Heritage Enhancement through Digital Tools for Sustainable Fruition—A Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Digital technologies are becoming increasingly relevant in the processes of documenting, surveying, enhancing, and preserving cultural heritage, including through applications that are becoming more and more optimized and oriented toward new data management and accessibility processes. This great potential can find significant levels of application in the tourism sector, seeking new strategies to access, discover, and understand cultural assets. In this direction, many digital applications have already found interesting outcomes in the tourism sector, but there is large room for improvement in the applications for “minor”, small, or neglected cultural sites, not included in conventional tourism routes, which play a key role in social inclusion and territorial cohesion, as well as for the development of social, economic, and environmental sustainability. The paper presents a conceptual framework or possible outline to foster the use of digital technologies through a set of integrated bottom-up and top-down actions, to facilitate connections of minor sites into larger networks, contributing to the search for new forms of sustainable and active fruition and social participation.

Comparing AlUla and The Red Sea Saudi Arabia’s Giga Projects on Tourism towards a Sustainable Change in Destination Development

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Phygital as a Lever for Value Propositions in Italian Cultural Tourism Startups

“…From the perspective of the public and the community, the implementation of a phygital approach enables greater access to and knowledge of the world's artistic heritage, paving the way for the democratization of art, thanks to tools such as NFTs [62], and for more sustainable development [63], which can also preserve monuments and sites that are at risk due to serious international crises or excessive tourist flows. Several of the analysed case studies also show how the use of heritage-related hybrid technologies can foster the participation of the surrounding community in value co-creation processes, demonstrating the potential of collaborative technology to enrich urban life.…”