Study Of Urban Heritage Tourism Development Path

Since the 70es and 80es of 20th century, heritage tourism has received great attention in western world. There are following reasons. First of all, developed countries had been industrialized in the early 20th century and started economic restructuring in the 80es when service industry took more and more weight in national economy. As a result, heritage tourism was treated as substitute for manufacturing industries and became new engine for economic growth. Secondly, in the process of globalization, economic development mode, urbanization mode and cultural value system had worked its way through local economy and culture. Locality was drowned in the trend of globalization. This paper, citing Shanghai as a case, studies urban heritage tourism development path in such a global environment.Due to its specific industrialization and urbanization process, Shanghai formed a conspicuous urban personality——worldism; Shanghai, with all its exotic flavors, is still Chinese. Due to enclosure after liberation and globalization after open door policy, Shanghai lost its pride-winning urban personality. From the 80es, Shanghai government and its subordinate district governments started to take measures to rebuild its urban personality.This paper relies on Shanghai Excellent Historic Building, National Cultural Treasures under Preservation and Shanghai Historic and Cultural Landscapes as data base and uses GBJ 137-90 as categorizing criteria. This research finds that now there are three development modes (commercial, creative industrial park and museum mode). What's more, urban heritage development relies more and more on non-economic factors (such as technology, multi-media, culture and art). Development plans show a great tendency towards niche market. Market appeal——carrying capacity matrix is adopted here to assess heritage assets. Market research on 28 items shows that all these items display medium to high market appeal and carrying capacity, which is good for development as tourism resources.Based on such great prospect, Singapore is introduced as a case of urban heritage development. Boutique hotels and Bugis Street are elaborated as examples of urban heritage development plans. Governmental policy is vital to urban heritage tourism development. Yet due to lack of knowledge about the formation of social capital and its conversion rate, such development plans failed to run smooth. Singapore shares with Shanghai something common such as locality, culture and urban development and could serve as a good example for Shanghai to learn from.This paper thus advises to establish a development mechanism led by government and joined by social capital, cultural capital as well as economic capital. What's more, an urban heritage data base should be established, a locally applicable assessment model should be developed and an international case bank should be established so as to give support to urban heritage development in Shanghai.