Moving to the countryside: Cultural and Creative Tourism

The Crocus Project has just published an extensive literature review of Cultural and Creative Tourism (CCT) in Rural and Remote Areas (RRA). This review throws new light on the role of non-urban areas in supporting these important forms of tourism.

As the review shows, CCT has been highlighted by European policymakers in recent years as a means of supporting rural communities and stimulating economic development. But it seems this new policy thrust is under-researched compared to the prolific literature on cultural tourism in cities. This is largely because rural areas lack the major cultural icons to be found in major cities. Many of the visits made to UNESCO World Heritage Sites are accounted for by cities such as Paris, London and Rome, which remain the global epicentres of traditional cultural tourism.

But the popularity of such cities also has negative consequences, as the growth of ‘mass cultural tourism’ threatens to swamp already busy city centres. Many cities are now adopting measures to try and limit  tourism growth, and there are growing efforts to shift demand from urban to rural areas. It is therefore important to understand more about the dynamics of cultural tourism outside cities, which has been a relatively neglected area of research. The Crocus Project is one of the initiatives attempting to redress the balance, along with other EU Horizon projects.

The Crocus Literature Review show that there is a relative lack of empirical research on tourism demand, tourist experiences  and governance issues in RRA. This is an important omission, because as Hortelano Mínguez and Beck point out in a recent paper on cultural routes, advocates for rural tourism development rely on rhetoric rather than evidence in supporting development initiatives. The hard figures tend to be wielded by the ‘sceptics’ who argue that the results of rural tourism development are at best questionable. This indicates a need for more coherent, comparable and longitudinal research on CCT in RRA – one of the aims of the Crocus Project.

Our literature review also reveals that in spite of decades of programmes promoting European integration, cross-border collaboration is still beset by problems. The few studies that deal with cross-border cultural tourism indicate that language and cultural barriers and weak governance systems lead to poor results in cultural tourism development.

The review also highlights the relatively recent rise of creative tourism as a recognisable niche in European tourism. Creative tourism research now accounts for around 16% of all publications in the cultural tourism field, a quarter century after its initial definition.

Creative tourism is seen as particularly important in rural areas because it provides opportunities to involve tourists directly in the creative life of the destination, helping to add animation, knowledge and skills to rural and remote communities. The recent CREATOUR Project has undertaken extensive research on creative tourism in Portugal, and Crocus now aims to extend this to the whole of the EU. One of the novel features of the Crocus literature review is the inclusion of reviews of literature in languages other than English, which has significantly boosted the analysis. The review includes analyses of CCT in the different Macro-Regions of the EU, as well as individual country profiles for Denmark, Finland, Croatia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Slovenia, Hungary, Italy, Bulgaria, Estonia, Spain and Portugal. Interestingly, the analysis shows that Portugal, Spain and Italy are by far the leading producers of research on CCT in RRA.

You can read the full report on the Crocus website.