Tourism and Heritage: The Pressures and Challenges of the 1990s

The disintegration of the Iron Curtain over recent years has opened up a vast tract of Europe not only to eager tourists, but also to those who are concerned for the conservation of historic townscapes. It is now much more widely realized in the ‘west’ that the towns of the ‘east’ contain a storehouse of valuable assets, with exciting prospects for the understanding, enjoyment and promotion of urban heritage (see Figure 10.1 ). It must also be realized that these assets, which have come to us through a strange combination of circumstances, are under threat from insensitive exploitation, the poverty of maintenance agencies and the march of unthinking commercial redevelopment. Those from both east and west concerned with urban conservation need to raise the awareness among relevant controlling authorities that underpins sensible policies for heritage protection. The worry is that the rush towards ‘free markets’, especially in property development, will overrun and disable conservation interests. Most of the regimes of the former Soviet bloc had building conservation organizations in place, funded and managed from the centre; these organizations are today viewed by the new entrepreneurial class with deep suspicion, and by new governments as superfluous in times of economic stringency. The task is now to re-establish the legitimacy of conservation and heritage-related policies and expenditure without falling into the trap of using urban heritage indiscriminately, as mere bait to draw in the tourists.