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This opening chapter provides an overview of the evolving and diversifying world of creative tourism and its research trajectories, discusses the changing contexts for research in this field, and introduces the chapters in this volume. The volume brings together 30 authors working within and researching creative tourism from different disciplinary perspectives and different origins. Many of these chapters also make strong links between theory and practice. Each chapter provides a window on current investigations in creative tourism, illustrating the variety of research interests, approaches, and national contexts informing and influencing the development of the field. Taken together, these cases encapsulate the growing diversity and scope of creative tourism and the expanding body of literature on this topic. From these varied perspectives, the editors asked each author to suggest future research streams to extend the conceptual questions and pragmatic issues with which they are engaged. In the closing chapter of the book, the editors synthesize these suggestions and advice to outline the perceived research gaps and to elaborate key thematic areas for investigation to advance creative tourism research.

Creative tourism is a young and dynamic field that has already spawned a wide range of topics for investigation, theoretical reflections, methodological frameworks, and empirical approaches. While creative tourism does not fit well within traditional tourism research paradigms, we are observing a growing range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives brought to creative tourism, including many researchers from outside the tourism field, producing an interdisciplinary nexus. In this closing chapter, the editors provide an overview of the main themes for future research that have been suggested in this volume and point out potentially fruitful future research avenues within the tourism field and related to it. Accordingly, they have organized the chapter into nine thematic areas: The creative tourist, creative tourism experiences, creative supply, marketing creative tourism, the development of creative tourism experiences and destinations, assessing creative tourism development, the role of local communities in creative tourism, placemaking through creative tourism, and creative tourism networks and platforms.