"Promoting Creative, Cultural or Ethnic Quarters in Cities: Strategic Tool for Developing Urban Tourism"

 
Promoting Creative, Cultural or Ethnic Quarters in Cities: A Strategic Tool for Developing Urban Tourism


Introduction
Travel and tourism is gaining popularity over the years and in modern era, it is considered as one of the most important aspects associated with world economy. In various form of tourism, urban tourism is one of the most significant parts associated with the travel and tourism sector. In the modern era, half of the world is living in the urban areas and the level of civilization is increasing continuously over the years. These urban cities are the areas of entertainments, leisure and arts, for the people and at the same time, it act as gateways of traditional and modern society. In terms of centre of commercial industries and finance, the urban cities provide opportunity for creativity as well as diversity. In recent years, tourism gain popularity at a very fast pace and Scheyvens and Momsen (2008) in their review has mentioned that it is the largest industry in modern world. According to Muhammad (2011), present situation in the tourism industry is growing at a very rapid pace. From 1950 till 1995, the international tourist arrivals in different nation increased at a steady pace and after that, from 1995 till 2010 it increased at a very fast pace. After 2010, there was a slowdown in the number of international tourist incoming mainly due to economic crisis.

Objective of the Paper:
The main objective of the paper is to analyze the importance of developing theme spaces along with cultural, creative and ethic quarters in various parts of the city to develop the tourism. In order to analyse the same, the city that taken into consideration is London where travel and tourism plays a major role not only in terms of assuring economic boost but also at the same time, creating a huge number of job opportunity.

Literature Review:
The growth of the urban tourism industry is one of the main factors of economical boost of European cities (Delitheou, Vinieratou and Touri, 2010). It is a proven fact that the urban tourism is an indispensable feature of the developing relationship between internal and external demands. Edwards et al. (2008) in their review has mentioned that tourism can be considered as one among many social and economic forces associated with the urban environment. It helps in marketing various kinds of product and helps people to enjoy a wide range of preferences and cultural perspectives. Travelling is a medium of exchanging new thoughts and ideas as well. Reutsche (2006) critically analyzes the relationship between tourism and urban development. According to her review, there is a difference between primary, secondary and additional elements associated with the urban tourism. The primary elements are those, which attract the travellers to visit any particular place. There are two key points associated with primary elements and those are; places for deploying activities and places for spending the leisure time. Among secondary elements, there are numbers of points such as developing new facilities for the travellers, developing opportunity for shopping and adaptation and at the same time, development of new market. Moreover, development of tourism sector is helpful for the betterment of transportation and accessibility, providing detailed tourism information etc., all these are equally important for the success of tourism development in any area (Popescu, 2008; Popescu and Corbos, 2010).

Urban Tourism
Over time, cities have developed their own values and traditions, and these have been created and recreated by successive groups of people who live, work, eat, and play there (Rath, 2007). Based on various factors, including its landscape, cultural identity, politics, and business, every city has developed a unique appeal as a destination in the international tourism market with many tourists for various purposes (Ashworth and Page. 2011). Often various urban areas consider as the gateway of larger cities for various international as well as domestic tourists. So, one can easily say that, as an "accessible, efficient, structured, manageable and organized" area (Beedie, 2008, p. 39), a city performs numerous and overlapping tourism roles such a gateway, staging post, destination, and tourist source (Pernecky, 2012).

In modern era, this field is mainly consider as cash cow in the industry as there are immense opportunity for this sector to contribute to the economy of any nation. In recent time, the concept of urban tourism has recognized as a resourceful vehicle for financially and culturally restores the deteriorated town surroundings in many developed countries. In most of those places, numbers of urban areas are in crumble situation as conventional industries lose liveliness (González, 2010). Although the concept of urban tourism is yet to be explore properly as, there is no "simple definition for neither this complex phenomenon nor any clear demarcation of its diverse and vaguely formulated set of activities" (Ashworth and Page, 2011, p. 2).

In nutshell, one can mention that the concept of urban tourism is a widespread but mixed group of performance that visitors with a variety of purposes experience in cities as versatile and ever-changing entities. If one compares the developed area and tourism in those places, the local government in various urban areas will face number of challenges in terms of development of tourism sectors. Local authorities need to restructure the industries, change the quality of the life of the people in those areas, making some necessary changes to attract tourist and make them feel comfortable in the local environment as well as making alteration in the political aspects also (Ashworth and Page. 2011)

Creativity and Cultural Tourism:
According to Landry (2007), there is a proper correlation between creativity and places, which helps any particular area, especially the urban areas to develop its tourism sector. As a matter of fact, one key concept associated with tourism development in the urban area is developing attractions related to that particular place, boost its economy and providing ensure opportunity for the local people to earn money.. In different urban areas, cultural heritage is not only associated with the image of the city or any particular area; but at the same time, it is also associated with the creativity. Smith (2007) in his review has mentioned that cultural heritage is a crowd-puller for the tourists and different urban areas must design the tourism business strategy keeping in mind both tangible and intangible aspects of cultural heritage of the place which includes monuments, architecture, galleries and museums etc. Apart from that, local music, art and culture, theatre, film etc. all play an important role in the development of tourism sector. Montgomery (2007) in his review defines cultural tourism as seeds of developing attraction of a place among the people across the globe. Smith (2007) in his analysis also mentioned that urban areas must link their tourism with local cultural heritage as well as community values, to ensure the development of this sector. Miles and Paddison (2005) gave more emphasis on the positive input of cultural heritage tourism on originality with the help of growing prosperity, cosmopolitanism, regular growth in business services, transmission of social and human capital, improvement in the life style and transformed organizational capacity.