Creative tourism as a humanistic approach to regenerative tourism

Abstract

Creative tourism can be an effective platform to foster regeneration since it stimulates collaboration, exchange and local development. It highlights the local identity, promoting the preservation of intangible heritage and reinforcing distinctiveness. Through meaningful interactions, creative tourism stimulates ideas improving the repertoire of one another and impacting not only the local but also the external. Aiming to promote a small-scale tourism model, aligned with the territory’s specificities and focused on cultural, social, economic and environmental sustainability, creative tourism can contribute to improving the local quality of life. Thus, creative tourism could be successfully applied to regenerate a destination depleted by mass tourism or as a tool for regenerating a marginalised place with the potential to be a tourism destination. This chapter explores the ways in which in a small city context, a national-scale creative tourism network created within the research-action project called CREATOUR, forges new meaningful understandings of how tourism can catalyse the regeneration of local communities, through the activation of local culture. Perceiving local culture as a key element in creating uniqueness, the chapter discusses the emergence of five creative tourism models and how they contribute towards the regeneration of places, particularly small cities and rural areas.