There’s a sentence buried in Greg Richard’s report from this June’s ATLAS Conference that’s worth sitting with: destination management organisations are starting to call themselves placemaking organisations instead. It’s not a rebrand for its own sake. It’s a genuine shift in what these bodies think their job is. Not “get more visitors,” but “make this place better, for everyone who’s in it, whether they’re staying a night or a lifetime.”

That was the premise of the special track hosted in Leeds, run in the context of the CROCUS Project, and fourteen papers took a run at it from wildly different angles: a housing estate in East Germany, a music tradition in the Italian Apennines, an ABBA hologram concert in London’s West End. What holds them together is a question that turns out to be harder than it sounds. If culture and creativity are going to shape a place rather than just sell it, who gets to do the shaping, and who ends up living with the result?

When culture is asked to do repair work

Some of the papers weren’t really about tourism at all, not first. Robin Marlow’s paper on Chemnitz, the former East German city that held the European Capital of Culture title in 2025, looked at a specific project called the Kiosk des Unwissens, the Kiosk of Ignorance, set up for four weeks in the Fritz Heckert estate, a prefab housing development that emptied out and grew visibly bleaker after reunification. Residents dyed textiles, asked questions, showed up. It’s a strange thing to fold into a tourism conference, until you remember that Chemnitz won the title in the first place partly as a response to the racist protests that made international headlines in 2018. The 2 million visitors and 2,000 events are the headline numbers. The kiosk is the part that was actually trying to do something about a fractured place, using tourism infrastructure to create what the paper called “third spaces” for people who otherwise wouldn’t cross paths.

Mamelodi, outside Pretoria, is a starker version of the same problem. It’s a township of 1.5 million people, created by forced removals in the 1960s, with essentially no heritage visible on Tripadvisor. A team led by Charlene Herselman and colleagues used AI tools and oral history interviews to build a walking trail around the area’s jazz heritage, turning community testimony into StoryMaps layered onto Google Maps. They called part of the process “digital decolonization,” handing narrative control back to people whose history had simply never been written down anywhere a visitor could find it. Whether that label survives contact with a decade of actual use is a fair question, but the instinct behind it, that heritage has to be recorded before it can be shaped into anything, is hard to argue with.

The border, and the argument no one expected

CROCUS’s own fingerprints are clearest in Greg Richards and Leontine Onderwater’s paper, which took the project’s cross-border route work between the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany and ran it through a combined placemaking/placeshaping model. It’s Richards’ own framework merged with Ineke Horlings’ placeshaping model, aimed at understanding how resources, meaning and creativity get knitted together into something a community will actually recognise as theirs.

But it’s the residents surveyed by Iida Pyykkö and her Oulu University colleagues in the Torne Valley, the Finnish-Swedish border region, self-described by locals as a “borderless border,” who produced the finding I keep coming back to. Asked to weigh the impacts of cross-border cultural tourism, residents ranked quality of life above economic benefit. Not narrowly. Clearly. Given that destination marketing has spent decades leading every pitch with visitor spend, that’s not a footnote, that’s a challenge to the whole vocabulary. The authors are careful to note this might have something to do with already-comfortable Nordic incomes, which is fair, but it doesn’t make the finding less useful.

Down in Croatia’s Kvarner region, Dora Smolčić Jurdana and Elena Rudan were looking at a more familiar imbalance: 85% of tourism sitting on a narrow, crowded coastal strip while an inland region full of intact tradition goes largely unvisited. Their argument is essentially that the skills already exist. Rural residents who work coastal tourism jobs already know how to run a guesthouse or lead a tour. The problem is that no one has built a business model that routes any of that inland. Meanwhile, over on the Hungarian-Slovenian border, Ágnes Raffay-Danyi and colleagues were testing a related but subtly different idea, placeshaping rather than placemaking, because, as they put it, you’re not making something from nothing in a village with five hundred years of history behind it, you’re shaping what’s already there. One of their South Zala case studies involved selling literal bricks to fund the reconstruction of a demolished castle, which is either a brilliant piece of participatory fundraising or a slightly on-the-nose metaphor for the whole field. Possibly both.

Tourism as the thing that just happens to you

A genuinely lovely counterpoint came from Onna Rageth’s paper on Structuristic Art in Bregalia, an alpine valley on the Swiss-Italian border where Giacometti once lived, though none of his work stayed behind (it’s all in private hands). Structuristic Art is a technique invented by a Swiss artist in the 1980s: build an image up on canvas over twelve hours, using whatever materials you’ve got, open to absolutely anyone. There’s now a school for it in the valley. Crucially, the school exists for locals. Visitors show up from St Moritz because word gets around, not because anyone designed it that way. Tourism is a byproduct here, not the point, and Rageth’s argument is essentially that this ordering matters, that programmes built for residents first tend to hold up better than ones built for visitors first. Even when, especially when, visitors are the ones eventually funding a museum.

Leandro Pessina’s paper on the Quattro Province, the mountainous crossroads region between Turin, Milan and the rest of the Italian peninsula, sits in similar territory but with more visible strain. The area still plays traditional dance tunes on fife, müsa (a local bagpipe) and piano-accordion, mostly at festivals, and has tried the “house for one euro” trick that’s become a cliché of Italian village revival by now. Music tourism works, up to a point, as a niche draw and an identity anchor for a place losing population to outmigration. But Pessina’s interviews with local stakeholders surfaced the same tension every one of these projects eventually runs into: the more successful the festival gets at attracting outside attention, the more it risks becoming a performance of itself rather than the thing it actually was.

The technology question, and the honest anxieties

Two papers dealt head-on with what happens when digital tools enter the picture. Marco Scholtz and Kaat De Ridder’s “Participatory, Purposeful, Digitally Smart” framework, built from three linked Flemish and Dutch projects, makes an argument that sounds obvious until you notice how rarely it’s followed. Most heritage technology projects start by building an app, then go looking for a use case, instead of asking people what they actually want from an experience before any tool gets chosen. Their four-layer model, context, stakeholders, visitor preferences, then digital integration, in that order, is really just a formal way of insisting that the technology comes last.

Then there’s Naf Ahmed’s paper on the ABBA Voyage concert in London, which is doing something structurally different from everything else in the track. Digitally rendered avatars perform to a full house, generating roughly $1 million a week off an initial $150 million investment, and London gets to become “the city of ABBA” in the process, place branding by way of a band that split up in 1982. Ahmed’s more interesting move is the question underneath the spectacle: if this format works, and it clearly does, what stops every high-value destination from bidding for the next recognisable IP? The paper doesn’t answer that, but it names something the rest of the track only gestures at: creative placemaking can just as easily concentrate power in the hands of a franchise as it can hand meaning back to a community.

That tension between empowerment and extraction runs quietly under Karen Harris and CR Botha’s paper too, though they aim it squarely at a term the field has leaned on for fifty years. Working from ninety South African case studies, they argue that “community-based tourism” has been so thoroughly hollowed out that it now often describes projects with no functioning community behind them at all: chiefs consulted, communities not. Their proposed fix, which they call making “the B in CBT Bigger,” is basically a demand for clearer roles. Government should set direction and get out of the way, the private sector should bring funding and management skill, and “community” needs a definition precise enough that it can’t be used as decoration. Charlene Herselman’s second paper, on film-tourism sites like Outlander’s Scotland and Game of Thrones’ Dubrovnik, makes a similar point from the visitor side. Culloden battlefield has had to close areas off because of Outlander-driven foot traffic, some of it respectful, some of it people carving initials into trees. Popularity and preservation don’t automatically travel together.

Where this leaves the argument

Richards closes his report by pulling in a line from Raoul Bianchi’s keynote at the main conference, about how tourism research tends to study individual destinations in isolation, as though each one moves through its own private lifecycle rather than existing in relation to everywhere else. It’s a useful corrective for a field that talks a lot about “remote” places without asking remote from what. The EU’s own definition, rural areas with lower density and limited access to services, only makes sense in relation to the urban centres those areas are being measured against. CROCUS has been building its Living Labs around exactly that relational problem: not treating a remote village as a blank site waiting for content, but as a place already defined, in part, by its distance from somewhere else.

If there’s a single thread through all fourteen papers, it’s that cultural and creative tourism have stopped being a marketing layer applied on top of a place and have started being one of the tools that actually decides what a place becomes: its meaning, its social fabric, who gets to belong there. That’s a bigger job than the field has traditionally signed up for, and several of these papers are, essentially, early field notes on what happens when it’s taken seriously.

The European Journal of Tourism Research has now opened a special issue built directly around this same question, following on from CROCUS’s own 2025 publication on cultural and creative tourism in rural and remote areas. Abstracts are due 18 September 2026, to g.w.richards@tilburguniversity.edu.