Smart Participatory Methodologies for Sustainable Cultural Tourism in Rural Areas

Abstract

Rural areas encompass an abundance of cultural and natural heritage that offers great potential for attracting tourism. Nevertheless, many of these regions are neglected and deserted, facing many hard problems like limited job opportunities, poverty, low literacy rates, and a lack of basic infrastructures. In order to deal with these problems, we need to boost sustainable development by promoting participatory methodologies, engaging all interested stakeholders (public authorities, tourism organizations, cultural and creative industries, local communities, marginalised social groups, etc.) in novel co-creation of new touristic products and services (including real, digital or hybrid experiences). Using effective local and remote stakeholder engagement strategies as well as by adopting modern ICT technologies for developing high added—social, educational or economic-value products and services is a key element for boosting cultural tourism in such areas. In this paper, we first review recent state of the art practices and methodologies for Sustainable Cultural Tourism (SCT) in rural areas based on participatory approaches and modern ICT technologies. The proposed methodology first brings together all relevant key stakeholders to form hybrid (both real and online) communities (“SCT Innovation Hubs, SCTIHs”). We then formulate a concept for the establishment of a multi-disciplinary and cross-sectoral co-creation ecosystem for SCTIHs, based on (a) a participatory platform for consultation, decision-making and business model canvas creation, (b) a set of easy-to-use advanced smart apps/configurators to facilitate co-creation of new engaging hybrid cultural tourism products and services and (c) a digital marketplace to distribute these products, ensuring a fair distribution of profits for the co-creators and facilitating evaluation and identification of best practices. The main contribution of this study is to identify current challenges for SCT in rural areas and attempt to meet them by proposing a bottom-up and inclusive ICT-based methodology for co-design and co-creation.