Maria Della Lucia

Integrated planning for sustainable tourism and mobility. A tourism traffic analysis in Italy's South Tyrol region

Emerging tourist market trends are compelling destinations to consider mobility as an essential strategic component of sustainable tourism planning. Tourism mobility analysis is a tool available to policy-makers when developing integrated and effective sustainable transport and tourism policies. This paper introduces an innovative tourism-traffic analysis based on survey techniques which allows the identification of tourism-related components and an estimate of their environmental impact on a destination, information critical to the development of appropriate mobility management measures. This methodology was implemented in Italys South Tyrol region, an alpine province at the forefront of sustainable tourism and mobility innovation. The significant environmental impact of tourism traffic revealed in the destination justifies the innovative steps taken toward sustainable mobility in two pilot case studies covering eight communities. An exploratory desk analysis shows that neither the push – encouraging sustainable behavior – nor the pull – discouraging unsustainable practices – mobility measures adopted in these pilot areas decreased tourism flows; however, they did succeed in providing more environmentally sustainable means of transport, with reduced emissions. And in a majority of cases, tourism flows increased above the regional average. A range of problems with the existing methodology are described, along with key issues for future research.

Heritage and Urban Regeneration: Towards Creative Tourism

The question of how cities can capitalise on cultural legacy hybridisation to activate effective and sustainable urban regeneration has still not been fully answered. This chapter presents a conceptual framework based on public–private participation in cultural legacy hybridisation, designed to interpret the determinants and forms of urban regeneration and consider their possible implications for urban tourism. The framework’s application to a multiple case study analysis, focusing on three small and medium-sized Italian cities, has validated its interpretative capacity. In Pompei public investment in culture has proved to be almost entirely unproductive; in Trento public-driven regeneration has allowed for value creation through cultural heritage hybridisation; in Lecce stakeholder engagement in communities of practice is the driver of socio-economic value and innovation. Urban tourism in these cities is closely connected to the nature of their urban regeneration: cultural tourism in Pompei, its combination with creative tourism in Trento and innovative forms of tourism in Lecce.

The effects of local context on World Heritage Site management: the Dolomites Natural World Heritage Site, Italy

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the influence of local context on World Heritage Site (WHS) management. Building on the managerial literature about natural WHSs, protected areas and sustainable tourism, it explores the effects that tourism-driven socio-economic conditions have on stakeholder engagement in decision-making and governance both inside and neighboring a WHS. Mixed methods and tools collected case evidence at the lowest administrative level in Italys Dolomites natural WHS. Results show that UNESCO recognition seems to be creating a deeper divide between areas inside and those outside the WHS than already produced by the diversity of tourism development types. Within the WHS and where tourism-driven socio-economic well-being is already high, there has been reinforced stakeholder indirect participation in decision-making and raised expectations of further development. In contrast, it seems not to have affected the area outside the WHS or marginal destinations, either in terms of participatory decision-making, or of development, or of tourism as a development lever. There is strong belief in the value of WHS status, relatively little opposition to regulation, but a need for reduced reliance on financial incentives, and a better business culture. Preliminary managerial recommendations and suggestions on involving stakeholders more effectively are given.

Assessing the economic impact of cultural events: a methodology based on applying action-tracking technologies.

Cultural events have taken on a growing role in territorial and tourist marketing of cities and destinations. Their planning is a fundamental process because they contribute to the tourist and economic development of the territory. Assessment of the economic effects of the events becomes, therefore, an important managerial instrument of planning and control. The traditional approach for assessing the economic impact of a cultural event is based on data relating to preferences and intentions of participants collected through questionnaires. This article introduces an innovative methodology that applies action-tracking systems for collecting behavioral data on the fruition of the tourist destination offer. These data improve the estimates of the whole economic impact of cultural events calculated through Input-Output models (direct, indirect, and induced effects). The methodology has been formalized on the basis of the results of the RFID for Festivals relative to the 2008 editions of two international events in the town of Trento.

Governing Sustainable Tourism: European Networked Rural Villages

This chapter explores the relationship between the rural political economy and the development of tourism, including new media, as a policy intervention and potential solution for the socioeconomic development of rural and peripheral areas. Academic attention in the field of rural tourism has been largely self-referential. The field remains particularly focused on definitional issues, land and access management, and entrepreneurial development, as opposed to the broader rural context within which tourism serves as a policy intervention aimed at rural economic and social regeneration. From this current state, we try to draw lessons for governing rural and peripheral areas across the boundaries of diverse stakeholder communities, each with its distinctive identity, agendas and interests. Information and communication technologies and high speed passenger transportation have enabled managers to redraw a multitude of boundaries, simultaneously — a process which is accompanied by new forms of regulation, the connection of spaces and emerging patterns of poly-inclusion. At the root of poly-inclusion is the ‘issue [of] whether humankind should encourage alienation or participation’ (Go and Fenema, 2006, p. 71).

E-governance-based Smart Place Branding: Challenges and Implications for Local Identity and Cultural Entrepreneurship

This chapter theorizes how the ‘conceptual spaces’ created by the emerging Web 2.0-based tourism scenarios might be leveraged for harnessing cultural entrepreneurship within an e-governance framework for the systematic construction of smart, inclusive, sustainable place branding (Go and Covers, 2012). The genealogy of place harbours diverse ideas, the most salient ones being that place represents a particular perspective, that is, a path to the sacred place, often recreating the pilgrim’s journey and its three components of preparation, separation and return on the one hand, and its built form symbolizing the rite of passage and spiritual transformation on the other.

Case B: Culture-led Urban Regeneration and Brand Building in Alpine Italian Cities

In post-industrial societies the combination of knowledge (Scott, 2010), experience (Pine and Gilmore, 1999) and the digital economy (Zuboff and Maxmin, 2002) has made intangibles strategic assets for competitive advantage (Richards, 2011). The growing prevalence of immaterial and symbolic components in all forms of production meets the needs of complex individual personalities, thereby transforming consumption into patterns of experience and learning defined for, and participated in by, the user. The new Internet generation has defined a new capitalism that acts as a multiplier of these processes of dematerialization and symbolic value creation (Scott, 2000). This ‘distributed capitalism’ (Rifkin, 2011) allows organizations and individuals to interact widely and to participate in virtual communities (Funilkul and Chutimaskul, 2009) — in which interactions are not mediated solely by the market (Potts et al., 2008) — and to exchange and co-create knowledge-based resources on a global scale (Cooke and Buckley, 2008). The potential of technological infrastructure (its ubiquity and interactivity) combined with the characteristics of knowledge-based resources (non-rivalry and non-excludability) is increasingly blurring the boundaries between supply and demand in the co-creation of intangibles and multiplying the activities in which their transformation into economic and social value for the sake of individuals, enterprises and places’ growth and well-being can be experienced (Sacco, 2011; Sacco et al., 2013).

International Place Branding Yearbook 2010. Place Branding in the New Age of Innovation

In the 1990s, the rise of digital information technology and the Internet had fuelled a controversy about ‘the end of geography’ (GRAHAM, 1998). This book adds an important piece to the demonstration that location has become, on the contrary, more than ever important, even though location awareness has often become digitally mediated. The commoditization of ‘smartphones’ equipped with global positioning system (GPS) capacity, Google’s geo-portals and countless dedicated applications give people a nearly ubiquitous access to localized information. This digitized form of relation between people and place is called networked locality – or net locality by the authors. The book is organized into seven chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on maps. The application of crowdsourcing principles to the feeding of Web-based databases has democratized geographical information systems (GIS). Web-based applications such as Google Maps not only have revolutionized the way people use and generate maps, but also have made maps ‘an universal interface from which people access information’ (p. 19). Chapter 2 looks at the mobile phone, the prominent tool of net locality. It describes the history of the critical relation between the mobile phone and location. Today’s GPS-enabled smartphones have generated a myriad of location-based applications. The book places particular emphasis on ‘mobile annotation’, which is the capacity to attach information to particular places. WikiMe provides smartphone users with Wikipedia articles selected on the basis of their actual location. Other applications aggregate blog posts or tweets on a locational basis. Mobile devices themselves become ‘location intelligent’: Apple’s iPhone can automatically reconfigure its home screen by selecting the applications that may be the most useful, according to the new geographic environment. Chapter 3 is on location-based social networks (LBSN) and mobile games (LBMG). LBMGs such as Botfighters or Can You See Me Now? are played in a combination of a real space (a given city) and a virtual space displayed on a mobile phone. Mogi (Japan) is basically a treasure hunt that allows users to see the location of other players on their mobile screen. Chapter 4 focuses on the transformation of cities and urban space by net locality. The authors point out that urban citizens equipped with mobile location-aware devices commonly ‘navigate two spaces simultaneously’ (p. 86), to the point that the real space and the digital space consolidate into a unique, hybrid space. The book provides a thorough discussion about social relations in public space, and how these relations are transformed by the use of net locality. On the one hand, mobile phones enable users to escape from public space and establish a private relation with a distant person. On the other hand, the ability to retrieve digital information attached to a given place, and to find other persons located nearby, may be seen as an enrichment of the relation to this place. What we are witnessing is a recombination rather than a dissolving of public space. Chapter 5 offers a look at community. Does the use of digital technology have any positive or negative effects on civic and political engagement? Does it change the geographic scale of this engagement? There is no simple answer. Mobile phone and Webbased applications ‘increases social connectivity and social isolation at the same time’ (p. 107). Presence on Facebook per se is rarely the ultimate goal. Some studies demonstrate that Web-based social networks may help to develop and strengthen communities of neighbours, family and friends. Net locality makes it possible for the emergence of ‘hyperlocal news’ displayed by online newspapers and websites. Net locality also favours some form of Government 2.0. For example, FixMyStreet or SeeClickFix may be used by local governments to draw reports from citizens. Chapter 6 is about privacy and surveillance, a hotly debated social and political issue generated by the mass diffusion of digital technology and applications such as Google’s Street View. The ability of tracking and being tracked is accompanied by ‘dystopianOrwellian fantasies of total surveillance’ (p. 133). But modern surveillance is characterized rather by an extreme dispersal of power. People do not know who is tracking who, given the emergence of ‘a model of decentralized and all-encompassing surveillance in which all the individuals in the network know the position of the others’ (p. 143). Chapter 7 examines the linkage between globalization and net locality. Digital technology is a major driver of globalization. However, this book explains, Regional Studies, Vol. 45.10, pp. 1403–1405, November 2011