The Tourist-Historic City

The original publication of The Tourist-Historic City in 1990 reflected the growing importance of heritage to cities, and cities to the creation and marketing of heritage products, not least within tourism. In response to the continuing rapid growth of interest in this field, the concepts and models it introduced have subsequently been applied by urban planners and tourism managers in many different contexts throughout the world. This extensively rewritten and restructured account of the tourist-historic city takes into consideration the importance of these applications in reformulating and modifying theoretical concepts, developing practical methods of analysis and policy formulation, as well as extending the geographical scope worldwide. Changes in the last decade include not only the growing importance of heritage and associated heritage industries serving many social, political and economic users, but also the expanding role of cultural products within tourism. In addition, the opening up of central and eastern Europe and the export of heritage ideas from western cities to a wider world have emphasised the tension between a globalisation and a localisation of heritage and its expression in the tourist-historic city. In addition to detailed reworking of conceptual and case material, this book reviews theoretical developments triggered by or otherwise related to the original, extends the arguments into the post-Communist world, and more generally develops them with respect to countries most affected by the 1990s political transformations. The result is a review of the state of urban heritage tourism at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the light of the extraordinary developments during the preceding decade, and of its prospects for the years to come.