"COMPETITIVE PLACES": TOWARDS AN INTEGRATED APPROACH FOR HERITAGE AND CULTURAL TOURISM DEVELOPMENT IN EGYPT

Abstract

Many of today's development patterns and adopted globalization have changed the way by which we perceive place and time; and it is expected to produce more change for humanity than any previous era in history. On the basis of contemporary situations, a new outlook and attitude are necessary to create more livable and competitive places to preserve local values and meet international demands.

This thesis is about designing competitive heritage and cultural tourism places in Egypt, which have the character of competitiveness by its unique inherited heritage and/ or cultural values and also the man-made values. It goes to the heart of how those places should be designed, function, and enrich both the community and the experience of their visitors.

However, recent years have witnessed a huge increase in the volume of world tourism and this increase in numbers has been accompanied by profound trends characterizing demand, product, destinations, community participation, and sustainability requirements. Heritage and Cultural Tourism, in specific, is a growth market, which offers new opportunities for the economic revival of historical cities, mainly found in developing world. It also brings challenges to those cities. These challenges are twofold.

In the first place: How to utilize heritage and cultural resources and turn them to be attractions through appropriate planning, development, design, management and •marketing efforts. And, in the second place: How to produce attractive, high quality, and sustainable places to add new values to the heritage and cultural resources, thus achieving competitiveness on the international scale.