30 GIVING PLACES NEW LIFE BLENDING CULTURE, CREATIVITY AND TOURISM – Contributio
30 GIVING PLACES NEW LIFE BLENDING CULTURE, CREATIVITY AND TOURISM – Contributions by Maria Della Lucia
My letter to future generations of women academics in tourism describes the key points on my research journey. The mountain village where I grew up – its natural environments, industrious communities, cultural heritage, and history of emigration – has influenced my life, and my research, profoundly. Today, the valley is part of the Dolomites UNESCO WHS, with an economy which combines the area’s tradition of artisanal ice cream with nature-based and sports tourism, and includes a company producing both components and finished products in the luxury eyewear sector. The valley’s cultural heritage retains clear traces of its primary industries: forestry, zootechnics, mountain agriculture and mining. Under the Venetian Republic, and until the end of the 19th century, the steel industry dominated its economy, with blast and smelting furnaces and fusinèle that produced countless tons of tools and nails. In the mid-19th century, people started to leave the valley, first to the cities of Italy, where they worked as street vendors, and then, between the world wars, to Europe (Austria and Germany in particular) to produce and sell artisanal ice cream. The community still sees these seasonal emigration flows that resulted in the valley and nearby areas becoming places of origin not only of artisanal ice cream making professionals, but also areas where businesses specialized in their supply-chain agglomerate.
Because of this imprinting, my interest in and commitment to local development have informed my research since my BA thesis and my PhD in Economics and Management. The primary focus has been the study of the evolving drivers and models of local development from a disciplinary perspective inspired by the cross-fertilization of (apparently) separate research fields that, address new challenges and scenarios – including responsibility, sustainability, value co-creation and humanism on the real-virtual continuum. My aim has been to understand and detect the new in the old and the forces at play in our social and economic lives and landscape. Along the way, my research path widened in scope and grew increasingly deeper, leading to the uncovering of what “I don’t know” and the reasons why I don’t. Today, I can detect in my contribution to the field in different periods of my research the evolution of my “I don’t know” and the associated reasons why within my understanding and seeing of the new in the old.
Community-type tourism destinations through the lenses of local development and industrial district
My early research extended the well-established constructs and methodologies used in local development (Pyke et al., 1991; Saxenian, 2002) and industrial district research (Becattini, 1989) to community-type tourism destinations (Flagestadt & Hope 2001). The new in the old has been my interpretation of community-type destinations as a form of local developmen