Evaluation of the cultural and tourism development potential of urban built heritage and its renewal mechanism: A case study of the main urban area of Dalian

The integration of culture and tourism is becoming a new engine for boosting domestic demand in China, and the assessment of the potential for cultural and tourism development can help to reuse the built heritage of the city and renew it with high quality. Under the heritage conservation policy of integrated management, how to quickly identify and categorize built heritage with potential for enhancement, and how to gather multiple heritage resources to build a cultural and tourism network has become a key issue in cultural heritage renewal. Taking built heritage in the main urban area of Dalian as the object of study, combining field research scoring, geospatial, socio-economic, demographic and streetscape image data, we constructed an evaluation system of built heritage regeneration potential from three levels, namely supply potential, demand potential and regional security power, and further refined it with six elements, namely environmental value, ontological value, market demand, cultural renewal demand, regional resource conditions and tourism resource extensibility. Through the collection and sorting of heritage lists, the existing built heritage with development value was screened and identified, and the improved CRITIC and TOPSIS integrated evaluation models were used to comprehensively evaluate the development potential of built heritage sites, and the data of each element and criterion layer were visualized and analyzed. Based on the kernel density analysis, the joint heritage renewal areas were divided and the renewal priority of each area was determined. The results show that: (1) The differences in the development value of each built heritage are concentrated in the two aspects of supply potential and regional security power. (2) The demand potential, especially the demand for cultural renewal, is less different from region to region. (3) The higher comprehensive development value is observed in the urban core area. Based on the evaluation results of each element and the comprehensive analysis, we put forward the renewal mechanisms for the heritage development models in various regions. Finally, we select the most representative heritage sites with priority for renewal in each region, providing references for the protection and development practices of existing urban built heritage.