How Significant Are Buffer Zones for Tourism at Urban UNESCO World Heritage Sites?

While the concept of a ‘buffer zone’ is clear and well defined, the role of the buffer zone is vague, especially because a buffer zone—if any—can take on very different sizes and shapes, while their status in terms of protection and rules is very different locally. In this article, we focus on buffer zones in an urban context and explore if these buffer zones have some tourism dedication. The latter is particularly interesting since many urban World Heritage sites suffer from over-tourism. With this, we enter the field of policy, management and governance. Therefore, we analyzed three urban World Heritage sites in Belgium and commented occasionally on two more using text analysis (application and policy documents) as well as interviews (11) of interviewees that are representative of governance and expert groups. The results reveal enormous complexity because buffer zones are considered a must in the application without being well thought-out and therefore suboptimal in terms of policy and management. Streamlining the significance of buffer zones by UNESCO as well as bridging the gap between heritage conservation and tourism on a policy level can prevent the agendas of different stakeholder groups and policy fragmentation from hollowing out its potential.