Overview

As the Covid-19 pandemic strengthened worldwide, the CREATOUR International webinars launched in June 2020 with “So, what’s next?: The role of creative tourism in the regeneration of communities,” featuring Greg Richards (University of Tilburg / Breda University, Netherlands) and Diana Zuluaga (5Bogata, Colombia). Conceived as “global conversations,” the webinars aim to create a platform for connecting creative tourism research and practice in a spirit of co-learning. During the initial discussion, the topics of adaptability, localized tourism (“seeing your city through new eyes”), adhering to public health guidelines, issues of trust, community engagement, and organizational survival strategies were discussed.

Although it was not possible to continue the webinars in late 2020, we now are resuming these international conversations with a series of three webinars: April 1, May 6, and June 3. Each webinar will bring together practitioners and researchers, and feature guests from creative tourism and allied areas of practice. Following initial presentations (approx. 10 minutes each), we will be encouraging all participants to engage in an open discussion, aiming to foster a platform to discuss experiences, concerns, and various gaps in knowledge (and practice), especially during this uncertain time.

Thursday, April 1 - 04:00pm-06:00pm (GMT +01:00) – “What’s happening now? Experimentation in delivery modes of creative tourism: in presence to online and back again, gradually”

Thursday, May 6 - 04:00pm-06:00pm (GMT +01:00) – “Connecting creators to tourism: Building bridges and preparing for re-entry into a new paradigm”

Thursday, June 3 - 03:00pm-06:00pm (GMT +01:00) – “Highlighting distinctiveness: Connecting travel to community and sense of place”

These three webinars have been co-developed by Nancy Duxbury (CES) and Fiona Bakas (Lusófona University). For any questions, please send an email to creatour@ces.uc.pt.

What is creative tourism?

Creative tourism offers visitors/participants the opportunity to develop their self-expression and creative skills through active participation in creative activities and workshops that are characteristic of the place where they occur. CREATOUR’s approach to creative tourism involves four dimensions: active participation, creative self-expression, learning, and community engagement. To foster meaningful connections to place, these experiences feature strong links between the creative activity and the place, and engagement with the local culture and community.

Creative tourism encompasses a wide array of creative experiences. In this vein, creative tourism can be seen as an approach that can complement and extend other types of tourism as well as cultural and community-based activities. Creative tourism can contribute to regenerative tourism approaches for local communities through reinforcing distinctive elements of local identity, instigating flows and connections between the locale and the external, and serving as a platform for local collaboration, exchange, and development.

What is CREATOUR?

CREATOUR - Creative Tourism Development in Small Cities and Rural Areas was a national creative tourism incubator and multidisciplinary research project. As a research-and-application project, CREATOUR developed new knowledge on creative tourism in Portugal and provided a networking and capacity-building platform for creative tourism activities in small cities and rural areas of Portugal. The three-year project (2016-2020) focused on the Norte, Centro, Alentejo, and Algarve regions of Portugal. It was funded under the Joint Activities Programme of PORTUGAL 2020, by COMPETE2020, POR Lisboa, POR Algarve, and Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia.

What is CREATOUR International?

CREATOUR International is an informal network to further knowledge exchange and capacity-building among creative tourism researchers and small-scale practitioners internationally. CREATOUR International builds upon the numerous international connections made through CREATOUR’s conferences and other activities, emails, online conversations, participation in events, and the relationships formed in the course of producing publications.

CREATOUR International aims to foster closer research–practice relations in the field of creative tourism – with special attention to initiatives in smaller places – through providing a platform for sharing experiences, practice-based knowledge, and insights from research; articulating and discussing issues and solutions; and learning from one another to inform the growing field of creative tourism internationally. More broadly, CREATOUR International aims to foster and inform progressive connections between culture, tourism, and holistic local development.