As travel is gradually regaining momentum, the UNESCO UNITWIN Network "Culture, Tourism and Development" is pleased to announce that the Network's seventh conference will be held in person at the University of Primorska in Slovenia. Recently, both tourism and World Heritage sites have experienced dramatic changes in their environmental, technological, economic and social conditions. These new challenges call for new perspectives, new strategies and new solutions for more resilient and sustainable tourism in World Heritage sites.
Meanwhile, innovation is becoming a crucial dimension of sustainable development in many sectors, including tourism. Recent studies on innovation in tourism often focus on innovative technologies, strategies and service design. However, the potential for tourism innovation, especially for World Heritage sites, has not been fully explored and is rarely considered from an interdisciplinary perspective.
World Heritage sites can foster sustainability-oriented innovation by using not only new technologies, but also new visitation and communication strategies, new methods for measuring impacts, new approaches to site and infrastructure planning and design, new social and institutional forms of collaboration and networking, and more.
The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars and managers from the tourism and heritage sectors to discuss new concepts, needs, tools, trends and strategies for better planning and management of World Heritage tourism in times of uncertainty.
Its objectives are:
- to support and promote the concepts, principles and objectives of UNESCO and UNESCO UNITWIN Network 'Culture, Tourism, Development' (brochure available here),
- to address tourism innovation issues in line with the principles and objectives of the World Heritage and Sustainable Tourism programme of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre,
- to promote an open, multidisciplinary debate on a responsible and ethical vision of tourism as a vector for the sustainable development of regions,
- to stimulate the debate on new tourism strategies and projects for World Heritage sites in the framework of the objectives of the Sustainable Development Goals (https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment )