Managing Cultural Tourism and Heritage Sites in Urban Areas—Application of Q-Analysis to Europe

Tourism is a complex economic activity shaped by distinct local resources: culture, nature, industrial heritage, urban ambiance, place-based uniqueness, and geographical accessibility. The simultaneous governance and management of economic growth motives, preservation of the cultural heritage base, and respect for nature and ecological quality calls for an evidence-based and multi-faceted policy analysis that seeks to achieve a sustainable development among conflicting policy objectives. The present paper seeks to explore the feasibility of a sustainable balance for various heterogeneous cultural heritage areas in Europe (‘urban pilot regions’), with particular attention for sustainable local development characterized by circular economic objectives and an ecological balance strategy based on the principle of stakeholders’ co-creation. To that end, an extensive survey experiment was administered in the urban regions concerned, in which a wide range of management issues/questions related to environmental preferences and perceptions were posed to stakeholders and visitors. The data were analyzed by means of a novel respondent-oriented multivariate statistical tool, viz. Generalized Q-Analysis, which is suitable for handling big databases with many respondents. The paper shows that the application of the Generalized Q-Analysis to common survey data enriches the results from the application of the usual Q-Analysis. Furthermore, the study also highlights that, based on the views of the surveyed visitors, the tourist areas concerned are quite different from each other in attracting specific types of visitors. Functional specialization seems to be, therefore, an important anchor point for effective governance of urban tourism.