2 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
2.1 Access points
There is today widespread acknowledgement of the ethical value of the heritage, which can be seen
to shape a number of human practices (from travel to pilgrimage, from ethnicity to environmental
protectionism) and to elicit a number of policy responses at various levels. However, both at
European government level and at the local (especially city) level, there is today recognition that
culture has also strong economic implications for the development of a territory. Furthermore, the
other way round is also believed to hold: as a rule, the economic situation explains the political will
and the financial resources to develop and sustain cultural activities.
Much research on the economics and geography of culture has been opportunity-driven (Graham &
al. 2000). Tourism, and cultural tourism in particular, has unsurprisingly been the main focus
(Smith, 2003, see chapter 4). Cultural tourism is possibly the most immediate strategy to make the
heritage “rentable”. On the other hand, the threats determined by excessive tourist pressure on the
cultural assets have been (and to a large extent still are) an “emergency” for many European regions
all through the 1980s and 1990s, causing fundamental revisions in common thinking and strategic
attitudes towards tourism development. Established destinations like Venice, Toledo, Rhodos,
Sintra, Salzburg, Bruges, the Loire Valley, or world heritage sites in the “new Europe” like Cesky
Krumlov, Pécs, Cracow, Tallinn, Paphos are regularly flooded with visitors without any clear long-
term benefit exceeding the costs that tourism brings to the host community. Furthermore, in many
places the very integrity and symbolic significance of such heritage assets is under threat.
The rationale for cultural landscape protection comes from the Council of Europe’s European
Landscape Convention and UNESCO’s ‘Man and Biosphere’ program. The SPESP project (Study
programme for European Spatial Planning), a main input for ESDP, integrated such background
with a new the economic-aware focus. In the SPESP final document (p.18), it is argued that cultural
landscapes and built heritage need to be protected and their utilisation enhanced not only because
they are valuable markers of human history, but also for general development to be sustainable,
connecting with much tourism-related research carried out in that period (Butler 1980; Martin and
Uysal 1990; Canestrelli and Costa 1991; Van der Borg 1993, 1996; Van der Borg and Gotti 1995;
Lindberg et al. 1997; Russo 2000, 2002, 2004; Russo et al. 2001).