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applied to cities. Opportunity was viewed from the perspective of how acces-
sible the core elements of urban attraction spaces were to visitors, addressing
influencing factors that included the spatial arrangement of interesting
places. Jansen-Verbeke and Lievois (1999) saw networks and urban trails as
a means to connect the key cultural elements within urban areas (e.g. heri-
tage buildings, museums) to secondary elements that added value to the
tourist experience (e.g. places to eat and shop). This latter variable creates a
direct link between UTOS as a framework for urban managers and the role
that trails and routes play in achieving both accessibility and valuable tourist
experiences. They applied their thinking to the historic city of Leuven,
Belgium, and found that UTOS had three relevant dimensions as a develop-
ment model: clustering (spatial concentration of complementary tourist
products), synergy (between tourism and other urban functions: shops and
food outlets) and themed trails (that offered intervening opportunities that
connect key tourism products with other ancillary services). Disappointing
is the lack of adoption of this systems thinking by other urban tourism
scholars, and the UTOS remains, like the adaptations of ROS, another
exploratory tool and possible marketing instrument.
Imposing limits
This section examines visitor frameworks and procedures that focus on
limits of use, either in terms of carrying capacities or limits of acceptable
change. In most cases one follows the other, as the issue of carrying capacity
was likely to be found and instituted by resource managers because a process
to identify acceptable levels of use was required.
Determining carrying capacities
Research on this notion is now 40 years old (Wager, 1964, is the seminal
paper). The idea of being concerned over numbers in an area is not new; it
just became an issue when levels of use started to pose a threat to the quality
of both the resource and the activity taking place. Early literature from the
1960s and 1970s came from the fields of range management, wildlife research
and eventually recreation. It only started to be explored in depth by tourism
scholars in the 1980s (e.g. Mathieson & Wall, 1982; O'Reilly, 1986).
Tourism and recreation planners have always been concerned about car-
rying capacities, or thresholds that when exceeded will result in negative
repercussions. While there are no magical formulas for determining carrying
capacities, many planning and environmental management practitioners
have undertaken efforts to devise ways of determining these thresholds
(Gunn & Var, 2002). Capacities vary from ecosystem to ecosystem and by
type of activity, but many route managers find them useful in understanding
limits of acceptable change and managing visitor crowding (Beeton, 2006;
Dolesh, 2004b). Carrying capacities have multiple uses, including social and
ecological dimensions. They can be useful for determining what stabilization
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