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Heritage shopping villages are becoming increasingly commonplace in rural North America. Their creation reflects the demands of post‐modern consumers to purchase symbolic capital in the form of unique products and experiences reflecting a bygone era. Entrepreneurs have responded to this by commodifying heritage and tradition; a process that leads to the creation of new landscapes and a perceived destruction of the old. This transformation has been described in the model of creative destruction (Mitchell 1998). In this paper the model is applied to Old Niagara‐on‐the‐Lake, a heritage shopping village located in southern Ontario, Canada. Data on functional change, visitor numbers and residents' attitudes are analysed for the period 1950–1998. It is concluded that historic Niagara‐on‐the‐Lake is in the early stages of ‘advanced destruction’; one characterized by major investment, large numbers of visitors and partial destruction of the rural idyll. Results of this analysis confirm that while the basic premise of the model is sound, modifications are required to accommodate some of the study's findings.
Mitchell et al. (Fri,) studied this question.