Tourism Policy and Planning for a Quality Urban Environment: The Case of Heritage Tourism

Abstract

Most studies of the impact of human activities upon the environment concentrate upon natural and/or rural areas and define environmental quality in terms of aspects of the natural physical environment. But a city is also an environment, even though the natural attributes of site, vegetational cover, building materials and the like have been restructured by deliberate intervention and design. The distinction between the so-called natural and the built-environment is one of the degree of such intervention rather than its existence. The rural/urban distinction is similarly more a continuum than a polarity. Figure 1 locates a range of US tourism places along these two spectra. The simple but serious consequence of this neglect of urban environmental quality is that although cities occupy a much smaller proportion of the earth’s surface, they actually provide the working, living and recreational environment of most of its inhabitants most of the time.