Overview

CREATOUR’s second international conference, “Emerging and Future Trends in Creative Tourism”, will be held June 7-9, 2018, in Braga (Portugal), organised by the CREATOUR Norte team (Lab2PT, University of Minho).

The conference aims to continue the work developed in the first CREATOUR conference at Curia (2017), bringing together creative tourism researchers with creative tourism practitioners to discuss issues and opportunities of creative tourism internationally.

Learn about the development of the creative tourism network – CREATOUR – now involving 40 pilot projects located in small cities and rural areas within the Norte, Centro, Alentejo and Algarve regions of Portugal, is another aim of the Conference.

What is creative tourism?

CREATOUR’s approach to creative tourism involves four dimensions: active participation, creative self-expression, learning, and community engagement.

Creative tourism offers visitors the opportunity to develop their creative potential through active participation in workshops, courses and other learning experiences that are characteristic of the destination where they are taken. Creative tourism allows visitors to deepen contact with the local culture by directly participating in cultural/creative activities and being involved in the creative life of the destination (rather than just displaying creative products, for example). The creative tourism approach allows the destination communities and regions to benefit from significant advantages, and enables artistic and other creative activities to play a driving role in broader socio-economic development.


What is CREATOUR?

The conference is organized within the project CREATOUR: Creative Tourism Destination Development in Small Cities and Rural Areas (Desenvolver Destinos de Turismo Criativo em Cidades de Pequena Dimensão e em Áreas Rurais). The overall objective of CREATOUR is to develop and pilot an integrated approach and research agenda for creative tourism in small cities and rural areas in Portugal, developing strong links within and amongst regions. CREATOUR is a national three-year project (2016-2019) funded under the Joint Activities Programme of PORTUGAL 2020, by COMPETE2020, POR Lisboa, POR Algarve and Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia.

Building on a twofold approach, CREATOUR intertwines Theory and Experimentation, combining multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological frameworks, cultural mapping, and benchmarking exercises with the development of an array of Pilots, or creative tourism case studies.

CREATOUR promotes the potential for the development of humanscaled, interactive, creative tourism featuring creativity- and culturebased experiential tourism experiences. Focusing on smaller cities and rural areas in which active cultural organizations and creative enterprises currently operate, the project aims to foster new or enhanced tourism offers building from local strengths, knowledge, skills, and traditions. The project aims to develop a sustainable creative tourism that is socially, culturally, environmentally, and economically rooted in specific places and is sensitive to these dimensions. It aims to give added value to cultural and creative traditions, skills, and knowledge as well as to emerging creative practices and pathways.

Visit the conference website to see more information about the conference programme, venue, transportation, etc., at: https://creatourconference.weebly.com/