When heritage meets tourism : heritage tourism as a tool for sustainable heritage conservation in Hong Kong : the case of Tai Ping Shan Area

Abstract

With the growing advocations of sustainable heritage conservation, there is a need to identify an approach that can facilitate the self-sustainability of the heritage resources. Heritage tourism, which scholars used to consider as the injection of business incentives towards heritage conservation, is now considered as one of the stakeholders in achieving sustainable heritage conservation. With the introduction by UNESCO on the Historic Urban Landscapes (HUL) approach as a derivative towards the concept of cultural landscape, it focuses on the integration of the urban conservation goals with the necessary social and economic development considerations in advocacy for a balance for the long-term success. This research attempts to adopt the HUL approach as the base framework for the planning of heritage tourism to evaluate its applicability on achieving sustainable heritage conservation. By the case study of Tai Ping Shan area, a derived set of steps in the implementation of the HUL approach has been adopted based on Veldpaus and Roders (2013)’s proposed approach, as a step-to-step guide on the discussions and evaluations on adopting heritage tourism as a tool for sustainable heritage conservation. Based on the research findings, the application of HUL approach is generally flavourable towards the heritage tourism planning, which can be further executed to provide incentives and motivations to encourage the sustainable heritage conservation in Hong Kong, but prerequisite actions are deemed important for a smooth and effective application. This is hoped to be a pioneer study on the correlation of the three heritage concepts, to encourage further development of derivatives of different modes of sustainable heritage conservation approach in Hong Kong and beyond.