Abstract
The churn of globalization and its concurrent economic shifts during the second half of the twentieth century left many former industrial cities in the United Kingdom, United States, and Western Europe, among other places, seeking new sectors for growth and development. Alongside these broader economic challenges and rapid technological changes, the physical remnants of manufacturing and production industries in these cities were rendered obsolete. As manufacturing shifted outside the urban core and subsequently to other countries with cheaper labor, the landscape of industrial cities hollowed out, and questions of how to revitalize these spaces—often comprising buildings with historic and cultural significance—became an important question for planners, economic developers, and urban policy makers. With an abundance of historic resources and the need to stabilize their economies from manufacturing losses, many cities turned to creating or expanding sectors connected to cultural and heritage tourism. Economic development through the attraction of tourists and their associated spending also served as a means of rebranding the industrial image of these cities and reshaping their historic spaces toward amenities and consumption-oriented uses desired by visitors.
Daniel Barrera-Fernandez’s Attracting Visitors to Ancient Neighborhoods: Creation and Management of the Tourist-Historic City of Plymouth, UK enters this context and tackles questions surrounding the use of historic resources as a means of urban revitalization and cultural tourism. This book examines the management and conservation of historic urban fabric in a postindustrial city, Plymouth, United Kingdom, focusing on the late nineteenth century through roughly the present day. The book includes six chapters, each of which contains multiple subsections. The author sets forth five research questions: (1) How has heritage protection and management of the historic city evolved in the city? (2) What is the current framework for the preservation of the historic city as a heritage asset? (3) How has the city’s tourist model evolved, especially in relation to the use of heritage assets? (4) What is the presence and importance of tourism activities today? What is the role of heritage in the city’s tourism model? (5) What are the actors and initiatives intervening in the tourist use of the historic city in relation to culture and heritage, tourism, urban planning, and economic development?
Plymouth serves as the single case study city for this analysis, while the study area includes an array of historic neighborhoods ranging from places formally designated as heritage areas to those currently under consideration for official designation or included in local conservation policy documents. Current and archival documents including citywide and small-area plans, tourist guidebooks, national and local heritage listings, tourism and economic development strategies and policy documents, maps, interviews, and meeting minutes are the primary forms of data collected and analyzed. The author also relied on fieldwork in Plymouth, and the book includes photographs and maps that showcase important buildings and orient readers unfamiliar with Plymouth.
After outlining the research framework in chapter 1, Barrera-Fernandez presents a succinct review of the literature related to this analysis in chapter 2, relying primarily on European scholarship and developing connections between the current state of historic city centers, the values of heritage preservation, and the push for tourism-based approaches as a means of urban revitalization and economic development. This is followed by a short chapter on Plymouth’s urban history, including its influential port, maritime industries, military traditions, and the current local municipal structure and socioeconomic trends.
In chapter 4, the author traces the past and current conservation management practices in Plymouth, covering six stages from the early twentieth century through the Second World War, the postwar Plan for Plymouth and its associated reconstruction, the shift toward regeneration plans focused on connecting heritage and economic development in the 1980s and 1990s, and the most recent approaches centered on citizen participation in community-based initiatives. A dizzying collection of plans and policies are covered in extensive detail here, and again in subsequent chapters. Including a summary table, highlighting the key plans and policies, when they were adopted, and their important features or contributions would have made this material easier to digest.
Chapter 5 describes the types of urban heritage protections used in Plymouth and the United Kingdom more broadly. Several of these strategies, including the Buildings at Risk Register, offer a glimpse into potential tools that could be transferred to similar contexts in other countries, particularly the postindustrial shrinking cities in the United States or elsewhere. The discussion then shifts to a review of the tourism sector in Plymouth, including a historic perspective and present-day approaches. In the final chapter, Barrera-Fernandez offers a comprehensive list and brief summary of the litany of actors and initiatives connected to the management of the tourist-historic city, including those focused on culture and heritage, tourism, urban planning, and economic development. While comprehensive, this chapter does not connect the important synergies between these initiatives, explain why it is meaningful that a wide range of actors are involved in historic tourism, or examine how these actors affect the types of activities that are branded as tourism. Are the multitude of players and initiatives a strength for Plymouth or do they hamper implementation of tourism-based policies? How did these relationships evolve over time? How do these groups collaborate, and what does that mean for tourism in Plymouth? Finally, the book concludes with a useful summary of the information covered in previous chapters.
In sum, Attracting Visitors to Ancient Neighborhoods succeeds in providing a detailed account of the multitude of plans, policies, and actors connected to Plymouth’s history and culture-based tourism sector. However, it fails to develop a coherent narrative that effectively weaves this information together. The book rarely offers the reader much beyond a basic listing and summary of a wide range of planning and policy documents, and there is little analysis of the synergies or disconnects across these resources. Tourism and economic development strategies often have vastly different objectives compared to those focused on preservation or conservation, yet these potential conflicts are not examined. There are also extensive discussions of plans and projects that never came to fruition, but the author never explains why these failed plans are important to understand.
Overall, the book is lacking in its synthesis of what these documents collectively reveal about Plymouth’s approach to promoting tourism in a postindustrial historic city, or how the case of Plymouth might offer broader lessons for other cities balancing the challenges of postindustrial shifts and the protection of historic built environments. Further, there is little acknowledgement of the potential negative outcomes from a tourism-based approach to revitalization in historic city centers and neighborhoods, including an analysis of who is benefitting from these initiatives, the impact on existing residents, and whether these strategies are prioritized over others that are more focused on community-based needs. In many ways, this book reads like a report on all the activities in Plymouth related to the tourism sector and less like a scholarly analysis of these initiatives in the broader context of urban policy and planning.
Although the author argues that the contribution of this research is the introduction of an economic policy dimension to the existing conceptual framework developed by Brito (2009) that connects tourism and the historic city, it is unclear how this adds to the scholarly literature. The tensions between the cultural and economic values underpinning preservation and heritage are widely covered in the existing discourse (e.g., Mason 2008; Throsby 2001). While balancing these dichotomous principles is an important challenge for the fields of preservation and conservation, this single case study offers little in terms of advancing theory or practical understanding of this context, beyond the simplistic confirmation that these tensions do indeed exist within the framework of this case.
This book will provide practitioners with an understanding of polices and strategies that can help cultivate a preservation-based approach to tourism. This case study might also provide useful examples for preservation planners or economic developers seeking to connect culture, history, and tourism in similar, postindustrial urban contexts.