Keywords

1 Introduction

The dynamic role of tourism for local economic development of both urban and rural areas is nowadays largely appreciated. Tourism is indeed one of the main drivers of the economy in EU and worldwide and is strongly connected with cultural resources. According to UNWTO 2018 report on Tourism and Culture Synergies [1], cultural tourism plays a major role in global tourism, representing about 37% of the total tourism sector, with an annual growth of around 15%. This highlights the importance of cultural heritage to support local sustainable development. For this reason, local communities need to put great emphasis on the preservation, conservation and restoration of cultural monuments and artifacts as well as to their local intangible cultural assets. On the other hand, the uncontrolled growth of tourism activities in specific “tourist hotspots”, also puts considerable pressure on the culture and environmental resources of these areas, as well as to day-to-day lives of residents.

In order to avoid these negative effects, some local communities and heritage experts have opposed tourism and its associated development. For this reason, EU and other organizations promote an alternative concept of Sustainable Cultural Tourism (SCT) [2]. SCT offers a new perspective, as it places cultural heritage, natural environment and local communities at the centre of decision making processes. It provides a solution to tackle the detrimental effects of mass tourism by capitalising on natural and cultural assets, by contributing positively to local development, by supporting economic activities, and by fomenting cohesion and cooperation among its stakeholders.

Nowadays, the cultural tourism imbalances indicate that there is a need to reform cultural and touristic activities considering their macro-regional impact. Tourism is strictly interconnected to a destination’s natural and cultural endowments, as well as local communities and stakeholders and its impact is far from only economic, but it also concerns the socio-cultural and environmental dimension as well. Force majeure events (e.g., Covid) and over-tourism has caused tremendous shifts in tourism trends and tourist expectations, with increasing demand for travel to places less well known, and more authentic travel experiences to immerse themselves in local cultures. The pursuit of authenticity—consisting of cultural and social identities, traditions, memories, intangible connections, local peculiarities, and rural landscapes—has, therefore, led communities and local, national, and European governments to seek novel ways to respond to new tourism demands. For rural areas, this shift creates a need for new strategies aiming to promote and valorise in a sustainable way their tangible and intangible resources [3]. Such strategies should bring together stakeholders of cultural heritage, tourism activities and local communities, enhancing social, environmental and economic benefits for all. Furthermore, they should employ technological features, smart strategies and the support of digital tools to provide knowledge and experiences about the local cultural values and meanings. According to EU [4], “The collaborative economy creates new opportunities for consumers and entrepreneurs. The Commission considers that it can therefore make an important contribution to jobs and growth in the European Union, if encouraged and developed in a responsible manner. Driven by innovation, new business models have a significant potential to contribute to competitiveness and growth”.

2 State of the Art

Research suggests that there is still a lack of consensus on the conceptualization and assessment of sustainable tourism development [5], particularly for rural areas. Previous EU projects, such as RURITAGE, IMPACTOUR, BESTMED or DESTIMED, have identified challenges regarding the sustainable development of cultural tourism, including: (i) the definition of cultural tourism, (ii) lack of relevant data (due to lack of interoperability, homogenization, sharing and availability), (iii) governance of tourism destinations with stakeholder multiplicity, fragmentation of competencies and coordination issues, (iv) lack of skills, knowledge and capacity, and (v) resource limitations [6].

Collaboration and community participation are crucial for securing sustainable tourism and highlight the need to listen and respond to the broad range of stakeholders’ voices, opinions, and concerns. These concepts dominated the discourse of sustainable-responsible tourism and gave rise to collaboration theory [7], as well as various types of community participation. Many scholars in both Western and emerging economies have employed these concepts, however, there is limited research on how they can be applied to rural areas, where tourism is in the early phase of growth. Recent research showed that, “while the stakeholders and local communities are willing to collaborate, challenges affecting their efforts include autocratic governance structures leading to mistrust, clash of responsibilities, inadequate funding for security, lack of tourism awareness and little respect for local culture” [8]. Research also showed that in rural areas there is a lack of social space and participation opportunities for vulnerable groups [9]. A participatory process is needed, based on the widest possible inclusion and overlapping consensus between different opinions, which will, therefore, be reasonable and accepted by all reasonable participants in deliberation [10, 11]. Therefore, deliberation requires at least showing a minimum of respect for the interlocutors, stimulating discussion between people of different backgrounds. The deliberation process insists on the most rational argumentation, but also on leaving particular interests for the common good and consensus [11].

Research on the sharing economy has almost exclusively focused on urban contexts in ‘advanced economies’, while sharing practices in rural, small town and ‘less advanced’ contexts have received far less attention [12]. There is a gap of exploring perspectives, knowledge and practices of sharing in the peripheries, beyond big sharing economy platforms. In addition, currently, almost all major collaborative economy platforms share the same disadvantage: content producers, prosumers and active user communities receive a very low share of the profits, while the owner company behind each platform exploits its users activities, data and personal information. In addition, most collaborative economy platforms focus on sharing private goods or services, without promoting co-creation.

The application of the concept of “smart” development in rural areas (also called Smart Villages) gradually receives increased attention, despite the fact that smart villages and their practices were introduced much later than smart cities [13]. People have many expectations for the sustainable development of rural areas through the smart village initiative and practices. New forms of ICT are essential to enhance the visibility and the promotion of tourism opportunities in rural areas. However, fragmentary and parochial visions typical of rural areas inevitably lead to heterogeneous approaches to planning and programming smart tourism products [14]. In addition, the successful integration of rural, smart and cultural tourism can be achieved only if there is agreement among the various stakeholders—including the local and regional administrators and the local community—to coordinate and encourage the promotion of local cultural resources.

3 A Co-Creation Ecosystem for SCT and Rural Development

In this section, we will present a new vision towards rural development by establishing and promoting a new co-creation ecosystem for SCT. The transition to the digital age and to sharing economy models constitute an extremely fertile ground for the implementation of new economic activities to create a virtuous circle from culture, tourism and heritage. Today’s rural areas’ development requires the involvement of all stakeholders from the value chain (science, business, society, government and entrepreneurs) and that the new digital technologies play an important role in the acceleration of this process. In the specific field of cultural tourism, the application of ICT technologies, data analysis and social innovation can create value for rural communities and give rise to new strategies in the local, regional or macro-regional level. Towards this goal, a multi-disciplinary and cross-sectorial ecosystem needs to be established, covering the technological, sociological and business aspects and bridging modern ICT tools with new bottom-up initiatives. These tools will allow communities to negotiate (i.e. online participatory tool), co design (i.e. business model canvas tool), co-create (i.e. SCT apps, tools and configurators) new engaging cultural products and services, and finally distribute them, ensuring a fair share of profits (i.e. digital marketplace tool). In this way, SCTIHs can become the center of innovation. The core components of the proposed ecosystem are illustrated in Fig. 1 and are briefly described in the following subsections.

Fig. 1
A flow diagram of S C T in rural areas. The four phases are community building, co-design and co-decide, co-create, and fair share of profits, evaluation, and identification of best practices.

The proposed co-creation ecosystem for SCT in rural areas

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3.1 Community Building: SCT Innovation Hubs

We propose to foster the development of SCT in rural areas using a participatory approach, involving local communities in the co-definition process and building on the cooperation between local stakeholders. Towards this aim, we propose to form SCT Innovation Hubs (SCTIHs), similar to EU’s Digital Innovation Hubs [15] or Online Communities ([16]) that will engage and involve all necessary stakeholders in a specific rural area. SCTIHs will perform research and innovation activities related to SCT within a public–private-partnership. They will be integrated through the co-creation, exploration, experimentation and evaluation of innovative concepts and technologies for rural smart tourism development. The main goal is to bring together knowledge from different fields to work on solutions that may have a strong social, economic, cultural, touristic or ecological impact. Each SCTIH will include local (in a broader sense) community members, including local vendors, residents, employees, students, etc. as well as representatives from key stakeholders, such as tourist organisations, IT experts and researchers, artists, manufacturers, tourists etc. Vulnerable and marginalised groups should also be well represented.

The main purpose of SCTIHs is to open communication, foster collaboration, share information and resources, to efficiently develop and quickly launch services, products and solutions that contribute to the sustainable development of cultural tourism activities in rural areas. Their value lies in the access to resources for the local communities, businesses, Cultural and Creative Industries, entrepreneurs/start-ups and the flow of information for the ecosystem’s stakeholders. This information flow creates more investment opportunities for the right institutions to connect with the right ideas for their businesses and portfolios, at the right time, and for the right reasons. In rural areas, this innovation ecosystem is often scattered, lacking the knowledge, infrastructure, and resources to efficiently support and improve innovation. Networking of rural innovation players is the key to the success of any rural innovation ecosystem. The mechanisms and governance framework put in place through the SCT Hubs will strengthen the cooperation of the cultural tourism stakeholders in rural areas, will boost and support innovation, and will allow rural businesses to have access to a comprehensive pool of talent, tools, data and services, enabling them to develop SCT services, products and solutions.

3.2 Online Participatory Platform

An open-source participatory platform is an important tool for online deliberation within SCTIHs. As an example, the DECIDIM platform [17] can be used and extended to cover this need. DECIDIM is a digital infrastructure for participatory democracy, built entirely and collaboratively as free software. It is developed in Ruby on Rails and allows users to create and configure a website platform or portal, to be used in the form of a social network, for democratic participation. The portal allows any organisation (e.g., association, NGO, cooperative, etc.) to create massive democratic processes for strategic planning, participatory budgeting, collaborative regulatory design, product co-creation and decision-making. It also enables the organisation of in-person meetings, signing up for them, publication of minutes, proposing points for the agenda and receiving notifications of the results. It can also help organise governing bodies, councils or assemblies, the convening of consultations and referendums or channelling citizen or member initiatives to impact different decision making processes. All together, DECIDIM makes it possible to digitally structure a complete system of participatory democratic governance for SCTiHs, enabling evidence-based understanding of the techno-social issues related to key aspects of the networked society. The platform offers extensions and customization possibilities and its codebase is actively maintained by a large community of contributors. For instance, the software can be extended to accommodate a “business model canvas” template, allowing the SCTIHs to define and evaluate new business model ideas.

3.3 Co-Creation of Smart Apps and Configurators for SCT

SCTIHs will be able to co-create new tangible or intangible products (e.g., an AR smart guide app featuring the highlights of the region) and services (e.g., a real cooking experience with locals).

In order to facilitate content creation by inexperienced users, a user-friendly web-based authoring tool will be designed for creating web/mobile CT apps for digital or AR experiences, by customizing and extending existing free or open source tools. For instance, based on the previously awarded Artful application [18], we can create a web configurator allowing inexperienced users to develop (configure) AR smart-guides, story-telling or game experiences using preconfigured templates. This configurator will provide an intuitive user interface with drag and drop interactions that facilitates the import of new digital content, including text descriptions or narrations, videos, interactions (e.g., hotspots or location-based) and other effects. Templates for different scenarios (open-air AR exhibitions, treasure-hunt games, etc.) will be provided for enhancing users’ engagement when visiting a rural area. The final products will be developed as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), ensuring compatibility with all modern mobile smartphones/browsers. In addition, they will support social features to enable end users (tourists) to share their feedback to the app.

Similarly, configurators for open-source travel apps may be co-created by extending and combining applications like: (a) Wanderlog [19] letting users create, update, and delete curated lists of destinations as well as view other users’ lists. (b) Travel Route Optimization apps (e.g., [20] based on the Travelling Salesman problem), can be configured to provide optimised touristic circuits using selected Points of Interest (POIs) that a person would like to visit. Such tools could be a valuable tool for promoting tourism and improving the overall tourist experience, provided that information regarding POIs is properly updated. (c) Artificial Intelligence (e.g., OpenAI APIs) can also be used to accelerate content creation (e.g. gather information related to Points of Interest at a specific location).

3.4 Digital Marketplace

A digital marketplace can be easily created using free/open source tools, such as the popular Wordpress CMS plugins (WooCommrce plugin for creating individual e-shops together with the Dokan plugin [21] for implementing a digital marketplace). Such tools can support multiple payment methods (e.g. PayPal or even crypto-currencies (Bitcoin), while crowdsourcing campaigns can also be supported by the WP Crowdfunding plugin [22]. Real-time splits in the payments to achieve a fair distribution of profits between all co-creators of a product or service is currently supported only in Dokan paid version, but can be added in the future. Alternatively, open-source blockchain-enabled digital marketplace can also be used, e.g., [23].

4 Conclusions

In this paper, we first review the recent state-of-the-art approaches for SCT in rural areas and identify related challenges. In order to meet challenges, we then propose a bottom up and inclusive ICT-based methodology that allows key stakeholders to design, co-create and market products in three steps: (a) Establish hubs active or potential stakeholders of cultural tourism in rural territories, (b) Co-create strategies, business models, tools and design cultural experiences together with all value chain stakeholders, and (c) Distribute the resulting products and services to a digital marketplace and split profits in a fair manner to all co-creators.