Mariapina Trunfio

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.

A cultural hybridisation approach to reinterpreting the integration-diversity dichotomy: the case of Guggenheim’s master branding Bilbao

This paper explores how urban actors leverage iconic branding as a cultural catalyst to fill the void left by the declining narrative of the nation. The global, deindustrialised service economy raises the cultural politics of the landscape, including heritage governance issues relative to spatial theory. The case analysis unpacks the convergence-divergence dilemma, particularly, how the Guggenheim master-brand transfer simultaneously changed the political dynamics and corroded Bilbao’s sense of place. It contributes to our understanding how a cultural hybridisation approach can help to reinterpret the ‘integration- diversity’ dichotomy embedded in iconic branding, particularly its impacts on urban socio-cultural, economic and political institutions.

E-Services Governance in Public and Private Sectors: A Destination Management Organization Perspective

In today’s “wired world” the public sector and private sectors face competing pressures of price rises and scarcity of “territory”. So far, the public and private sector knowledge domains have large developed separately. A destination Management Organization perspective can accommodate the production facilities and e-services governance to represent the interests of both the public and private sectors. The notion of short-term lets of the territory must be assessed against perceived outside threats, such as food scarcity, that require self-sufficiency to protect the long-term interests of both the public and private sector stakeholders’. This paper develops an e-services “interactive” governance model to bridge gaps by trustworthy relations in the context of decision making by network stakeholders. Subsequently, it applies this model to the Trentino case study for examining conceptual constructs based on embedded governance as a vehicle to balance heritage and innovation and knowledge dissemination. It concludes by summarizing the advantages and disadvantages of sharing information within a destination management organization context amongst the public and private sectors as a step towards “reclaiming the narrative of the commons”.

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.