Mass tourism is promoted for destinations of great cultural, historical and heritage importance, some of them classified as World Heritage sites by UNESCO. It is a major engine of economic development, but also creates a burden among local inhabitants. BODAH (Big and Open Data for Atlantic Heritage) aims to develop new sustainable tools, solutions and processes for managing tourism in Atlantic cultural heritage, based on data analysis and intelligent technologies. Between 2019 and 2022, I coordinated scientific research and dissemination for the BODAH project at the University of Pau.
BODAH aims at fostering cooperation to improve the management of two kind of cultural destinations that can benefit and be affected by tourism and other types of pressure: i. old-historical cities centres and ii. sites of particular cultural or heritage interest. The project takes advantage of technology and innovation in management tools (e.g. in relation to Smart Cities) through the collection and generation of complementary data (e.g. with existing sensors). One of the key objectives is to develop new solutions to address social and public needs, contributing to create new alternative offers adapted to the interests of visitors to better distribute their crowd flows, as well as redistribute impacts (both environmental and economic ones) on heritage monuments, sites, and cities.
Composed of ten partners from European universities, research institutes, non-profit organizations, municipalities, and natural parks, the project is co-financed by the European Union (through the European Regional Development Fund’s Interreg Atlantic Area Program). Its consortium has established its own system of indicators to determine which data should be measured and used in the cities of Pau (France), Cork (Ireland), Santiago de Compostela and San Sebastián (Spain). In addition, the University of Pau research team also undertook several case-study analyses of Angers, Bruges, Santander, and the Douro Valley, which are available in this report.
In the end, the project will help to successfully strengthen the sustainable development of tourism flows and redistribution of socio-economic impacts through the use of data and smart technologies in other cities along the European Atlantic and beyond.
