Planning and Developing Trails and Routes - Tourism and Trails: Cultural, Ecological and Management Issues - page 211

Substitution
A final design consideration is the deliberate strategy of developing a trail
to deflect visitor pressure from more popular areas and landscapes. This is
extremely hard to achieve in the context of nature trails as the setting itself
is often a major raison d'être as to why users are on a particular path, track
or trail, and denying them the vistas they can enjoy is not an option; instead
development strategies such as trail hardening, already discussed, are the
preferred option of trail designers. Walkers interested in one of the Great
Walks in New Zealand (previously discussed in an earlier chapter) are
unlikely to choose a less similar trail unless they adopt that action as a delib-
erate coping response to over-use and crowding (Kearsley & Coughlan, 1999).
It is perhaps a design strategy that is easier to deploy on routes within an
urban landscape. Of course, the authors are cognizant that substituting one
location or trail for another is equally a management action, and not solely
a design aspect. In this chapter, we look at substitution as part of deliberate
design for some urban walking routes within tourist-historic cities to spread
the attraction space away from popular key features and sites, as the follow-
ing case study about Budapest demonstrates.
Case Study: The Cultural Avenue Project, Budapest
Routes are an important feature within tourist-historic cities (Ashworth
& Tunbridge, 2000), defined as a particular area within a city where
architectural forms and morphological patterns together with their arti-
facts and edifices have been consciously used to create a place-bound
heritage product. In modeling the evolution of the tourist-historic city,
Ashworth and Tunbridge (2000) argued that over time there would be a
high degree of connectedness between what they saw as the 'historic
city' and the 'tourist city', where most of the popular tourism spaces and
attractions would be clustered within the historic core. The end phase of
their model is the development of a newer periphery that also features
heritage attractions and spaces. The extent to which this has taken place
has varied considerably. In the case of Prague, the majority of heritage
has remained in the city core; an exception is the walking tour to the
castle outside the city center and on the other side of the river, whereas
Rome has many heritage features and attractions throughout the city
that are commonly experienced by visitors on sightseeing tours that
follow a set itinerary and route where they enter or exit from the route
using a hop-on and hop-off system.
Urban walking/touring routes, as previously noted, are popular
ways to link individual heritage and cultural point attractions and
( Continued )