Cowtowns or cathedral precincts? Two models for contemporary urban tourism.

Abstract

Urban tourism models and in particular the location of urban tourist elements are subjects that hitherto have received little attention by geographers and others interested in tourism (Ashworth 1989; Ashworth 1992). Exceptions to this include Gunn's (1972) model which concerns the location of recreation and tourist functions in and near cities and the essay by Griffin and Ford ' A Model of the Latin American City Structure ' (Griffin and Ford 1980), which includes a section on the fossilised city core. Such a core often contains the local cathedral or equivalent and other colonial structures of interest to tourists. An addition to urban tourism research occurred in 1990 with the publication of Ashworth and Tunbridge's The tourist-historic city. They believe that in the 1990s the city is exploiting historicity as a contemporary resource, in response to society's growing demand for the ' tourist-historic city ' (Ashworth and Tunbridge 1990). One section of their book is devoted to a discussion of the relationship between tourist functions and the historic fabric of the city. Through an examination of ' tourist-historic cities ' a model was created to explain the processes that have produced such a city (Ashworth and Tunbridge 1990, 63), as well as the location of various land uses. As much of world tourism is based on historic attractions in cities, such a model may eventually be of use not just to researchers interested in tourism, but to city planners as well as to the tourists themselves. The model itself was based upon medium sized cities in which tourist areas are concentrated into a single place (Ashworth and Tunbridge 1990, 69). These are long established urban areas with fairly complex and well developed morphologies and therefore represent such traditional centers of urban tourism as cathedral towns and old provincial capitals. Could this model and the spatial relationships of the tourist elements it displays be applied to urban tourism of a more recent vintage and in a smaller setting? To this end, the application of the Ashworth and Tunbridge model will be discussed in a quite different temporal and spatial setting: to six urban areas in Kansas, all established in the second half of the nineteenth century and with populations ranging from two to seventeen thousand. This paper is divided into three sections. In the first section, the ' tourist-historic city' of Ashworth and Tunbridge's model will be discussed and related research on urban tourist land use will be reviewed. In the second section the location and spatial relationships of tourist land uses in the six Kansas towns will be discussed. In the third, a model of tourist related land use in Kansas will be described and then

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