Perceived impacts of tourism oriented urban historic district revitalization: Case study of Yangzhou, China

Heritage tourism has been promoted by many city governments to revitalize declined urban historic districts; however, the impacts were rarely explored. Existing literature is biased on rural destination, rural population and negative impacts, which limited the findings to be applied in urban historic districts. Academic limitations, existing unsustainable cases in China, and China's unique political and economic context, these are the three reasons that motivated the author to conduct this research. It is anticipated that this research would contribute to existing knowledge by exploring the impacts of heritage tourism upon urban destination and urban citizens in a developing country. Through a thorough understanding of the impacts, sustainable heritage tourism development could be achieved. Based on extensive literature review and proposed framework, a mixed method approach with qualitative methods (in-depth interviews, observations and travelogue analysis, etc) and quantitative method (survey) was adopted for this research. In-depth interviews were conducted to five major groups of stakeholders, namely government officials, preservationists, tourists, residents, entrepreneurs. Other qualitative methods such as site visits and travel with tourists were also used in this research. Results from qualitative methods were used to identify how different stakeholders perceive tourism development in the host community and triangulate with the findings from quantitative methods. Survey was used as the main method in this research. Based on the survey data, many statistical analyses were performed to understand how residents, the main beneficiaries, perceive heritage tourism development in their community. According to these analyses, the research identified that (1) government played multi-roles in heritage tourism development which may exert both positive and negative impacts on the host community; (2)development related impacts were the major motivations for government to promote heritage tourism development but some intangible benefits could not be ignored as well; (3)contribution of tourism development to urban advancement and economic development was recognized by the residents however at personal level they do not receive actual economic benefits; (4) residents perceived positive social benefits from tourism development were correlated with physical improvement and many social negative impacts were not so obvious in the host community; (5) significant variances exist among residents with regards to cultural impacts; (6) tourism impacts on the natural environment was not apparent so far. Two clusters of residents were differentiated through cluster analysis based on their social representations of tourism impacts. These two clusters both revealed ambivalent perceptions of tourism impacts. However, the first one was more concerned about social impacts and macro economic benefits while the second group emphasized more on personal economic benefits and cultural issues. Three variables were found as significant discriminants in deciding cluster memberships, namely Yangzhou citizenships, political party memberships and satisfaction with government performance. Four variables were considered as predictive variables in influencing residents' perceptions, namely socio-demographic factors, place attachment, perceptions on participation and political self-identification. 16 indicators were emerged after operationalization and factor analysis, among which only 4 were confirmed as influential predictor for residents' attitude towards future tourism development. These four indicators are place attachment as constructed by emotional attachment and place dependency & self-identity; satisfaction with government performance and perceptions on participation in benefits sharing. Based on above analysis, five recommendations were proposed to achieve sustainable heritage tourism development: (1) Bring more actual personal benefits to local residents (2) Preserving and Maintaining the way of life (3) Monitoring the commercialization process (4) From result oriented to process-oriented (5) Encouraging wider and more active community participation. Keywords: urban historic district revitalization; sustainable heritage tourism development; social impact assessment; perceptions; Yangzhou, China