World Heritage and Tourism: the dialectic between urban landscape conservation and tourism development in local regulations

The sustained conflicts between theories of heritage conservation and the political imperative to ensure the economic vitality of lands become more acute in those spaces that have been included in the World Heritage List. The aim of this study is to shed light on this matter. This is achieved by using discursive analysis techniques in a series of normative documents such as municipal ordinances for the protection of urban landscape and special protection plans, as well as Advisory Body Evaluations created by UNESCO for the inclusion in the List of four case studies. In this way it is possible to verify how, in general terms, there continues to be a pre-eminence of aesthetic protection approaches in the heritage conservation of historic places, where orientations aimed at preventing visual degradation prevail. This is an ideal formula in turn to achieve greater success in the tourism market.