Digital Pathways for the Sustainable Development of Tourism Landscapes

Dear Colleagues,

Tourism landscapes—urban, rural, cultural, and natural—are being reshaped by the accelerating integration of digital technologies into tourism, heritage, and land-use practices. Digital tools and platforms increasingly mediate how landscapes are represented, accessed, governed, and valued, influencing everything from visitor behaviour and mobility patterns to heritage interpretation, community participation, and environmental stewardship. These shifts create new opportunities for sustainability, inclusivity, and resilience, while also posing challenges related to equity, spatial restructuring, market pressures, and the protection of cultural and ecological assets.

This special issue examines how digitalisation shapes the sustainable development of tourism landscapes and advances critical, interdisciplinary understanding of the social, spatial, and environmental transformations unfolding in this domain. We invite contributions that examine how digital technologies—such as platform economies, geospatial tools, sensor systems, augmented reality, social media, and data analytics—interact with tourism mobilities, heritage practices, governance structures, and land markets to influence the evolution of contemporary tourism environments.

We particularly welcome conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions from disciplines including geography, tourism studies, heritage studies, environmental studies, urban and regional planning, sociology, anthropology, and the digital humanities. The Special Issue aims to illuminate how digital pathways reshape stakeholder relations, power dynamics, cultural meanings, land-use patterns, and everyday experiences within tourism landscapes, and to identify approaches that support socially just and ecologically sustainable futures.

Key Themes for Submissions

Sustainability, Resilience, and Justice-Oriented Perspectives

• Sustainable tourism and heritage practices in digitally mediated environments
• Balancing visitor demands, cultural preservation, and local livelihoods
• Digital technologies and questions of justice, inclusion, and digital futures

Heritage, Identity, and Cultural Meaning in the Digital Age

• How digital mediation reshapes cultural memory, authenticity, and storytelling
• Representation, cultural rights, and contested narratives in heritage landscapes
• Changing experiences, values, and negotiations of heritage through digital tools

Tourism-Driven Land Dynamics and Spatial Transformation

• Tourism-led gentrification, displacement, and restructuring of landscapes
• The influence of platform urbanism, short-term rentals, and digital markets
• Heritage-led regeneration and its socio-spatial implications

Social Dynamics, Communities, and Everyday Life

• Resident experiences of digitalised tourism landscapes
• Community responses, adaptation, and resistance to digital tourism pressures
• Shifts in publicness, accessibility, and everyday uses of tourism and heritage spaces

Governance, Power, and Stakeholder Relations

• Changing power relations between authorities, communities, and digital platform companies
• Digital tools for managing visitor flows, monitoring landscapes, and supporting planning
• Regulatory challenges, data governance, and accountability in digitalised tourism

Dr. Lotta Braunerhielm
Dr. Peter Reid
Dr. Linda Ryan Bengtsson
Dr. Thomas Blom
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Heritage is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• tourism
• cultural heritage
• identity
• land dynamics
• digital heritage
• tourism-led gentrification
• spatial restructuring
• community participation
• sustainable tourism development
• digital transformation