engleski

Sustainable vs. over-tourism in UNESCO World Heritage Sites – lessons from Dubrovnik, Croatia

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is the most influential document of global development today. It treats heritage protection and safeguarding as one of the means to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe resilient and sustainable (Goal 11). Its valorisation within the broader context of sustainable tourism ought to be a desirable tool to promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, enable full employment and decent work for all, and to promote local culture and products (Goal 8). However, many heritage sites in the world, particularly those protected by UNESCO, beside economic and social benefits, face ever-growing pressure of tourism and unsustainable use. Many of them experience overcrowding of tourists, traffic congestions, pushing out of the local population by over-priced real estates to make them to tourism rentals etc. It often leads to deteriorating tourism experience, environmental degradation, increasing social and economic inequalities and monoculture of tourism in the economic structure. Some heritage cities, therefore, started to implement different measures to reduce the pressure of tourism and to restore them as a place for living instead of being open-air museums. This paper presents the case of Dubrovnik in Croatia, with the Old City protected as a World Heritage Site. The virtually perfectly preserved and restored historical core has slowly lost its function as a place of living and working, and became a highly pressured tourism district with high share of hotels and rental flats, simple business structure oriented to tourists and marked by constant decrease in the population. Aims of the paper are to determine the intensity of tourism development and to measure its pressure to the city, to investigate the perception of tourism impacts at the local population, and to identify existing and potential measures that would make tourism more sustainable according to the Sustainable Development Goals. The results were obtained by desk methods and in the field survey, which included a questionnaire survey on an occasional sample of the local population.

sustainable development goals ; tourism ; heritage ; over-tourism ; heritage cities ; UNESCO

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