Soustainable development of the city of Alexandria

This projects consists in the research on different topics about the city of Alexandria to open it to the tourism in a soustanaible way and taking the experiences of other cities in the region like Rabat and the Mediterranean cities of Barcelona and Napls, with long tradition in tourism.

Tourism is not anymore a simple sector of the economic activity. At the beginning of the XXI Century, tourism is a whole economic, social and cultural activity of a lot of societies. The tourist gaze (Urry, 1990), as alterity, is one of the most important ways to select the significant features of the local and a strong help to recuperate its identity. This social process is a dialectical one, with many contradictions and conflicts. Furthermore, the economic profits of tourist activities with no control tends to destroy even the touristic ressources, and so the identity of the locals, and the atractivity for the foreigners.

Alexandria is a very interesting city in this Globalisation era, with a privilegied Mediterranean location, with a rich and diviersified historical and cultural heritage and a relatively discriminated place from the main international tourist flows.

Naples and Barcelona could afford many examples of success and failure connected to the tourist's attraction. Concerning to the Mediterranean country of Morocco, Rabat has a relatively similar location than Alexandria, but in an Atlantic environment. Working together all these four experiences coul develop unexpected sinergies.

The main objective will be to analyse the different values and conceptions around the main significant places, atmospheres and monuments, among alexandrians, egiptians and foreginers. A nice metaphor of this could be the comparison of the literary work of Ibrahim Abdel Meguid and Lawrence Durrel on the city during the Second World War.

The method of work would be the organisation of a first seminar in Alexandria, with the participants of the four teams, in order to adopt a common way to work, both conceptually and methodologically, with a first field work. The analysis of the present touristic guides and leaflets at international level will be absolutely necessary. The product of this first seminar would be the division of work and tasks among the participants, each one performing a separated paper over the same things. Finally, all the participants would meet again in Alexandria to present and debate their conclusions and to open the main conclusions to the public, through some touristic itineraries in the city, targeted to school students (as a guide to make them more aware of their own history), and for the local authorities and firms (in order to plan new investments). Between these two seminars it coul be very interesting and necessary the visit of the local coordinator (Daniel Marquez) to the three other participant teams in order to unify criteria and times.

The main outpouts of the general research work would be the organisation of a public conference about the subject (national or international) and the edition of a book in English and in the three (four?) languages of the participants in order to publish the content of the research and to contribute to the diffusion of the international image of the City.

Daniel Marquez Piris
Dr. Carles Carreras i Verdaguer (University of Barcelona)