Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Plate 5.5:
Entrance to the cathedral
precinct, Canterbury, Kent. Crowding
may have substantial impacts not only
on the quality of the visitor experience
but also on the attraction itself.
These concerns should force cities seeking to develop an urban tourism economy to
reconsider the feasibility of pursuing a strategy to revitalise the city-region through
tourism-led regeneration. All too often both the private and public sectors have moved
headlong into economic regeneration strategies for urban areas, seeking a tourism
component as a likely back-up for property and commercial redevelopment (see e.g. Lutz
and Ryan 1997). The implications here are that tourism issues are not given the serious
treatment they deserve. Where the visitors' needs and spatial behaviour are poorly
understood and neglected in the decision-making process, it affects the planning,
development and eventual outcome of the urban tourism environment. The experience of
waterfront areas in large cities is such that research which reviews the ambitious schemes
to market tourism in London Docklands, to pull the centre of gravity and development in
London to the east from the central tourism district in the west, resulted in developers
underestimating the role of tourist behaviour (e.g. the inertia of tourists who would not
travel east from St Katherine's Dock to areas en route to Greenwich). The result was a
series of missed business opportunities and a range of business failures. Therefore, tourist
