Why isn't Leicester twinned with Abbottabad? Those places have got so much in common. Both face stern economic challenges. Both are desperate to attract investment and tourism. And both have been the resting place of the mutilated remains of a notorious villain – who, in both cases, some say has been misjudged.

There are differences of course: Leicester's dead guy, Richard III, belongs to a very different historical era from Osama bin Laden (who met his end in Abbottabad) – it was no less brutal but the distance of time has allowed it to become picturesque. And, perhaps consequently, Richard III is a little further along the path of reputational rehabilitation than Bin Laden. Also Richard III didn't actually die in Leicester but was carried there dead, while Osama bin Laden was removed from Abbottabad post-mortem, leaving no possibility of infra-car-park skeletal jackpots for the city's future mayors. But the main difference is in how the two towns are making use of their respective celebrity corpses.

"This project has nothing to do with Osama bin Laden," is how Syed Aqil Shah, sports and tourism minister in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, last week described Abbottabad's latest plan to attract visitors, an "amusement city", complete with a zoo, paragliding club and water sports facilities. But Sir Peter Soulsby, the mayor of Leicester, isn't soft-pedalling Richard III to quite the same extent, announcing the ex-monarch's public reburial in Leicester cathedral, the opening of a new Richard III museum nearby and "In the meantime we have a small but excellent temporary exhibition… telling the story of Richard, the search for his grave and it even has an exact copy of his skull."

There are currently no plans for an exact copy of Osama bin Laden's skull to be the centrepiece of the new attractions at Abbottabad. Instead, there's talk of a ski ramp. It seems the city is trying to distance itself from its famous former resident. The house where Bin Laden died, far from being considered for a blue plaque, has actually been demolished to avoid the area becoming a place of pilgrimage for those keen on terrorism. Abbottabad is refusing to become synonymous with one murderous dead guy. Meanwhile Leicester is jumping at the chance.

The Abbottabad approach could be win-win: while ostensibly reclaiming the town for more mainstream holidaymakers, there's nothing to stop the new park benefiting from Bin Laden pilgrims too. However ghoulish or pro-al-Qaida your tastes, there's only so long you can look at the rubbly remains of a concrete compound before you start to think about lunch. And, after lunch, there'll be a wide range of other activities to tempt you: "a heritage park, wildlife zoo… adventure and paragliding clubs, waterfalls and jogging tracks", according to Mr Shah. They might get into it. Center Parcs would probably get a bit more chance custom if it ran a shuttle bus from where Fred West lived.

Anything specifically Bin Laden-themed would be even more of a turn-off to his fans than it would be to the rest of us. I get the impression that most al-Qaida enthusiasts are pretty down on commercialism and branding, and any attempt to Disneyfy Osama is likely to be more distasteful to them than a Bin Ladened Mickey Mouse to a midwestern senator. The only way you could design a park that had any chance of tempting an OBL buff to have a go on the dodgems would be if you explicitly stated that: "This project has nothing to do with Osama bin Laden."

Like the last Plantagenet king's battered corpse, the surface of the Earth is covered with wounds caused by various historical encounters. The sites of battles, murders, genocides, plagues, sieges, crucifixions and reality TV show planning meetings bespatter the planet. Should we commemorate them with respectful museums, temples and cathedrals? Should they be forgotten and left to nature and future car park builders?

Or, as in Abbottabad, should those wounds be soothed with the Savlon of an amusement park – a place where those who wish to remember, forget, celebrate or condemn the reason for the area's notoriety can eat candyfloss and go paragliding together? Would Alton Towers not make more sense if it turned out to be on the location of some kind of slaughter? Would the site of the wreck of the Mary Rose not be brightened up by a windsurfing academy? Here are some suggestions of other historically scarred locations that could be turned into commercial beauty spots.

Shooting-of-Abraham-Lincoln World



This would be built on the site of the shooting of JF Kennedy and would combine rides and amusements with a museum explaining the circumstances of the assassination of the earlier president. This would greatly reduce the pain and shock that people still feel about the death of the USA's young and popular 1960s president by subtly making the point that lots of presidents get shot.

Highland Clearances Designer Village



It was a time of betrayal which made of the Scottish Highlands the wilderness we know today. A people were driven off their land and their cries of anguish echo down the centuries. A bit of retail therapy is long overdue. Amid the bleak windfarms of Caithness, a Bicester Village-style collection of designer outlets would attract visitors and transform the local economy. In time, there'll be fairground rides, a multimedia zone and buggy trips out into the countryside where teenagers get to fire air rifles at real sheep – but the retail would come first, if only because of the ready-made sale pun in the name of the historical event from which we're trying to divert attention. Maybe, in time, what once stood for the suffering of an entire nation will come to mean nothing more woeful than heavily reduced designer shoes.

Waterworld

Built at the rough location of the sinking of RMS Titanic, this spectacular watersports and rides complex, constructed around the framework of a former North Sea oil rig, would take as its theme the eponymous 1995 Kevin Costner aqua-flop. The central roller-coaster would be in the shape of a graph comparing the financial fortunes of that film and the James Cameron blockbuster Titanic, released only two years later, the spectacular financial success of which surely made the sinking it dramatised a net gain for humankind in the minds of all but those most morbidly obsessed with the sanctity of human life.