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Tourism is ruining cities all over the Earth, and it seems to be getting worse by the month. But what if you built traditional cities just to accommodate travelers? Japan did something very similar to that in the first two decades of the 17th century: the shukuba, or post town. 
A shukuba was a town deliberately planned with only one purpose: to feed, house, and then send travelers, officials, merchants and tourists on their way to the next stop along the line. Initially a couple of dozen wooden buildings along a highway for horses and foot traffic...
...they would soon grow, the largest had over a thousand buildings, shops selling travel goods and souvenirs, bars, restaurants, notaries, theaters, etc. Initially the shukuba were established to create a reliable support system for officials traveling the Kyoto-Tokyo route.
The people running these official rests stops were obliged to keep men and horses ready to assist officials, the bigger the shukuba the higher the burden. In exchange they would get privileges like tax levying, toll rights, the right to run postal offices etc.
High ranking officials would stay at honjin, fortified compounds guaranteeing their comfort and security, built almost like little palaces and paid for by the government in Edo (Tokyo). Many of these still remain today.
Lesser officials would stay at waki-honjin, not fortified, but still very nice. If there were few officials on the road, these would also accept business men and even tourists who could pay. They were havens of rest and quiet after a long day on the road...
...because the distance between each shukuba was exactly the distance that a man could cover on foot in one day's worth of walking, he would never fear being caught by night fall, and since the routes were quite crowded it was a good chance to gossip with travelers from all over.
Restaurants served standardized menus, but always with a side order of the local specialities, and usually food that was good for the road. There was something for every pocket or taste, and much of this food culture still exists, serving the same menus for millennia.
The shukuba was a place where merchants could pick up new interesting things to trade, where locals could sell produce, where traveling entertainers could find work (and fame!), and young folk from the villages could find employment: tourism and travel that nurtured the region.
A typical shop in a typical shukuba is the Nakamuraya in Narai. A two story machiya (town house) belonging to a comb maker. Made of wood with standard sized parts to a standard design, with a covered path to the large back garden with a fireproof storehouse.
What if we decided to try and save our historical sites and great cities of culture by building new towns for travelers: instead of bringing in 20 million tourists straight into the heart of Barcelona every year, what if we spread them out over a hundred small towns just as nice?
