Competitiveness of Heritage Sites: A comparison between Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Venice and Oude Kerk in Amsterdam

The presence of outstanding cultural assets is not always a synonym of tourism and local development. This means that the competitiveness of a destination or a site is also related to other factors, which have been studied and gathered within respective theoretical frameworks by different researchers, focusing the urban destination (Van den Berg, Van der Borg, Van der Meer, 1995), the site level (Jansen-Verbeke, 2012), and the relationship between heritage conservation and tourist use (McKercher, Du Cros, 2002). In the present paper, these three different models have been applied to two cases: Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Venice and Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. Two flexible spaces, recently restored, they are both important on the community level for their past function and modern adaptive re-use. Results demonstrate the usefulness of the models in offering an operative tool to evaluate the site on its own, but also their limits in a network destination governance perspective: thus they open to models integrations and future research in this domain.