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Urban and Regional Planning and Sustainable Cultural Tourism

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Tourism, Culture, and Heritage".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 August 2021) | Viewed by 9646

Special Issue Editor

Department of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, 2600 AA Delft, The Netherlands
Interests: history of architecture; urbanism and planning; global commodity flows and their impact on the built environment in cities and landscapes; port cities; petroleumscapes

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The COVID-19 pandemic has set into motion lifestyle changes that have hit cities and cultural heritage sites around the world hard. Tourism has largely stopped, and musea and world heritage sites have been closed down. Many historic cities, and their hotels, shops, and cultural institutions, are empty as cruises have been canceled, planes grounded, and tourists unable and unwilling to travel. Although there is a yearning to go back to the way things were before the pandemic, there is also an acknowledgment that the current situation holds opportunities for developing new urban planning strategies, including for sustainable development and sustainable cultural tourism practices that are needed in light of climate change. Climate change mitigation requires sustainable development, circular practices, and the use of traditional building materials to allow local communities to sustain heritage sites so that they are not completely dependent on international tourism. Multifunctional economic development can make communities more stable so that heritage sites can support themselves within their respective communities and not only rely on global tourism. Cultural practices need to be locally embedded, developed, and included in education for people of all ages and backgrounds. Innovative practices have emerged during shutdown to recover traditional practices, to develop blended financing, to encourage grassroots practices, or to make heritage sites and collections accessible digitally rather than physically and can inspire new approaches to anchoring cultural heritage and its practice in local communities. Urban planning can support sustainable development at multiple levels. It can provide the spatial framework, legal tools, economic and production systems, design narratives, or educational tools to make international and local tourism by sea and land a part of sustainable development in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

This Special Issue invites contributions from diverse disciplinary and geographical perspectives. Contributors are asked to propose papers on theories and (re)conceptualization of urban planning and sustainable cultural tourism as well as on concrete local interventions.

Contribution can, but do not have to, focus on the following topics:

  1. Planning sustainable development for world heritage sites;
  2. Participation and community development for sustainable tourism;
  3. Metalevel governance for sustainable cultural tourism;
  4. Digital archives, collections, and education and sustainable urban tourism;
  5. Planning for water-based sustainable tourism, including cruises;
  6. Traditional cultures and urban planning;
  7. “Hidden designers”, legal tools, financial incentives, land use, and other planning tools that can reshape tourism practices in space and time.
Prof. Dr. Carola Hein
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Sustainable development goals
  • Cultural tourism
  • Heritage
  • Urban planning
  • Circular practices
  • Climate change.

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

24 pages, 3713 KiB  
Article
Tourism as a Key for Regional Revitalization?: A Quantitative Evaluation of Tourism Zone Development in Japan
by Hyunjung Kim and Eun Jung Kim
Sustainability 2021, 13(13), 7478; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13137478 - 05 Jul 2021
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 4668
Abstract
Since the dawn of the 21st century, Japan has switched its national industry strategy from traditional industries—manufacturing and trading—toward tourism. Regional revitalization is a particularly important issue in Japan, and by uniting regions as an integrated tourism zone, the government expects an increase [...] Read more.
Since the dawn of the 21st century, Japan has switched its national industry strategy from traditional industries—manufacturing and trading—toward tourism. Regional revitalization is a particularly important issue in Japan, and by uniting regions as an integrated tourism zone, the government expects an increase in visits to tourism zones. This study quantitatively evaluates whether the regions that contain a tourism zone experience a significant increase in visitors by using a quasi-experimental pretest–posttest control group design. Additionally, it examines the effects of subsidies through regression modeling. The results indicated that the tourism zones that were comprised of a narrow region in the same prefectures experienced a significant increase in visitors. The subsidy on information transmission, measures for the secondary traffic, and space formation had a significant positive impact on the increase in visitors to these tourism zones. Implications on tourism policies, urban and regional development, and community development can be obtained through this study. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban and Regional Planning and Sustainable Cultural Tourism)
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15 pages, 3698 KiB  
Article
Urban Zoning for Sustainable Tourism: A Continuum of Accommodation to Enhance City Resilience
by Chung-Yim Yiu and Ka-Shing Cheung
Sustainability 2021, 13(13), 7317; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13137317 - 30 Jun 2021
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 3910
Abstract
While governments around the world are embarking on the path to recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, sustainable tourism planning is crucial, in particular in the hospitality sector, which enhances the resilience of destinations. However, many destination management models overlook the role of urban [...] Read more.
While governments around the world are embarking on the path to recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, sustainable tourism planning is crucial, in particular in the hospitality sector, which enhances the resilience of destinations. However, many destination management models overlook the role of urban zoning. Little is known about the impacts of land-use zoning on the hospitality and property industries, especially with the current disruption of short-term peer-to-peer accommodation like Airbnb. Euclidean zoning, also known as effects-based planning, has long been criticised in destination management for its exclusionary nature and lack of flexibility. With exclusionary zoning, property owners may only be able to use their land sub-optimally, and cities will be less efficient in responding to market changes in short-term and long-term accommodation demands, but planning intentions can be better controlled, and the property supply can be more stable. Taking Hong Kong as a noteworthy case, this study puts forward a conceptual framework that enables comparison of a novel zoning approach with the traditional zoning approach. This novel zoning approach encompasses both the short- and long-term rental sectors as a continuum of accommodation, ranging from hotels and serviced apartments to Airbnb and rental housing units under a unified regulatory and planning regime to enhance the switching options value. This novel zoning system can gear up the tourism sector with the rapid growth of the sharing economy and aligns with sustainable tourism to ensure long-term socioeconomic benefits to related stakeholders. We extract the data of Airbnb listings to construct the first Airbnb ADR Index (ADRI) by Repeat-sales method, and the results support our Switching Option Hypothesis. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban and Regional Planning and Sustainable Cultural Tourism)
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