Resource information
The paper presents the key objectives
for the rehabilitation of historic centers or medinas in the
Middle East and North Africa as elaborated by the World Bank
on the basis of twenty years of past and present lending and
technical assistance operations to the governments of the
region. These are: 1) the conservation of the urban and
cultural heritage; 2) the local economic development of the
historic city; and 3) the improvement of the living
conditions of the resident population. The paper presents
some innovative ways to classify the contemporary users of
the medinas into different catagories which then become the
market segments to reach via the rehabilitation initiatives
given the readically changed present role of historic cities
as urban cores of much larger urban agglomerations.The paper
reviews the financial and fiscal instrucments that can be
used to mobilize the necessary resources, including the
roles of scaled up private sector investments and of
internaitonal development financing in support of national
and local governments. As sustainale culutral tourism I sput
forth as the main economic rationale for investment of
financial reosurces in medina rehabilitation, the paper also
presents an innovative multi-vriteria index to determine the
tourism potential of historic cities in the region, which
has been recently used in the case of Morocco for a national
strategy for the rehabilitation of its historic cities.
