A Systemic District for Sustainable Tourism. Co-designing interconnected networks for enhancing the natural and cultural heritage of local ecosystems

The attention toward Sustainable Tourism has been spreading worldwide. Many policy actions and programmes have been set up to create international frameworks for cooperation towards Sustainable Tourism development. However, further work is needed to adopt these new approaches to tourism at a local level, by introducing innovative instruments for dialoguing with local communities and engaging all the stakeholders in this transition. The present research focuses on a specific case study and investigates the connections between the UNESCO sites of the Piedmont Region (Italy) to design the theoretical structure for building a regional Systemic District of the cultural heritage sites. The proposed methodology is based on a Systemic Design approach that enables to define a process of policy and governance for the creation of an open and fluid system that shapes itself according to the mutable nature of the cultural territories originated by the Piedmont UNESCO sites. The research defines the implementation pathway to be followed for implementing a pilot district that involves several stakeholders and citizens, thus proposing an innovative systemic bottom-up approach to Sustainable Tourism.