Heritage And Tourism Education in Fragile Landscape. Enhancing the Image of Suburbia

Abstract

Tourism is changing significantly and many of the changes are also affecting the field of landscape enhancement and cultural heritage education. There is a growing interest in sustainable tourism and projects involving local communities in the promotion of the less-know locations. Contemporarily, the digital transformation is deeply involved in these processes, as it broadens the possibility of accessing information that may interest a particular public focused on cultural, sustainable and community-based tourism offers.
This paper refers to a research project aimed to involve schools in a participatory processes of interpretation and enhancement of the everyday landscape inside an area basically unknown by tourists in an evolving touristic city. The first part focuses on the current links between heritage education and tourism education in consideration of the European policies about the landscape. The second part concisely illustrates the research project, and present an overview of the use of ICTs in the participatory processes of interpretation and enhancement of a suburban landscape. The third part describes a specific activity performed during the project and it focuses on the adopted methodology and the touristic interactive applications created. In the last part, the paper discusses, in the light of the project, the relationship between landscape and heritage education, tourism education and some important transformations that are taking place in the field of tourism. Finally, the authors propose some considerations on the field experience described.