Fuori Luogo Journal of Sociology of Territory, Tourism, Technology

Embracing Responsible Tourism: Exploring New Frontiers in Sustainable Travelling

2024-04-27T08:32:45+00:00

Cohabiting the Territory: Responsible Tourism as a Practice of Hospitality and Community Care

2024-04-27T08:30:28+00:00

The study of tourism is one of the privileged gateways for understanding the territory, not only from an economic point of view. Tourism plays an essential role in the social and spatial dialectic that assigns meaning to places: on the one hand, it feeds the individual and collective imaginary through the production of icons and representations; on the other hand, it shapes places, which become "touristy" through visible transformations that spatialize those same images. Since the 1970s, various observers have denounced the tourist phenomenon as a new form of alienation, environmental destruction or imperialism. In the wake of these and other calls for the need to rethink and govern an ever-growing industry, the so-called responsible tourism has emerged as a mode of travel that meets and respects the needs of travelers and host regions while protecting and enhancing the opportunities of specific territories. Starting from a reflection on the dimensions, impacts and changes taking place in one of the phenomena characterizing contemporary times, this article, as well as the special issue it introduces, takes as a case study IT.A.CÀ_migrants and travelers, the first festival at the European level focused explicitly on the theme of responsible tourism. The journey through the different editions of IT.A.CÀ_migrants and travelers allows us to assess assumptions, outcomes and future potential of experiences and practices that in recent years, through participatory processes of sharing, co-designing, dialogue and experimentation, have sought to combine the sustainability of tourism with the well-being of citizens, imagining a valorization of the territory that promotes the transition to a sustainable cohabitation of the Earth.

Ethics and Tourism. Conceptual Preliminaries

2024-04-27T08:30:14+00:00

The article explores the ideas of "ethical tourism", "conscious tourism", "responsible tourism" and "sustainable tourism", identifying the peculiarities of each of these expressions, in order to offer a theoretical framework in which they should no longer be considered as synonyms, but autonomous categories useful for identifying "good" tourism.

Responsible Tourism as Strategy for Implementing Transformative Education for Global Citizenship

2024-04-27T08:28:34+00:00

This contribution investigates the educational implications of responsible tourism with a view to promoting transformative education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship. After a brief overview of the theoretical and historical framework of the notion of transformative education in relation to Global Citizenship Education and education for Sustainable Development, this paper highlights the contribution of responsible tourism as an informal education practice. Some examples of transnational educational tourism for Global Citizenship Education are then provided and analysed. Particular attention is paid to the case of international volunteer tourism (also defined as “voluntourism”), highlighting its opportunities and limitations. The conclusion describes some of the pedagogic preconditions that help educational tourism to contribute to learning global citizenship, depending on the type of education, tourism and global citizenship activated in designing educational tourism programmes.

Looking for Experiences in the Inland Areas: Walking in the Bolognese Apennines

2024-04-27T08:26:19+00:00

The contribution starts from point 2 of the I.Ta.Cà.’s manifesto about the Tourist as a (con) temporary citizen, and it focus on the growth of “experiential tourism”: in other words, the search for a unique and authentic experience in the holiday, the basic importance of human relations and the possibility of multisensory experiences (involving sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste), as well the direct and participant knowledge of local identity. This new scenario calls into question many regions that can enter the tourism market by making use of the infinite possibilities offered by the network and the media, even more important in this pandemic period and for the Italian marginal areas (Aree Interne). This contribution explores the walking sector in the Bolognese Apennines using, in addition to a bibliographic and website search, ten interviews with walkers, guides, members of local institutions and experts in this sector. An important progress has emerged in recent years thanks also to the role of I.Ta.Cà., both in walkers’ flows and in the development of public-private networks to manage them, but also critical issues in monitoring the phenomenon and in strengthening interactions between tourists and local actors during and after the trip.

The Role of Local IT.A.CA' Networks in Territorial Development Processes. An Exploratory Study Starting from a Transcalar Reading

2024-04-27T08:26:10+00:00

IT.A.CÀ festival represents an innovation for at least two reasons: on one hand, the festival’s vision aims to boost the progressive awareness of the tourist/host, here intended as “temporary citizen”, as she/he experiences a place; on the other hand, the organization structure is based on a complex networking system made up of vertical (among national committee and local networks) and horizontal (among local stakeholders) ties. Through the analysis of reporting documents and other documentation produced by the festival organizers since 2009, as well as surveys, the research studies IT.A.CÀ’s multi-level network structure. The aim is not only to achieve a better understanding of the functioning and rooting processes, but also to clarify if and how the involvement of local stakeholders within IT.A.CÀ’s nationwide network affects the spread of a new way to conceive tourist destinations. More specifically, we suggest that local networks linked to IT.A.CÀ can be intended as a driver for social innovation at local level, whether they stem a virtuous auto-poietic process according to which synergies among network members favour new opportunities for cooperation and shared project design.

Rethink the Inland Areas. A Question of Imagination?

2024-04-27T08:25:43+00:00

The pandemic context has triggered a different narrative in Italy compared to the usual one linked to the image of inland areas. No longer understood only as problems or spaces of lack, the inland areas have become opportunities for a new approach to sustainable development, capable of overcoming the socio-territorial polarisation between urban centres and peripheral realities (Fenu, 2020). However, the return to the countryside, fuelled by generic proposals on the immediate and indistinct repopulation of Europe's rural areas and by an idealised narrative that contrasts the amenity of bucolic life with the chaos of the city, as well as nostalgia for the past with urban modernity, appears simplistic. In fact, contemporary crises clearly show - the recent Pandemic is only the latest example - the socio-ecological relations that trigger them, making it possible to recognise the structural, complex and epochal character of the phenomena, beyond interpretations that frame them as circumstantial and provide inadequate answers (Moralli, Allegrini, 2020). These relations, by shifting from the global to the local, make it possible to frame local experiments as the only possible solutions against global and generic ones. More generally, they open up spaces for a re-signification of the imaginary (Carmagnola, Matera, 2008), and in particular for a reflection on the anthropocentrism of the Anthropocene itself; offering the possibility of reinserting human action within a chain of agency involving multiple and heterogeneous species, both human and non-human (Latour, 2020). Starting from a theoretical introduction on imaginary, inland areas and new narrative practices, the paper will then present some concrete examples of grassroots territorial design that took place within the IT.A.CÀ Festival of Responsible Tourism, capable of providing alternative symbolic and communicative meanings on the Italian 'marginal' and 'inland' landscapes. These examples will show how inland areas can thus become a real opportunity to design more solid and inclusive social infrastructures also starting from the language through which the territory is described and codified. First of all, by deconstructing incoherent media and political frameworks, but also by triggering trust in innovative regeneration processes from below and releasing living from the condition of permanence in order to link it rather to the concepts of care and interaction between bodies and inhabitant species (Barbera et al., 2020).

Tourism Practices in the Inland Areas of the Abruzzo Apennines. The Challenges of the Tourism Promotion and Enhancement Strategy of the Terre della Baronia District

2024-04-27T08:23:47+00:00

The paper explores the tourist promotion strategies of a territory in the Abruzzo Apennines using the lens of proximity tourism, in order to reflect whether the increase in the tourist flow in the area recorded in the last two years can trigger virtuous mechanisms aimed at a better tourist management.

The first section proposes a theoretical reflection on proximity tourism while the second problematizes the nature of the inner areas of the Abruzzo region and the potential for its territorial development in terms of tourism, with a specific focus on the Terre della Baronia District, a territory that is part of the Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga National Park which experienced a real explosion of domestic tourism in the years 2020 and 2021, following the reduced international mobility induced by Covid-19.

Should I stay or should I go? Challenges and Opportunities in Music-based Public Engagement

2024-04-27T08:23:36+00:00

This paper critically reflects on the researcher’s effort to stimulate public engagement around the themes of inclusivity and sustainable tourism through arts-based approaches. This effort resulted in a music show on mobilities, tourism and cultural diversities performed at the IT.A.CÀ festival in Bologna[1]. Here, a songwriting-based celebration of values such as openness and inclusivity was coupled with an attempt to share with a wider audience what are the main challenges of researchers working on sustainable tourism development, thus promoting dialogue and exchange of ideas. Presenting the main obstacles and opportunities encountered, the paper performs a critical evaluation of the intervention with the aim to improve future music-based contribution to the festival I.TA.CÀ and other public engagement occasions.

[1] A sample of the show can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNnwzONhsPE

Which IT.A.CÀ for Naples? A SWOT Analysis Approach

2024-04-27T08:23:19+00:00

Naples has a rich and suggestive artistic, historical and cultural heritage. This characterization makes it one of the most attractive Italian tourist cities. Starting from 2018, the IT.A.CÀ Festival has also been included for two years in the already dense calendar of tourist events of the regional capital of Campania. It is one of the major Italian Festivals aimed at promoting responsible tourism and enhancing local realities.

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of an action-research conducted by OUT (University of Naples' Research Center on Tourism) aimed at analyzing the impacts that the Festival has had on Naples.

The study involved the main representatives of associations, institutions and local bodies that organized the past Neapolitan editions of IT.A.CÀ. More specifically, using the SWOT analysis tool, the research identified the strengths and opportunities associated with the event, but also the weaknesses and threats, to individuate a number of recommendations for its realization in Naples.

Practices of Community and Place Narratives for IT.A.CÀ Salento 2021. The Case #39 of A.Lib.I. Teatro

2024-04-27T08:22:22+00:00

The paper intends to problematize the relationship between community narrative practices and territorial identities, investigating the capacity of the former to influence the social perception of places and their development. Translating this relationship of influence into a valorisation practice means understanding that the ability to know how to read a story in places makes a difference among stakeholders today, as it determines a culturally sustainable development plan, through the use of practices that steer the direction of cultural and economic growth of a territory and that at the same time determine the possibility for local communities to re-appropriate a common narrative-cultural matrix. Within the framework of these considerations, there are some particular projects conceived and realised within the framework of the I.ta.cà. Responsible Tourism Festival, which since 2008 has intercepted and made its own the desire to propose sustainable travel models attentive to the involvement of communities and the sustainable development of territories. This is particularly the case of the stage of I.ta.cà. Salento 2021, which saw the realisation of a rich and complex dramatised itinerary among the Salento localities of Marina Serra, Tiggiano, Lucugnano, Tricase, Tricase Porto, Biotopo delle Vallonee, Porto Museo, and Castiglione d'Otranto del Serra Mito. The event also included and offered to the public a performative restitution by the cultural association A.Lib.I. (Artisti Liberi Indipendenti), which has been working in the Salento area since 2013, mostly through theatrical performances and dramatisations aimed at the valorisation and narration of local material and immaterial sediments. In particular, by means of a semi-structured interview with director Gustavo D'Aversa, an attempt was made to investigate the social implications of their work and of the community performance entitled #39 by Walter Prete, which recounts a complex chapter of local history, the story of the local refugee camp (Displaced Persons Camp), active in Tricase during the Second World War, from 1943 to 1948. The performance was entrusted to local people, volunteer and non-professional actors, who told contemporary fellow countrymen about the difficulties that arose in their town with the arrival of the Jewish refugees. A tale from the people of Tricasini for the people of Tricasini, which proposes an experimental way of telling the story of the territory and for this reason stands as an interesting case study for reflecting on the opportunity, through narrative practices, to intercept and satisfy the needs and desires of a community and to attempt to compose a mapping of cultural instances to which to offer answers.

Participatory Guarantee Systems: Co-Defining Agricultural Practices for Food Sovereignty

2024-04-27T06:31:15+00:00

This article aims to frame Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGSs) in the evolution of relations between (urban) consumers and (rural) producers in Italy in the light of the food sovereignty aspirations of Alternative Food Networks, and to what extent PGSs are actually capable of responding to these expectations. The evidence gathered shows how PGSs support the spread of agroecology, food sovereignty and the democratisation of food supply chains.

3T Readings

2024-04-27T08:15:03+00:00

Interview with Alessandra Priante

2024-04-27T08:15:40+00:00