The use of intangible heritage and creative industries as a tourism asset in the UNESCO creative cities network

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Abstract

The creative economy has been recognized as key in urban development and planning, which the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) consolidates. While benefiting from the label, the tourism sector also plays a fundamental role in the creative strategy. This paper explores how intangible heritage and creative industries can work as a tourism asset for creative cities and thus participate in their development. An NVivo thematic content analysis of all the tourism-related actions listed in the UCCN reports was performed to identify what types of cultural tourism products and actions are linked to the creative cities and to understand how they relate to their UNESCO creative fields to detect gaps and potentials. Tourism activity represents 17% of the total actions listed in the creative cities’ reports, mostly concentrated in the Crafts & Folk Art field. The empirical results highlight tendencies that can be applied and adapted to future destinations with intangible assets on their territory and that want to work with the creative industries. Thus, this paper unveils an underexplored potential of synergies between two important economic and creative activities.

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Tourism and COVID-19: impacts and implications for advancing and resetting industry and research

Marianna Sigala (2020)

The paper aims to critically review past and emerging literature to help professionals and researchers alike to better understand, manage and valorize both the tourism impacts and transformational affordance of COVID-19. To achieve this, first, the paper discusses why and how the COVID-19 can be a transformational opportunity by discussing the circumstances and the questions raised by the pandemic. By doing this, the paper identifies the fundamental values, institutions and pre-assumptions that the tourism industry and academia should challenge and break through to advance and reset the research and practice frontiers. The paper continues by discussing the major impacts, behaviours and experiences that three major tourism stakeholders (namely tourism demand, supply and destination management organisations and policy makers) are experiencing during three COVID-19 stages (response, recovery and reset). This provides an overview of the type and scale of the COVID-19 tourism impacts and implications for tourism research.