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Town walls, walled towns and tourism: paradoxes and paradigms

The paradoxical relationship between tourists and town walls is examined in the wider context of the walled town tourism. Such towns may be paradigm cases for historic towns as attractions for heritage, urban and cultural tourism among the ‘flows and scapes’ of delocated global tourism. Widely distributed across the ‘old’ world and extant even in the ‘new’, town walls can be seen as the grim barriers between contested identities or as the emblems of the peaceful security of the town within. The paper draws on material gathered as part of a European Interreg IIIc network project – ‘ARCHWAY’. Walled towns and related monuments represent nearly 20% of the 890-strong 2009 world heritage list and half the ‘ARCHWAY’ towns have world heritage status or aspirations. To meet the economic and urban planning challenges, walled towns have developed a range of options for success in, or for surviving, tourism. Examples from across Europe and beyond are critically appraised in the light of the literature of historic and heritage town tourism. As historic towns with obvious signs of past conflict, walled towns point the way to examining urban heritage tourism with de-romanticised vision.