WebinarOnline
Placemaking with purpose: Sustainable community planning and tourism geography in the Asian context
Friday, 7 May 2027
A context-sensitive exploration of placemaking across diverse Asian settings, connecting tourism geography, spatial evidence and community planning to questions of liveability, environmental limits, belonging and fair control over destination development.
About this event
Placemaking influences how tourism develops through decisions about land, mobility, public space, heritage and everyday services. Across Asia, these decisions unfold within highly diverse political, environmental and cultural settings. This webinar examines how tourism geography and sustainable community planning can help places welcome visitors while supporting local needs, ecological limits and meaningful control over development.
The session will explore how location, scale and connection shape tourism opportunities and pressures. Coastal regions, mountain settlements, historic districts and expanding cities face different constraints. Participants will consider how mapping and spatial evidence can reveal patterns of access, displacement, environmental risk and concentrated visitor activity that may remain hidden within destination-wide averages.
Purposeful placemaking begins with communities rather than an imported image of what a destination should become. The discussion will examine participatory planning, public space design and locally grounded enterprise as ways to distribute value and strengthen belonging. It will also address unequal power, contested heritage and the possibility that attractive redevelopment can exclude residents or displace ordinary uses of place.
Researchers, students, planners and tourism practitioners will gain a framework for connecting spatial analysis with fair decision making. The webinar will avoid treating Asia as a single tourism model and will emphasise comparison grounded in context. Its aim is to support planning that respects regional difference, anticipates cumulative effects and treats liveability as a central measure of sustainable destination development. Such planning can protect valued places while allowing communities to shape how tourism fits within broader social and economic futures over time.