life and famous Brabant people.
To illustrate COLIN’s method of working the two creative tourism routes and the think tanks are further explained.