Tourism and everyday urbanism: negotiating the contestation in case of historic core of Udaipur

Abstract

Tourism is an important, even vital, source of income for many regions and countries. Increased leisure time and changes in lifestyle and consumption have given renewed importance to tourism. Particularly for historic cities where tourism acts as an important cultural and economic resource. Urban tourism affects cities in an often subtle, yet pervasive manner. Tourism and urban everyday life are deeply connected in a mutually constitutive way. As a result, the tourism shaping the contemporary cities not only takes place at crowded sights, famous museums, and designated neighborhoods, but pervades the city. Tourism is conceived on global terms and manifests itself on local sites, creating transformations in host territories, promoting new ways of using space and modifying cultural landscapes as well as the territoriality of the tourism destination called as touristification which means the process of change in urban forms and functions derived from the implementation and growth of tourism activity. Thus, the aim of this thesis is to contribute to resolving and understanding the ‘sites of conflicts’ or ‘contested landscapes’ between host community and tourist visitors in the historic city tourist destinations. Using tourism to make better places for people to live in and better places for people to visit. The aspiration is to use the tourism rather to be used by it. This could be understood though series of interrelated strands of work and analyzing them as the city has pursued and proposing strategies in making tourist activities more sustainable. For this purpose, the socio-cultural dimension of Udaipur will be examined which has witnessed transformation at massive scale, changing the morphological conditions, pattern of land use, zones of contact and sociability, public interaction, and spatial narrative of the city. The handicrafts and other industries have brought in migrants, creating a situation of touristification in the old clusters of the city which leads to transformation. However, this transformation lacks holistic understanding of the urban development, reflecting inadequacy to be able to execute them in an integrated manner. While certain areas have managed to attract the newer forms, the others still struggle to meet the required infrastructural plug-ins Thus, the intend of this thesis is to holistically integrate the historic city and tourism to become a tourist friendly hub that benefit both the locals and tourists with tourism as a potential parameter resolving through urban design all sort of conflicts or contestations that are present in the precinct. By reviving and regenerating the precincts for improving the built and natural environment by improving the wellbeing of locals and preserving the cultural identity, economic development to rejuvenate the art and craft of the communities and to create contextual design spaces that will address the territorial, temporal, and experiential dynamics of space.