Abstract
The impacts of mass tourism and COVID-19 crisis demonstrate the need for healthy, peaceful, and authentic recreation options, giving prominence to emerging destinations, such as remote Mediterranean islands. These, although endowed with exquisite land and underwater cultural heritage (UCH), are confronted with insularity drawbacks. However, the exceptional land and especially UCH, and the alternative tourism forms these can sustain, e.g., diving tourism, are highly acknowledged. The focus of this paper is on the power of participation and participatory planning in pursuing UCH preservation and sustainable management as a means for heritage-led local development in remote insular regions. Towards this end, the linkages between participation and (U)CH management from a policy perspective—i.e., the global and European policy scenery—and a conceptual one—cultural heritage cycle vs. planning cycle—are firstly explored. These, coupled with the potential offered by ICT-enabled participation, establish a framework for respective participatory cultural planning studies. This framework is validated in Leros Island, Greece, based on previous research conducted in this distinguishable insular territory and WWII battlefield scenery. The policy and conceptual considerations of this work, enriched by Leros evidence-based results, set the ground for featuring new, qualitative and extrovert, human-centric and heritage-led, developmental trails in remote insular communities.
Highlights
Sustainability and resilience have been extensively discussed during the last decades with great focus on environmental concerns, they have gained remarkable attention during the COVID-19 global pandemic [1]
Tourism seems to be one immensely affected by COVID-19 pandemic [4,5,6,7], with unprecedented effects on employment, local entrepreneurship, as well as regional and national economies [8]. This is due to the fact that the tourism sector is strongly associated with—largely banned or restricted in the COVID-19 era—social gathering, as well as national and international mobility for recreation, entertainment, and cultural visits [9]
Taking into consideration insights gained from the previous planning steps, and time constraints for conducting participatory planning work in the Leros case study, a decision is made as to the stages of the planning process in which community engagement is worth taking part
Summary
Sustainability and resilience have been extensively discussed during the last decades with great focus on environmental concerns, they have gained remarkable attention during the COVID-19 global pandemic [1]. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on a global scale on the other [2,3] Due to this new health-related threat, issues such as proactive planning, resilience, capacity for crisis management, collaborative action, and readiness of local communities, local/regional, and national governments, and of economic sectors, have arisen, as proper means for effectively confronting with emerging, unexpected, and highly destructive crises and their multi-level consequences. Tourism seems to be one immensely affected by COVID-19 pandemic [4,5,6,7], with unprecedented effects on employment, local entrepreneurship, as well as regional and national economies [8]. As evidence shows [8], COVID-19 appears to be the most pronounced and catastrophic event in the history of the tourism sector
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