ASHWORTH, G.J.; TUNBRIDGE J.E.

Cap.4: Modelling the tourist-historic city En The toruist historic city. Belhaven Press, London 1990.

The nature and use of a model

The attempts to conceptualise and regionalise the historic and tourist cities in the preceding chapters resulted in sets of intra-urban structure models that were necessarily based on an initial isolation of these functions from each other and from other functional areas of the city. Although the two concepts were distinct in their origins and development, it nevertheless became increasingly clear in the subsequent analysis that the historic city is at least in part being defined by tourist demand and that the tourist city is in part delimitable in terms of the location of historic attractions. Each was developed initially quite independently by different organisations for quite different motives, yet it was argued above that the historic city ultimately depends for its definition and justification upon users while similarly the artefacts of the past are marketable as tourism resources. Thus we arrive by the logic of evolution rather than the deliberate intent of policy-makers at the composite tourist-historic city. This concept has much in common with other attempts to delimit similar areas especially in relation to tourist and recreational uses of the city, such as the idea of the Recreational Business District (Stansfield and Rickert, 1970) or Central Tourist District (Burtenshaw et al., 1981, p.172). Both of these however are narrower, being based upon recreational commercial services and tourism facilities respectively.

The tourist-historic city presents few new difficulties of conceptualisation or regionalisation, being merely the conjunction of the two previous models, so that overlap and interaction between the two constituent elements contribute towards a new synthesis. Thus the tourist-historic city can be conceived and modelled in the same way and with the same constraints as were earlier applied separately to the historic and tourist cities.

The bringing together of the two models into the composite tourist-historic city risks introducing a certain amount of circularity into the discussion as each part of the combined concept is, to an extent, dependent for its definition upon the other. The conjunction does not, however, necessarily imply an automatic compatibility and it is the interplay, whether co-operative or conflicting, between the two elements revealed by the synthesis that is in itself the justification for producing the composite model. The concept and model of the tourist-historic city both poses, and provides the framework for answers to, a number of important questions that are central to the management of such cities and form a leitmotiv in the subsequent chapters of this book.

From the viewpoint of the historic city two such questions are posed. Is tourism a realistic use of the conserved city? Realistic in this context might be assessed in terms of land or building occupancy, economic return or social and cultural benefits. Related to this is the question, does the implicit selectivity of tourism at best limit the usefulness of tourism and at worst distort the wider aims of urban conservation? In planning terms the question is frequently resolved into whether a single set of conserved resources can serve different groups of users equally effectively, or whether the commitment to tourism excludes, or restricts, opportunities for other, users. 'The list of monuments of tourist interest may be quite different from the list of archaeological interest' (Lawson and Baud-Bovy, 1977). To this could be added many other such 'interests' and the broader implications of selling the city as different products to distinctly different consumer groups.

From the viewpoint of the tourist city there are similar intrinsic potential conflicts. First and fundamentally, many of these inevitably derive from the 'commodification' of the past, that is its treatment as a commercially exploitable product (see Ashworth and Voogd, 1989), in a volatile fashion-conscious and highly competitive market. Both conservation planning and heritage marketing are selective, but in each case the selection is based on different criteria and goals. Thus the delimitation and presentation of the urban past for tourism may lead to conflicts both within tourism, which is by no means a homogeneous market, and with other users of the historic city.

Secondly, the process of urban conservation, described above, was in practice largely a matter of the imposition of constraints upon the activities of land and building owners and users. The historic city was created by the imposition of controls on free markets in the community interest. The tourism industry requires many facilities which are usually provided by commercial firms in a competitive context. The question in simple terms is, to what extent is the successful use of the conserved city for this commercial activity dependent upon breaching the very protective regulations that created it?

Thirdly, there is a difference in the emphasis upon spatial scales that threatens the compatibility of the historic and tourist cities. The former is dominantly local in motivation and management, while the latter is inevitably related to demands from beyond the individual city. The tourist city is intrinsically part of a wider network of tourism places, whether these are defined in terms of visitor behaviour or facility supply, in a way that the historic city is not.

Three constraints, which also applied to the previous models, need reiteration. First, the composite tourist-historic city has two distinctly different meanings: it can be used as a description of a dominant set of functions, planning designations or the perceived character of the entire city, or as a description of that part of the city within which such characteristics are concentrated. The confusion arising from such a duality of meaning is unavoidable as both senses are freely used by customers, suppliers and urban managers. A city can simultaneously be regarded as tourist-historic, which has implications for the way it is perceived as a whole, and also include specified areas which are designated tourist-historic to distinguish them from others which are not. This seeming perversity is no different from the double meanings contained in many other functional designations such as 'industrial city', 'administrative city' or 'market town'. Secondly, the intra-urban functional models are based upon regionalisations of concentrations of particular uses and therefore lack sharp boundary demarcations. Thirdly, the recognition of such functional regions does not imply monopoly or even dominance: the uses and activities considered here can, and generally do, coexist in space with other related and non-related activities, the implications of which are discussed in Chapter 5.

Establishing the model

The tourist-historic city model, being derived from a conjunction of concepts, is necessarily constructed by superimposing the spatial patterns of the historic and tourist cities within the wider context of other urban functions. The resulting model is shown in Figure 4.1 in which phase III represents the fully developed ideal situation where the historic city, the tourist city and the central commercial district all partially overlap. This pattern is a result of the shift of some central area commercial functions out of the conserved original city and the spread of the tourist city over both a selected part of the historic city and a portion of the modern commercial area. Both of these processes were discussed earlier. Logically the tourist-historic city can be defined as the area of overlap between the historic and tourist cities, this being the part of the city where historical artefacts and associations are being actively used for tourism, whether as primary attractions, secondary supporting services or merely as a background environment for the enjoyment of visitors engaged in non-historic activities.

Although such an area of overlap represents the currently exploited tourist-historic city, the entire area of both the historic and tourist cities could be included, both because an appreciation of the overlap depends upon a prior understanding of the independent development of the two constituent parts, and also because the excluded parts of the historic and tourist cities contain the latent resources for the potential expansion of the tourist-historic city. The planning and management of the tourist-historic areas must consider the wider entities from which they are derived: policies for tourism need to recognise that historic attractions are only one part of the package of facilities assembled from within and outside the historic city for tourist use, while conversely policies for conservation are concerned with more than just the historic highlights which have been, or could be, selected for visitor consumption.

It is clear that the tourist-historic city is not a separate functional zone in quite the same sense as a shopping district or office quarter, nor can it be delimited in purely morphological terms corresponding to the buildings and spaces of the conserved city. It is an integral part of the formal and functional complex that comprises the central area. It should be seen as an extra dimension of that Complex rather than a specific function to be accommodated alongside existing central area functions, or a spatially separate demarcated district alongside other functional zones.

The empirical basis for the model derives from the regionalisation of the concentrations of historic and tourist facilities described earlier. One aspect of this complex relationship is spatial congruence between the various elements in the tourist-historic city and other urban features. Figure 4.2 shows an example of some of these sorts of spatial relationships in a medium-sized tourist-historic city as described through trend surfaces, which display significant concentrations rather than abrupt boundaries. 'Central area shopping functions' is used as an indicative variable of the central commercial area and includes an extensive part of the inner city within which protected (i.e. 'listed') buildings, as an indicator of the historic city, occupy only the northern part. The tourist city is indicated by two different variables, catering facilities and tourist attractions. The latter includes and thus tends to correspond to the distribution of historic resources, while the former also extends into the modern commercial area outside the historic city.

The spatial coincidences upon which the model is based can also be inferred statistically. For example Table 4.1 shows a set of results which, while not unexpected, do suggest some of the spatial relationships that underpin the model and need further investigation later. There is for example a positive relationship between the distribution of catering and tourist attractions but not between tourist accommodation and other tourist facilities. Similarly the central commercial area, indicated by the presence of higher-order shopping, office and banking functions, the absence of housing at ground-floor level and high rateable values (i.e. taxation assessments), correlates closely with the distribution of tourist catering facilities but not with tourist accommodation. Listed historic buildings correlate strongly with the interrelated complex of central commercial functions and especially with shops and offices.

In terms of change over time, the preceding evolutionary phases of the model are clearly those of its two constituent elements as discussed earlier. Expansion of the tourist-historic city however raises some new issues. It is assumed that the historic city reacts to possible pressures for expansion by extending protective cover outwards from the core of the original city, which also generally implies an extension forward in time into more recently built areas. Such expansion is also more likely to occur in a direction opposite to that of the expanding commercial area within which redevelopment rather than conservation is likely to have occurred, thus into zones of discard where the pressures from other land-uses are less and new functions may be sought for existing premises. The tourist city has limited possibilities and incentives for physical expansion within the central area. Increases in tourism demand are more likely to lead to an intensification of tourism uses within the existing tourist city, as a result of increased competition between tourism facilities and other users. Some expansion ol that part of the historic city used by tourism is possible as tourists widen their selection of historic itttnictions, a process often encouraged by the dispersal policies of local tourism management agencies. Similarly expansion of this part of the tourist city may follow in the wake of expansion of the historic city as suggested above, while equally possible is expansion, especially of catering and entertainment facilities, in the opposite direction following the shift in location of the commercial city. The tourism facility most likely to expand as a result of increases in demand is purpose-built tourism accommodation, but much of this expansion is likely to be peripheral to the central area, although again intensification is as usual a reaction as physical expansion, with the zone of triple overlap between tourist, historic and central commercial cities being under particular pressure to include new tourism accommodation in redevelopment projects. Examples of the results of these processes in particular cities are illustrated later.

Variations from the model

The model described above is clearly derived from the experience of the medium-sized Western European multifunctional city. This is explicable by the early pre-eminence of this area in both urban conservation and tourism, as well as its continuing importance in these respects. However two questions must be posed, namely, would distinctly different sorts of city result in fundamentally different spatial structures, and is such a model robust enough to admit variants in response to particular physical and functional characteristics and different cultural contexts?

In searching for variants two contradictory processes can be observed, namely individualisation and standardisation. In the sense that the history of any place is a unique experience resulting in a unique historic city, and the tourist is travelling in pursuit of variety, then it might be expected that there would be substantial, widespread and deliberately cultivated deviation from any model that attempts to generalise the tourist-historic city. But against this tendency towards distinctiveness must be set one towards standardisation which is equally intrinsic to both tourism, in its search for an instantly recognisable product, and conservation planning, as a result of the internationalisation of tastes and techniques discussed earlier. In part this individual/standard paradox is explicable by the scale of the examination; none the less particular sets of variations from the model can be identified.

Waterfront A fundamental set of variations can be expected when the classical assumption of a circular city, equally accessible in all directions, is relaxed. The most widespread occurrence is cities located on water frontages, whether seacoast, lakeside or riverside. This implies more than that only a portion of the circle is available for the evolution of the functional regions hypothesised, for the waterfront is more than a negative boundary. The partial separation of central commercial functions from the evolving historic city described earlier receives a new and special impetus. The waterfronts and surrounding area were often the fundamental reason for the initial establishment of the settlement and important nodes of early commercial activity. Two factors in particular are likely to encourage the discard of the waterfront area by many commercial functions. These are changes in the requirements of transport technology, and the inevitable inland migration of the geometrical centre of an expanding semicircular urban area, and thus also of city-serving commercial activities which relocate at the point of maximum accessibility. Such a loss of functions, together with the area's previous historical importance, may result in the survival, on or near the waterfront, of an architectural heritage and historic associations usable in the creation of an historic city, with the added advantage to tourism of the attraction of waterfront views and linear promenades. The exploitation of such possibilities will term an important theme in later chapters: the point here is that these physical site conditions tend to accentuate and qualify this phase of the model rather than form a radical departure from it.

Acropolis Another site attribute that is equally fundamental and widespread is that of differences in physical relief. Where these are minor they can be regarded as local detail, but there is one case in which the variations are neither minor nor exceptional: this can be termed the 'acropolis city'. It is not confined to Mediterranean countries but is so widespread in them as to be more usually the norm than the exception. Such towns originally developed on defensible higher ground in regions of chronic insecurity, expanding in more peaceful interludes beyond, and necessarily below, the original city. The functional shift of modern central commercial activities out of the historic city is thus reinforced and made physically more obvious by the distinction between the upper and lower towns. The former preserves its architectural heritage as a result of its abandonment rather than redevelopment, creating the possibility of the separate spatial development of the tourist-historic city and the modern commercial city. The results of this can be seen most clearly in a number of the medium and smaller towns of Italy, Spain, Turkey and Greece which combime both an important architectural heritage and sufficient modern development to motivate expansion beyond, and below, the original city. In extreme examples, such as Corinth, the modern city has developed some distance away from the ancient settlement; but in cities such as Bergamo, Urbino, Carcassonne or Gerona there is more continuity in both time and space, leading to the evolution of two contiguous 'cities', with tourist-historic attractions and most tourist accommodation and commercial services occupying the clearly defined upper town, and most modern commercial activities concentrating in the physically separate lower town.

Even in far larger cities, where the scale of modern development dwarfs any earlier urban development, acropolis sites may form islands of historic architectural survival and thus actual or potential tourist attraction and commercial clusters. The Turkish cities of Ankara and Izmir, for example, have small but distinctive partially walled 'upper towns' where historic functions dominate, although surrounded by modern urban developments.

While the acropolis city is particularly characteristic of the Mediterranean, similar cases occur in other regions, notably the 'burg' phenomenon (variously 'burcht', 'berg', 'borgo', 'borg' 'burgh' or 'bourg'), which was defensible high ground, whether natural or contrived, on which military and governmental functions were located. Although in most Western European towns such developments were generally gradually absorbed into the expanding settlement, they have survived in some towns to act as a focus for a wider tourist-historic city, as in Salzburg or Edinburgh.

Thus again the site variations tend to underline and reinforce the hypothesised model rather than contradict it.

The origin of the model in the experience of the medium-sized city implies a number of assumptions that will not necessarily apply in either the small town or the large city.

The model assumes a town large enough to possess sufficient historic, tourist and other central commercial functions to allow each of these types of facilities to cluster in recognisable regions. In other words, the sort of functional segregation envisaged in the model is dependent upon attaining a size threshold sufficient to allow spatial segregation to occur. The small historic town, which is conserved more or less in toto, is frequently too small to allow a spatial distinction between the conserved city and the location of tourism facilities, and also between the concentration of tourist-historic and other central commercial functions. The small conserved town, however attractive to tourists, will rarely detain them for more than a short stop, and its limited tourism facilities will rarely form a recognisable, spatially distinct, urban region. There is, however, an additional difficulty with such towns in that their charm is derived from the absence of the evolutionary pressures for change, and consequent abrupt fossilisation of their development. The interactive processes assumed by the model have just not occurred. Such towns are thus not really variants of the model so much as not relevant to it, being in their entirety a tourist-historic facility rather than tourist-historic cities: they are more open-air museums than urban places in a full sense. Examples, such as Willemstad, Bourtange, Ribe or in North America, Williamsburg or Saint Andrews will be discussed in Chapter 7.

Conversely, cities large enough to develop more than a single major concentration of a particular set of facilities can produce multiple nuclei variants of the model. Both the tourist and the historic cities will tend to develop around a number of distinct nodes, in the former case possibly linked by corridors of tourist movement between them. In the major metropolitan cities such a fragmentation of the tourist-historic attractions, based around groups of major monuments, museums or neighbourhoods with historic associations, is clearly identifiable, and best developed in the cities that combine a long history of importance, a substantial visitor inflow and a large resident population. The planning and management of a number of examples of these cities is discussed in Chapter 8.

There appears to be a critical mass of historic attractions, tourist visits and consequent development of secondary tourism services that must be reached for the successful development of such u polycentric model, which confines its occurrence to the major cities. In any case, only the major cities are likely to have absorbed enough spatially distinct historic nodes during their development to provide the resource base for such polycentricity.

Many smaller cities have seen advantages in the deliberate stimulation of the development of secondary or additional tourist-historic districts in order to encourage the spreading of the impacts of visitors, whether positive or negative, by utilising underexploited historic resources. The methods and problems of such management strategies will be considered later, but it can be noted here that the strong tendencies towards concentration found in both the tourist and historic cities, as assumed by the model, are generally only countered by genuine multiple nuclei development in the largest cities.

Cities which are both large and contain tourist-historic functions important on a national or international scale will not only tend to develop multiple nuclei but also intensify these functions within the existing areas, allowing on occasion a near monopolistic pattern of uses to occur. It is in the cities with a national show-case function, such as the larger Western European capitals, and those with a major international tourism reputation based on their historic attractions, such as Venice or Salzburg, that extensive contiguous areas of the inner city can be devoted almost exclusively to these functions, at least during specific times of the year. The complex relationships with other central area urban functions described below become, in these cases, of minor importance, at least within the districts concerned.

As every city is a product of a particular historical experience and reflects a particular culture, the set of tourist-historic resources will, at least in detail, be unique. Variations from any generalising model will be inevitable on these grounds alone and any attempt to describe each such variant m. detail would ultimately become a Michelin Guide to the historic cities of the world. However this, or similar structural models, can be applied to a number of broad cultural regions other than North-western Europe, from where it was derived. The extent to which other cultural and historical experiences result in significantly different spatial generalisations, produced by different processes, will determine the universal applicability of the main suppositions of the model.

The Spanish variant important assumption of the model is the partial functional separation of the original city, now conserved as historic, on the one hand, and the modern commercial city on the other, with the overlap between the two playing an important role in the tourist city. These aspects of the tourist-historic city have received particular attention in the work of Ford (1985) on the Spanish city. This study is one of the few to consider the development of urban morphology in relation to the conservation and tourism functions in a sample of medium-sized non-metropolitan provincial capitals in a single country. Thus general conclusions can be drawn about what amounts to a national model of the tourist-historic city. This national variant, although derived from the particular history and institutional structures of Spanish urbanisation, and not consciously related to experience elsewhere, nevertheless has features in common with other parts of the Western Mediterranean, and provides an elaboration of some of the aspects of the more general model.

The early medieval core of the Spanish city (see Figure 4.3) was typically walled, compact and dominated by ecclesiastical land-users. The growth of commercial activity and individual prosperity after the 'reconquest', and subsequent colonial expansion, led to an extension outside the walls in the late medieval and early modern periods. These two 'cities', taken together, form the casco antiguo, corresponding to the 'original city', and generally coinciding with the subsequently preserved conjunto historico, the historic city. Beyond this is the nineteenth-century expansion of the ensanche, often 'Haussmannised', as in Barcelona, which developed to accommodate both the rural immigrants and the suburbanising inhabitants of the old city. The twentieth century provided further planned and unplanned peripheral extensions.

In terms of tourist-historic functions, the medieval core was spared severe pressures for redevelopment by its early extension, which reinforced a spatial distinction between institutional and commercial land-uses. The physical and functional link between core and extension was typically provided by the plaza mayor, located outside the gates of the walled town. This important morphological feature is composed of a substantial open space used for trading and civic displays together with a development around it of commercial premises. The plaza mayor is thus often both an historic attraction in itself (as in Cordoba's Plaza de Corredera, for example) and the focus for tourist-oriented commercial activity. It thus performs a bridging function between the dominantly ecclesiastical monuments of the core and the commercial city. Thus that part of the medieval core nearest to the plaza mayor forms part of the overlap between historic and tourist zones. Conversely on the opposite side of the core it is usually possible to identify a frequently extensive discarded area of the medieval city which is peripheral to both the protected historic city and the areas of the old city penetrated by tourism. Beyond the medieval core and its early extension, the later expansions of the Spanish city have generally little of interest to offer the heritage-motivated visitor, apart from accommodation.

The Spanish variant, therefore, despite its special cultural features and particular chronology of urban development, reiterates the importance of a number of features of the general model such as the partial separation of the conserved monumental city from the tourist commercial city, the significance of the zone of overap aptly portrayed by the plaza mayor, and the spatial selectivity of tourism within the historic city and of the preserved historic city within the medieval core.

The Morocco variant If cities outside Europe were placed along a spectrum that ranged from those of purely indigenous origin and development to those whose creation and shaping owed much to Western influences, then cities such as Cuzco, Chiang-Mai, Mandalay or Zanzibar (McQuillan and Laurier, 1984) would cluster near the former end while Santo Domingo, Singapore (Turnbull, 1977), Hong Kong or Nairobi would be closer to the latter. There would however also be an identifiable middle group of cities where pre-existing, invariably pre-industrial, urban forms have been squarely confronted by Western economic and social processes which have resulted in a more clearly dualistic colonial/indigenous urban structure. Although many such examples can be found, such as Delhi and Chinese treaty ports like Tientsin (Western, 1985), this situation has been particularly well documented in a number of Moroccan cities, especially Rabat (Abu-Lughod, 1980) and Fez (Segers, 1989), which can represent many similar cases throughout the post-colonial world.

Rabat's old city, like others in Morocco, was explicitly avoided by French urban development at the turn of the century, ostensibly to preserve it from the pressures of modern urbanism, but equally to accommodate a social apartheid which effectively excluded its inhabitants from political and economic power. On the withdrawal of the colonial administration the new city was occupied by the new indigenous social and political elite, whose abandonment of the old city thereupon threatened its conservation, along with concurrent urbanisation pressures. In Fez, there are three morphologically distinct cities: the 'original' medina of the eighth century, the 'palace city' constructed in the thirteenfh century as a government centre and the 'new town' dating from around 1910, which was constructed to house French residents and administrators. The first two have received various amounts of architectural protection since 1923 and together form a relatively compact historic city. The third, as in Rabat, now accommodates an indigenous elite and modern commercial and administrative functions.

At the present time the tourist-historic importance of this variant is relatively muted. It is, however, steadily growing as a result of both increasing demands of Western tourism and the expanding horizons of tourists, and of economic pressures in such countries to capitalise upon this. Where such 'schizophrenic' cities exist, the tourist-historic city will naturally be identified primarily with the indigenous component, and this will be politically most desirable in light of the 'whose heritage?' problem addressed earlier; but Western interest in the colonial heritage of the new city is also to be expected.

The Jerusalem variant Jerusalem is a special case of such dualistic cities but represents not so much a national or Middle Eastern cultural variant as a city of such remarkable longevity and particular international historic significance as to warrant separate mention.

The historic, political-symbolic and religious importance of the resource, together with the resulting long-standing reception of visitors, must be considered within the context of two distinctive characteristics of the city. These are, first, the very rapid population growth over the last century, and concomitant growth in the city's importance as a modern commercial and administrative centre, and, secondly, the omnipresent, and frequently violently expressed, political conflict within which the city has occupied a critical role. Although in this case the long and varied historical fortunes of Jerusalem render the term particularly inexact, the 'original city' is a clearly defined physical entity, referred to by both contemporary planners and citizens as the 'old city' (see Figure 4.4, phase 1). This 'old city' was largely contained within its sixteenth-century walls throughout the Ottoman period, but was subject to two sets of pressures for change after the First World War (Cohen, 1977). The first of these was the extension of preservational legislation by the British Mandate authorities over many of the historic buildings and sites, and the adoption of an urban planning philosophy within which conservation was given a high priority. Secondly, the city's population and commercial importance grew rapidly. These circumstances led to a clearly defined spatial separation of functions in phase 2 of the model, with the development of new commercial focuses outside the walls, especially in the direction of the coastal towns, such as along the Jaffa road (Turner, 1988). Intercommunal violence in the inter-war and immediate post-war period, and the armed conflict over the city itself in 1947-8, resulted in a social and political division into an Arab old city within Jordan and a Jewish West Jerusalem within Israel. This reinforced and made visible the functional separation of the historic and modern cities, leading in phase 3 to the strengthening of the modern commercial and residential functions in both West Jerusalem and north of the old city in Jordan. The de facto removal of the political boundary in 1967, and further rapid population growth, has led to a tendency towards the consolidation of the modern commercial city in West Jerusalem and the increasing dedication of the old city in the current urban plans to tourist-historic uses. This process was made easier by the departure from the old city of not only many of the remaining non-tourist commercial functions but also part of its Arab population.

A Japanese variant An opportunity to examine the development of tourist-historic cities in a non-Western culture is provided by the work of Satoh (1986) on the origin, subsequent evolution and planning problems of Japanese castle towns. Although the historical experience, building techniques and materials and methods of administration are quite different from those of Europe, it is notable that a series of generalisations have been drawn, which result in a clear spatial and functional distinction between a conserved historic city and a modern commercial city, relevant to the approximately 100 generally small or medium-sized castle towns in Japan. The processes through which this pattern emerges are, however, significantly different from those of North-Western Europe.

For much of the period before the seventeenth century the Japanese feudal system of administration and economic order led to the familiar 'acropolis' pattern of hill-top castle and administrative buildings, located for a mixture of defensive and symbolic reasons, together with the more or less spontaneous evolution of a lower commercial town. Such a pattern of settlement was widely superseded from the early seventeenth century, the beginning of the Edo period. The 'new' settlements were deliberately conceived as having two main components, namely a castle district that functioned as the seat of local administration and, separated from it by extensive defence works, a commercial and residential town. Rapid urbanisation from the end of the nineteenth century, the Meiji period, occurred mostly in the commercial town, leading to its expansion usually in a particular favoured direction, with the castle district generally acquiring mostly new administrative functions as a centralised national government replaced the local feudal structures.

The development of town planning, beginning with legislation in 1919, but becoming a major preoccupation in the period of post-1945 reconstruction, allowed a restructuring of these towns and especially the introduction of some conservational measures. A combination of earthquakes, highly combustible building materials and aerial bombardment has determined that it is the street patterns and the major landscaping features that are the main preservable attributes rather than the buildings as such. The principal axioms of this planning are the maintenance of the pre-Meiji morphological patterns in the castle districts and their use as parks, museums and other leisure-based activities, while new transport, commercial and residential developments are deflected into peripheral districts.

Satoh (1986) has described a large number of variations in the pace, timing and magnitude of development in various physical settings but the basic pattern of a clear tourist-historic district and separate, one or more, commercial districts remains. The similarity with the Western European model is obvious, despite the differences in what constitutes the historic city and the processes through which it has been created, especially the original in-built functional segregation and the absence of an extensive zone of overlap between the two.

North American variants No urban model can aspire to universality until its relevance to the North American city, and to the New World city more generally, has been established. In essence the concepts discussed above are as applicable in the New World as in Europe, given the similarity and interactivity of their market economies, conservation philosophies and tourism industries; hence the frequent reference to North American examples.

In some important respects, however, it is suggested that a difference of degree exists, which will be manifested in many of the cases discussed later. An obvious difference is the quantity and antiquity of urban historic resources in a, by definition, more recent and less culturally varied urban "system. This in turn has led not only to a higher valuation being placed on what remains but a difference in methods of exploitation and presentation, in particular a larger proportion of contrived attractions (discussed in Chapter 7). In addition, the locations of many tourism facilities tend to be more widely distributed than in Western Europe, as a consequence of the early development of private transport. It is thus more difficult to define the tourist city in narrowly inner-city terms and the concept .of a regional tourist city assumes a greater prominence.

In the final analysis, in North America as elsewhere, the delimitation of the tourist-historic city, and its two components, is dependent on the functional interrelationships of its elements and how it is perceived and used by the consumer. These matters will be addressed in the following chapter.

Limitations of the model

The intra-urban structure model presented, developed and exemplified in various forms here is essentially a description of resource and facility locations, a regionalisation of these spatial concentrations in relation to other functional distributions and an account of some simple but fundamental evolutionary developments. Such modelling, like all such approaches in urban analysis, is not in itself a complete explanation of the regionalisation of tourist-historic facilities but is rather a necessary basis for further analysis. It is a series of more or less inductively derived spatial hypotheses that require investigation if the operational dynamics of the model are to be understood.

In particular there are two such lines of further development which are suggested but not pursued by the model, and need further investigation. First, although either a spatial coincidence or a spatial aversion between the locations of different sorts of urban activities has been delimited, the actual functional relationships that cause such behaviour have not been investigated and cannot be left as self-evident.

Secondly, the approach so far has been almost exclusively pursued from the supply side; from the facilities provided for, or used by, tourists and the morphological features of the conserved city. The questions about who actually uses the facilities of the tourist-historic city, in what way and for what purposes, have yet to be answered. The model constructed from uses needs peopling with users.

These two tasks will be the subject of the following chapter.