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Whether this project will be successful or not in imple-
mentation will depend on many things, not least of this is the
institutional arrangements chosen to implement it. But the
project has already yielded an enormous amount of sophisti-
cated analysis that should be a benchmark for future projects of
this kind.
Briefly stated, the project will involve an improvement in
the infrastructure of the old medina, including improved access
for some parts of the area as well as an emergency road net-
work (tight at 1.7 meters, but still passable with special vehic-
les), assistance to owners and residents to upgrade the dilapida-
ted housing stock, and incentives for the commercial activities,
as well as enhanced tourist visits. The project is conceived as a
public-private partnership and designed in a participatory
fashion with the FES-ADER playing an important role in
grounding the operation in the community. External consultants
from the Harvard University Unit of Housing have focused as
much on innovative capacity building as on rigorous analysis.
The benefits of the project include improved infra-
structure, especially the emergency access network, improved
living conditions, including incentives for upgrading substan-
tial parts of the residential housing stock, restoration of impor-
tant parts of a jewel of the world urban heritage, rejuvenation
of the commercial activities in the old medina and increased
tourism revenues.
The rate of return for the public investment appears to be
quite robust against downside scenarios of cost overruns of the
order of 10-20% remaining consistently over 10% after the
eighth year.
At this point, I want to caution against a tendency to limit
the benefit stream to the increased revenues for tourism. Even
if it proves to be more than enough to justify the investment in
economic terms, it is an inadequate framework to measure the
benefits of heritage.
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A benefit stream that focuses exclusively on tourist
revenue not only misses the intrinsic value of the heritage, it
could lead to three erroneous conclusions that are imbedded in
the logic of such an analysis:
That those areas of the cultural heritage where you could
not generate a sufficiently large tourist stream are not worth
investing in. This is a denial of the intrinsic worth of the
cultural heritage, both for the people there and for the enrich-
ment that it brings to the world at large by its very existence.
After all, many of us will not visit any of the sites on the world
heritage list, but we would feel impoverished to know of the
loss of such sites, and feel enriched by their continued
existence, even if we never visit them.
That maximization of the number of tourists visiting the
place and the amount that they spend would be desirable, since
it increases the benefit stream. In fact, in many cases, such a
development would destroy the charm of the place and dena-
ture the activities that are endogenous to the cultural setting.
That if another and mutually exclusive investment -say a
casino on the beach- resulted in increased tourist dollars for the
country, we should leave the old city without restoration and
build the casino.
Clearly, all these conclusions are neither justified nor
defensible. We must look for the intrinsic value of the cultural
heritage above and beyond what it is likely to generate in terms
of tourist dollars.
In the case of Fez, a special study was undertaken to try
to capture the added value of the historic heritage. Three
different methods were used, in addition to the conventional
estimation of added tourist revenues through the result of
increased stays or increased spending per tourist. The first
sample was of tourists who had visited Fez, and an estimate of
how much they would be willing to invest to upgrade the old
town yielded the figure of some $11 million dollars. The
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second samples involved tourists in Morroco who had not
visited Fez, and the estimate from that yielded some $33
million (because the total numbers are larger, even if the per
person willingness to pay was lower). This could be called an
“option” value for the heritage of Fez, since the interviewees
could presumably visit there someday. The last sample
involved a Delphi approach with some Europeans who had
never visited Morroco and who were not necessarily likely to
in the near future. Their estimates if generalized to other Euro-
pean households yield a non-use value for the existence of the
heritage in Fez at over $300 million. The purpose of such num-
bers is not that they would be translated immediately into some
added revenue for the maintenance and restoration of the Fez
heritage, but rather that there is a large intrinsic value that goes
beyond what is actually measured by or measurable by actual
tourist revenues.
The estimation of such “existence” values is not a sense-
less academic exercise. It is an effort to grapple with and ulti-
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