The degree and the way of upgrading differ widely per industry. This article tries to give some new insights in these differences by linking the concept of upgrading to that of the knowledge base. Moreover, we try to identify barriers to upgrading as well as the appropriate spatial scale on...

In just a couple of years, the sharing economy grew out to become a significant segment of the holiday accommodation market. Online peer-to-peer marketplaces allow people to offer rooms or entire houses to tourists, with Airbnb being the biggest and most famous example. This paper aims to give...

This paper describes regional touristic supply under the framework of territorial capital to understand which territorial assets are the most important for stimulating economic growth. We used spatial regression models to consider spatial dependencies among regions, and Bayesian Model Averaging...

Sustainability in the tourism sector has become a principal goal for destination management and for the strengthening of the competitiveness and attractiveness of destinations (Bell & Morse, 2012). There is, however, no absolute scale of spatial analysis for sustainability. In this paper, we...

After reading Richard Florida’s work (e.g. Florida, 2003) on the creative industry and on the importance of the creative class for urban development in post-industrial economies, many cities in Europe and the USA have started to invest in creativity in general and in design in particular. Much...

This paper discusses a key issue in the framework of modern urban development policies: the role of cultural tourism in processes of urban transformation. The analysis focuses specifically on how the emphasis on the symbolic in the restructuring of certain areas of the city may function like a...

The principal scope of this paper is to reconstruct the chain-of-command that regards the implementation of a regional tourism development strategy, in particular the tourism marketing policy. Starting point of the analysis was the assumption that the quality of the governance of these...

Following the precedent set by the Virtual Tourism Observatory run by the European Commission-DG GROW a few years ago, several initiatives have taken place to design and manage tourism observatories at both the transnational and local level. However, these initiatives do not yet seem able to...

Culture is a key ingredient of post-industrial, information-intensive economic activity. Culture-oriented economic development (COED) is emerging as a dominant paradigm, integrating the symbolic and creative elements into any aspect of the urban economy, pursuing distinction, innovativeness, and...

The European space finds itself in a moment of profound change. On one hand it is adapting to the challenges that are inherent to the global, post-industrial economy. A shift from traditional manufacturing towards innovative and service oriented activities, the relocation of economic activities...