Encouraging Willingness to Contribute, City Fortifications and their Conservation in the Mediterranean

Abstract

City fortifications are a defining feature of many cities and their communities in the Mediterranean. They clearly delineate boundaries, provide circulations paths and encourage visitation. However, they are expensive to conserve and maintain. A visitor or user fee is one available option that can simultaneously generate revenue for conservation while restricting access to vulnerable areas. Willingness to Pay is a term reflecting of the maximum amount that a visitor thinks an entry fee is worth. When combined with an Optimal Pricing Policy and Price Discrimination to segment visitors into those willing to pay more, profits can be maximized. Obtaining the optimal price and thus maximum profit is especially important for extensive, expensive and difficult to conserve cultural heritage sites such as city wall fortifications. Wall fortifications cannot usually be adapted to other self-sustainable financial (or even semi-sustainable) uses beyond visitation; thus funding options to offset costs for maintenance, conservation and management are limited. However, this is a sensitive subject given the cultural, scientific and educational values of such places. Fortifications belong to the public and should be easily available for their enjoyment, recreation and educational understanding of history. Given this contradiction it is extremely difficult to achieve a balance between seeking maximum profit while providing access. Therefore this paper explores an alternative ? encouraging a Willingness to Contribute. Visitors are often willing to contribute or pay more especially if they know a percentage of their fee funds upkeep. The paper describes research into access prices and strategies (or lack thereof) to extract willing contributions at fortified cities throughout the Mediterranean including Famagusta, Rhodes, Dubrovnik, Valletta, Ávila, Jerusalem, Pamplona, Carcassonne, Elvas, Lucca and Acre. The research includes a survey of access prices and policies, intrinsic and extrinsic opportunities to contribute, price discrimination and seeks to establish a correlation between contributions and level of conservation. Preliminary conclusion include that there is generally very low or no access prices, non-existent contribution opportunities and little information regarding conservation. The final objective of this research is to assist decision makers at fortified cities to establish policies in order to improve financing for long term conservation.