According to the adviser to the director of the State Oceanographic Institute named after N. N. Zubov, a member of the Public Council of Roshydromet Vadim Petrov, one of the most interesting tourism products of modern times is industrial tourism.
“Traveling to industrial zones (both active and abandoned) today belongs to the category of alternative tourism products and is rapidly gaining popularity in recent years. There are more and more people who like to go down into a real coal mine, visit a metallurgical production, especially smelters, as well as historical industrial facilities of the last century. It is interesting that at the end of the last century, when access to such territories was relatively free, there were practically no people who wanted to take a walk, for example, to a cobalt plant. Except that sometimes, as part of the curriculum, schoolchildren were taken to plants and factories in different regions for a common understanding.
In the Arctic zone, many tourists now dream of getting to factories, even inactive ones (in the Murmansk region, Taimyr and many other Arctic regions), and, most importantly, local residents themselves want to get there. After all, many do not even imagine how the largest non-ferrous metallurgy plants or coal mines work. It is this new and unexpected social challenge that the program, on the concept of which we are working on, “Environmentally Responsible Industrial Tourism”, is trying to answer.
At present, unique conditions have developed in Russia for the development of new tourism concepts that meet the current tasks of the country's development, interaction between government, business and citizens: on the one hand, the state policy in the field of environmental development of Russia with a wide technological modernization of enterprises and the phased introduction of the best available technologies to minimize impact on the environment, and on the other hand, the program to promote the direction of "import substitution" in tourism for the development of territories (simultaneously taking into account the consequences of the COVID pandemic, the income of the population and the restrictions on foreign travel), but also the use of tourism as an effective means of public diplomacy at the interregional and international level. Industrial, which has a task to explore various areas, buildings and engineering structures for industrial or special purposes, related to objects of industrial culture, has gained great popularity in recent decades.
“The high significance of industrial heritage for world culture was recognized by UNESCO, which proclaimed 2006 the Year of Industrial Heritage. The concept of combining the principles of environmental responsibility and industrial tourism is certainly new and relevant,” he concluded.
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