Tourism and Urban Planning in European Cities

Noam Shoval

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367582401
• eBook ISBN: 9780429647413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Industrie de l'hôtellerie, du voyage et du tourisme

Ambitious projects to modernize European capital cities emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. The need for urban planning and urban expansion in European cities resulted from industrialization, modernization and economic development that created huge waves of immigration from rural areas into cities. These social and economic changes also laid the infrastructure for the mass tourism that would follow later.

This comprehensive collection investigates the interrelationship between urban planning and tourism consumption in European cities, and its evolvement and transition over time. The authors focus on different cases of urban planning and tourism consumption in a range of European cities – Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague, Budapest and Skopje. In addition to being political and cultural capitals, these cities are also places where ordinary people live and work. This book addresses questions and concerns regarding the social and economic carrying capacity of these capital cities due to the growing intensity and volume of tourism.

This book will be of interest to students, researchers and professionals in the fields of urban planning and tourism geography. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Tourism Geographies.

1 Urban planning and tourism in European cities

Noam Shoval

ABSTRACT

This special issue bridges the existing gap in the tourism and urban literature regarding planning and tourism in European cities and investigates the interrelationship between urban planning and tourism and its evolvement and transition over time. It includes nine articles that focus on different cases of urban planning and tourism in European cities. All the cities presented in this special issue function as capital cities, therefore they were designed and planned to represent the nation to itself and to the world for incoming tourists. As a result, all those cities are endowed with monumental city planning and architecture, they have abundance of cultural institutions and monuments thus raising questions about the choice and type of the representation of heritage arise. In addition of being capitals, those cities are also places where ordinary people live and with the growing intensity and volume of tourism, questions of social and economic carrying capacity arises; some of the articles reflect on those growing concerns. The cities chosen to this special issue are: Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague, Budapest, Skopje (and several additional cities in Macedonia). Those cities represent a balanced geographic distribution of cities in the European continent from East to West and North to South.

摘要

这期特刊弥补了旅游和城市文献中关于欧洲城市规划和旅游方面 存在的空白, 并探讨了城市规划与旅游的相互关系及其演变与变 迁。它包括9篇文章, 重点讨论欧洲的城市规划和旅游方面的不同 案例。在本特刊展示的所有案例城市都是首都, 因此它们被设计 和规划来代表国家和世界来吸引外来的游客。因此, 所有这些城 市都具有不朽的城市规划和建筑, 它们拥有丰富的文化机构和古 迹, 从而引发了遗产展示选择和类型方面的质疑。这些城市不仅 是首都, 也是普通人居住的地方。随着旅游的强度和数量的增加, 社会和经济承载能力的问题也随之产生, 一些文章反映了人们日 益关注这些问题。本特刊选择的城市有:柏林、巴黎、维也纳、巴 塞罗那、里斯本、布拉格、布达佩斯、斯科普里(以及马其顿的另 外几个城市)。这些城市代表了欧洲大陆上从东到西、从北到南的 各个城市均衡的地理分布。

Ambitious projects to modernize European capitals emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century (Hall, 1997). In Paris, the process was initiated in 1853 by Emperor Napoleon III under the supervision of Baron Haussmann. In Vienna, the Ringstraße project started in 1857 by Emperor Franz Joseph. In Barcelona, the urban plan of Ildefons Cerda started in 1869. Additional large scale schemes in European cities took place during the following decades all over the continent (Driver & Gilbert, 1999). The need for urban planning and urban expansion in European cities resulted from industrialization, modernization, and economic development that created huge waves of immigration from the rural areas into cities (Hall, 1998). However, these social and economic changes laid also the infrastructure for mass tourism that will follow later. For example, the railway systems that were created rapidly in the mid-nineteenth century allowed masses of people to attend events such as the various World Expositions that took place in European capitals from the mid-nineteenth century onwards (Towner, 1996).

The mass tourism phenomena that emerged in the mid-twentieth century made tourism a growing feature in European cities from various aspects. Geographer and city planner Sir Peter Hall claimed almost 50 years ago in regards to rising importance of tourism in the economies and urban planning of European cities that the ‘age of mass tourism is the biggest single factor for change in the great capitals of Europe, and in many smaller historical cities too, in the last 30 years of this century’ (Hall, 1970, p. 445). Indeed, the increasing touristflows have served to irrevocably alter many contemporary cities. Numerous airports, for instance, have been transformed from mere landing strips with small terminals into massive complexes that include shopping malls, hi-tech industrial parks, and hotels (Gottdiener, 2000). Huge mega-resorts have begun to emerge, such as the Costa del Sol in Spain (Mullins, 1991). Capital cities and global financial centers have registered enormous growth, notably in business-oriented travel (Law, 1996). Similarly, historical cities have become magnets for tourism to such an extent that their physical and social carrying capacities are actually placed in jeopardy (Ashworth & Tunbridge, 2000; Canestrelli & Costa, 1991; Page & Hall, 2003; Russo, 2001; van der Borg, Costa, & Gotti, 1996). These issues have become factors in the broader context of visitor mobility in urban areas.

It is somewhat ironic that urban tourism is one of the most important forms of tourism in terms of volume and economic impact, but among its least researched phenomena has various researchers have commented repeatedly (Ashworth & Page, 2011; Selby, 2012). Indeed, the call for more and better research is a common theme of much of the literature written over the years. Ashworth’s work is seen by many as the beginning of research into urban tourism (1989). His central thesis was that urban centers are both the origins of most tourists and the destinations for many, but that most research tended to focus on tourism’s impact on non-urban areas. While the volume of the literature is certainly growing (see, for example the following books: Bellini & Pasquinelli, 2016; Cohen-Hattab & Shoval, 2015; Hoffman, Judd, & Fainstein, 2003; Judd, 2003; Judd & Fainstein, 1999; Law, 1993; Maitland & Newman, 2009; Page, 1995; Page & Hall, 2003; Spirou, 2011), in his follow-up reflective piece, Ashworth (2003) argued that there was still insufficient research into various aspects of the urban tourism phenomenon. Pearce (2001) also noted a general increase in interest in this issue, with the phrase ‘urban tourism’ entering the tourism lexicon. Yet he, too, felt that research is still in its early stages, and that ‘there is still a considerable way to go in terms of developing a coherent corpus of work, pursuing common goals and carrying out comparable studies’ (Pearce, 2001, p. 928). Several years ago, Ashworth and Page, discussing the paradoxes in urban tourism research, observed that ‘it is curious that very little attention has been given to the questions about how tourists actually use cities’ (Ashworth & Page, 2011, p. 7) and this is especially true regarding the interrelations between urban planning and tourism consumption.

Tourism in urban areas is a spatially selective activity with tourist nodes or precincts clustered unevenly throughout acity (Pearce, 2001). The number of tourist nodes depends on both the size and geomorphology of a destination. Tourist nodes can be focused around icon attractions, shopping, and business precincts or anchored by hotels (Pearce, 1998). But even though tourism may be perceived as a dominant facet of such zones, in reality it may not be the primary activity and tourists may not be the central user group (Ashworth & Page, 2011). Beyond this generic knowledge, though, relatively little research has been conducted examining the spatial structure of tourism in cities at a neighborhood level (Pearce, 1999), there are some exceptions such as Maitland’s (2008) work in London and Ioannides, Leventis and Petridou’s (2016) work in Athens. Research on large cities is rare and the research that does exist does not analyze the development and planning over long periods of time.

Today, the appeal of many European cities lies to a large extent in their past; in the case of Paris, the boulevards, the palaces and the remnants of World Fairs, such as the Eiffel tower are the main attractions to tourists. In Vienna, the palaces, churches, museums, cultural institutions, and the urban environment that are nestled along the Ringstraße are responsible to the touristic appeal of the city. On the other hand, a lack of urban planning also characterizing many historic cities create a perfect atmosphere for tourism consumption and gaze, a good example for that could be seen in the old city of Barcelona. This special issue wishes to bridge the existing gap in the tourism and urban literature regarding planning and tourism in European cities and investigate the interrelationship between urban planning and tourism consumption and its evolvement and transition over time.

The idea for this special issue was conceived as a result of the international conference on ‘Urban Planning and Tourism Consumption’ that took place in November 2016 in Jerusalem to commemorate 160 years for the beginning of the planning of the Ringstrasse in Vienna (1857–2017). The conference was organized by the Center for Austrian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.¹ This special issue includes nine articles that focus on different cases of urban planning and tourism consumption in European cities. All the cities presented in this special issue are political and cultural capitals and they are usually also the most significant cities in those respective countries in terms of tourism volumes. The fact that all those cities function as capital cities means that along the years, they were designed and planned to represent the nation to itself and to the world for incoming tourists whether they are diplomats on official missions or tourists on a sightseeing tour. As a result, all those cities are endowed with monumental city planning and architecture, they have abundance of cultural institutions and monuments. As a result, questions about the choice and type of the representation of heritage arise. In addition of being capitals, those cities are also places where ordinary people live, and with the growing intensity and volume of tourism, questions of social and economic carrying capacity arise and some of the articles reflect on those growing concerns. The cities chosen to this special issue are: Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague, Budapest, Skopje (and several additional cities in Macedonia). Those cities represent a balanced geographic distribution of cities in the European continent from East to West and North to South.

Two articles are devoted to Barcelona that function as de facto political capital of Catalonia and certainly in symbolic and cultural terms. The first one by Nofre et al. describes the process in which the neighborhood of Barceloneta was transformed into a leisure-oriented and tourism-oriented quarter, while current ‘local’ policies and municipal regulations seem to be clearly insufficient to tackle and address negative impacts derived from the recent rapid expansion of informal tourism accommodation sectors like Airbnb. The second article by Dimitrovski and Crespi-Vallbona investigates the attributes that affect tourist satisfaction in relation to visits of tourists to another overcrowded tourist attraction in Barcelona: the La Boqueria food market in Barcelona. They identified three factors as importance for considering a repeat visitation: physical environment; location and accessibility and price. The results reveal that physical environment is an important tourist satisfaction predictor, while price and location and accessibility influence revisit behavior.

Novy, using Germany’s capital Berlin as a case study, makes the argument that it is imperative to go beyond and rethink traditional understandings of tourism and adopt different ways of approaching and understanding what is perceived as tourism-induced urban and neighborhood change. He makes two main arguments, the first is that defining and delineating tourism in urban environments, while always difficult, has become even more so of late due to a complex set of developments impacting cities, tourism and contemporary societies at large; and second that processes and phenomena currently discussed under the rubric of ‘touristification’ can by no means be attributed exclusively to tourism.

Using various methods such as GPS tracking, Freytag and Bauder identify intensive touristifaction processes in Paris, particularly at the margins of the existing tourist hot spots. They discuss the role of Airbnb contributing to the emerging touristification of widely gentrified residential neighborhoods. Considering tourism growth and urban development as mutually constitutive processes, they conclude with an outlook on potential future transformations in Paris.

Kádár compared Prague's hotel development patterns to the ones of Budapest and Vienna which are similar tourist-historic destinations. He revealed that in the case of Prague there are more extreme consequences of both the era of centralized planning procedures, and of the era of uncontrolled liberalization multiplied by the effects of in-kind restitution.

Monika de Frantz describes the political process related to the creation of the Museumsquartier in Vienna in 2002 when the city becomes the ‘Eur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Urban planning and tourism in European cities
• 2 Tourism, nightlife and planning: challenges and opportunities for community liveability in La Barceloneta
• 3 Urban food markets in the context of a tourist attraction - La Boqueria market in Barcelona, Spain
• 4 'Destination' Berlin revisited. From (new) tourism towards a pentagon of mobility and place consumption
• 5 Bottom-up touristification and urban transformations in Paris
• 6 Hotel development through centralized to liberalized planning procedures: Prague lost in transition
• 7 Tourism marketing and urban politics: cultural planning in a European capital
• 8 Hotel and hostel location in Lisbon: looking for their determinants
• 9 Non-planning and tourism consumption in Budapest's inner city
• 10 Preserving cultural assets of others: Jewish heritage sites in Macedonian cities
• Index