En-Route Seminar: Tourism Models to Enhance Border Landscapes

ORGANISED BY UNISCAPE AND CIRP – UNIVPM

ABSTRACT DEADLINE POSTPONED:
Contributors are kindly invited to send abstracts using the following email: borders.cirp@gmail.com by February 20, 2025. Abstracts must contain the title, authors, and a maximum 300-word proposal description

MOTIVATION

A previous seminar promoted by CIRP (Centro di Ricerca e Servizio sul paesaggio) of UNIVPM (Università Politecnica delle Marche) with UNISCAPE and Italia Nostra in 2020 (“For a New Culture of Landscape” November 20, 2020) opened up an engaging platform for dialogue between academia, schools, and civil society that deserved to be further developed.

From that occasion and subsequent experiences with European projects carried out by CIRP (e.g., U4V the EU COST Action Underground Built Heritage as catalyser for Community Valorisation Underground4Values), the idea emerged to develop a debate among local, national, and international actors to explore value-oriented strategies that seek to enhance border landscapes, with a particular emphasis on the conceptualization and implementation of concrete models of integrated tourism.

The most suitable framework for this purpose is the “En-Route Seminars” promoted by UNISCAPE, which for years have fostered valuable opportunities for researchers, experts, policymakers, and entrepreneurs to meet directly within the landscapes being studied and explored during the seminars.

KEY CONCEPT

Research on border landscapes to enhance them increasingly shapes the destiny of territories, proving strategic in the search for new environmental, ecological, economic, social, and cultural balances.

Landscapes represent a transdisciplinary subject, a meeting point for diverse cultures and sensibilities, different eras and heritages, and multiple values and meanings contributing to a comprehensive interpretation of places as heritage. Landscapes represent tangible and intangible borders among landscape components. Borders are edges and, in some cases, spaces of friction and conflict: political boundaries, boundaries between countries with different languages and cultures, boundaries between different regulations, aboveground and underground boundaries, natural events, city and countryside, and generational boundaries. In addition, landscapes frequently become marginal in terms of communities’ perceptions of place values. It is imperative to acknowledge the significance of edges, borders, and limits in fostering the values of meeting cultures and diversity, and in unveiling the possibilities of these spaces to become liminal spaces, of connection between different groups, of mitigation of threats and of social integration.

In today’s historical context, particularly in mature economies, various attempts are underway to create tourism models that aim to revitalize local economies while preserving and safeguarding territories’ environmental and cultural heritage through forms of sustainable tourism, avoiding over-tourism, which produces opposite effects, as well to re-frequent or re- inhabit abandoned, neglected or disputed places.

Various European projects’ objectives and research activities (e.g., U4V the EU COST Action Underground Built Heritage as catalyser for Community Valorisation Underground4Values) provide significant evidence of this trend. Accordingly, it is essential to establish dedicated moments of exchange to compare and analyse diverse experiences, allowing for in-depth reflection on tourism design models. The goal is to define shared methodological approaches and operational methods that are both generally applicable and adaptable to the specificities of individual territories.

The call is addressed to all those involved in the study of border landscapes, and will accept contributions that have already successfully experimented with tourism-based strategies, those that are implementing them, as well as situations in which scenarios have yet to be constructed, but which are urgent and deeply relevant.

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

1. Defining and mapping Models

When referring to integrated and connected tourism models, we mean models based on knowledge and awareness of places’ specific resources, viewed under the integrating and systemic umbrella of the local landscape.

A landscape shaped and evolving through the continuous interactive relationship between nature and culture, uniquely mediated by indigenous communities. This specificity, tied to the historical, cultural, economic, and ecological dynamics that characterise each place, is more significant when comparing tourism models across diverse natural environments, cultures, and economies.

Question: Share a meaningful experience of how you developed your specific tourism model in bordering contexts.

2. Sharing Experiences

Comparing different experiences, including their successes and failures, can expand methodological horizons in the design of original tourism models and promote initiatives aimed at the integrated enhancement of local resources (landscapes in the broadest sense).

Question: Share a meaningful experience of how you implemented your specific tourism model.

3. Implementing Networks

Comparison fosters the search for connections (physical, digital, virtual, cultural, and symbolic) between territories, whether neighbouring or far apart. Strengthening such connections is useful for territorial marketing and rethinking land management policies toward greater sustainability and increased involvement of local communities in decision-making about the future of their territories.

Question: Share a meaningful experience of how you connected your tourism project with neighbouring and distant territories.

Note: Participants are invited to present interventions/performances/papers illustrating experiences in planning, design, implementation, and/or evaluation of results, focusing on specific territorial realities. Contributions should address at least one of the three topics (1-2-3).