Abstract:The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of revitalized historic urban waterfronts as potential creative milieus attracting creative tourists. Waterfront redevelopment raises issues concerning an extensive range of urban planning and management perspectives, extending from space design to economic, environmental, cultural, and tourism considerations. The paper first reviews the ways in which the relationship between waterfronts and urban functions of port-cities has evolved over time, before turning to the examination of historic waterfronts' redevelopment as creative milieus to host creative industries. The agglomeration of creative industries, cultural organizations and venues, and recreational facilities in urban spaces is widely recognized to generate a dynamic urban culture attracting a new wave of -creative tourists‖, which do not fit to the mainstream cultural tourism behavior, and prefer to visit lively creative spaces based, not only on heritage, but also on contemporary culture. In this paper, the analysis focuses on how historic revitalized waterfronts can act as creative milieus, based on port-cities' genius loci as cosmopolitan places of intercultural communication, offering a new alternative approach to urban cultural tourism and hopefully functioning as a spin wheel for the regeneration of the urban economy.

The aim of this article is to develop a tourism (Carrying Capacity Indicator) for protected areas that could assist regional planners and park managers to promote an equitable form of the spatial distribution of visitors' environmental pressure. To measure the negative impact of visitors on an environmentally sensitive area, various indicators have been proposed, with regard to ecologically sustainable tourism. In this paper, we examine the unequal distribution of visitors to a protected area that causes significant additional environmental pressure on some subareas. This additional pressure, which may exceed the landscape's carrying capacity, cannot be measured by the commonly used indices that represent an average for the whole area. Our objective is to depict the variability of pressure intensity within a protected area. For this purpose we introduce an indicator adjusted to the Gini coefficient resultingfrom the Lorenz curve, used by economists to measure the unequal distribution of income. The proposed indicator is applied to the Mount Olympus National Park, Greece.

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Cultural heritage, considered as a tool for sustainable tourism development and place branding, makes a destination appealing to visitors; hence, cultural heritage tourism can be a driving force for economic growth in cities and regions. Polycentricity is a useful multi-scalar concept in spatial theory that describes how adjacent urban centers can interact with each other, creating synergies and generating broader spatial networks. Cultural heritage and tourism, perceived as important factors of integration in a polycentric spatial structure, can further promote regional branding strategies. In this paper, a polycentricity index is introduced as a methodological tool for networking cultural heritage destinations, with an application to the Silk Road heritage. Silk Road cultural assets traced on the historical Silk Road routes linking East and West, can serve as tourist attraction poles and as an essential component for branding destinations through networking at various spatial scales. The Region of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace in Northern Greece, endowed with a plethora of Silk Road cultural assets, most of which are still untapped, is used to highlight the proposed methodology. The ultimate objective is the designation of polycentric destination networks based on Silk Road assets, in order to build regional branding opportunities over the Region.

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