COURSE TITTLE: URBAN AND CULTURAL TOURISM The Assignment Task Your task is to critically analyse the role of cultural and urban tourism in the regeneration of a chosen city or major town. You have to ensure that there is enough information freely available on not only what changes occurred but also the processes that the national and local government, the private sector and other stakeholders, e.g. residents’ groups, used to bring about the changes. The town or city you chose should have gone through a process of economic decline and rebirth and you should explore the reasons for this rebirth, or attempted rebirth, and then explain how and why it was regenerated in the way it was. You should draw conclusions, based on theory, in order to assess whether or not the results of the town’s regeneration can be considered to be sustainable and socially just. You need to be able to find some academic writing on the city’s regeneration efforts although inevitably you will also gain information from official city websites too, by looking at sections on economic development, planning and tourism policy. Your references should not include sites such as TripAdvisor, although you may use the websites of quality newspapers international city tourism policy sites such as eurocities.eu. You are expected to work with more academic references than websites. Presentation contents You should start off your presentation with a brief description of the city before its decline (nature of its economy, culture etc.) and then briefly analyse the reasons for the decline and demonstrate – through economic and social statistics – the scale of that decline. Your main section will describe the nature of the regeneration that took place, analysing it in relation to one or more of the key models or frameworks of urban tourism (e.g. Laws 1996 or Tyler 2002). You must relate these frameworks to the dynamics of your city’s regeneration and compare the reality to the theory and explain any similarities and differences. In this way you will critically analyse the regeneration, and tourism and leisure’s role in it. You should be able to comment knowledgeably on who has benefited and lost from the regeneration, how the city has physically and socially changed, what new tourism markets have been opened up and how this was achieved (look at official tourism statistics). The final section should draw from the evidence supplied in the previous sections to conclude as to whether the regeneration achieved its aims and the role of tourism in this. It should also identify whether this has been economically and socially sustainable. By following such a structure, you will have critically analysed your case study and gathered theoretical and empirical (factual) evidence and drawn supported conclusions, which are the graduate skills you should by now have developed.