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The 2010-11 earthquakes severely damaged the city of Christchurch and most of its key attractions, with direct consequences for the visitor economy. The subsequent rebuild is highly contested, while many local stakeholders wanted inclusive, liveable and mixed redevelopment for the benefit of residents and city users in general, central government opted for an anchor project rooted redevelopment strategy to enhance international appeal and market-led recovery. As a result the rhetoric of tourism has been used to legitimize the redevelopment agenda and the design and delivery of key anchor projects, including a new international convention centre, and sports and event infrastructure. The aim of the chapter is therefore to examine stakeholders’ roles and policy discourses emerging from the city rebuild which embrace much of the discourse surrounding new urban tourism. Using documentary sources and interviews this study provides a longitudinal appraisal of key episodes of governance that have shaped the Christchurch rebuild, with accounts from residents, civic society and recovery authorities. The chapter finds that the rebuild has implications not only for Christchurch as a tourist city but, in a wider context, to the use of tourism in a post-disaster context and the reshaping of urban tourism practices to enhance real estate values. The research therefore problematizes the notion of new urban tourism and argues that recent changes in the trajectory of everyday social and economic practices of city users can be best understood as a further extension of the processes of contemporary neoliberal capitalism rather than a distinct new form.

Destinations face nowadays increasing pressure from ever-growing tourist visitation driven by an overall increase in expendable income and the emergences of new tourism markets. This places considerable stress on both the ecological and social fabric of both established and emerging tourist locales. Recent calls for more sustainable and responsible tourism practices have trended towards degrowth as a viable alternative to traditional economic activity. However, the application of these policies can be complicated in mature destinations that are very economically reliant on tourism. Similarly, emerging destinations may overlook the signs of growing resource depletion in the name of steady local economic growth. This chapter presents degrowth policies and practices with evidence from a mature World Heritage destination (Cinque Terre, Italy) and an emerging World Heritage destination (Northern Dolomites, Italy), where recent ecological disasters as well as tourist congestion concerns have led to a shift towards the implementation of certain degrowth measures. These examples will be used to critically examine the concept of degrowth within mature and emerging World Heritage destinations.

Over the last few years, complex systems and insights from planning theory have gained momentum in tourism planning and local community development. Resilience and vulnerability are structural properties of complex systems and have started to stretch from ecology to the wider domain of social sciences, including into tourism and development. Hence, the need arises to design and implement embedded models that encourage tourism projects rooted in the know-how of communities and their interrelation with institutional knowledge and third-order change. This chapter presents and applies the Harmonic Tourism Methodology as an alternative for community-based and community-led tourism planning. The methodology considers the interplay of rational and traditional knowledge emanating from a diagnosis of a complex system as the basis of community tourism projects. Two subsystems (biophysicist and anthropic) are acknowledged in the methodology, as environmental and socio-ecological embeddedness are at the heart of livelihoods. Data was collected from key stakeholders, the research community and a review of rational information through a multiscalar longitudinal perspective. The methodology was applied in four communities in Mexico and one community in Colombia. NVivo qualitative software was used to allow the interrelation of the vernacular-rational knowledge. This chapter concludes that the Harmonic Tourism Methodology can be an alternative territorial tourism planning that allows communities to adapt to system vulnerabilities and resilience in recovering and preserving natural and cultural resources for future generations.