Cultural tourism as a tool for transformation in small and medium-sized towns

Tourism scholars regularly extol the merits of tourism as a tool for economic diversification in small and medium-sized towns (SMSTs), especially those with a narrow economic base, which witness chronic social problems like high unemployment and rapid depopulation. In recent years there have been numerous case studies of tourism’s role in communities, especially those in predominantly rural and/or peripheral regions (Ioannides and Timothy, 2010; Lane, 1994; Scherf, 2021). Strangely enough, despite this research attention, most writings fail to clearly define what is precisely meant by SMSTs. For instance, some authors who write about tourism in small-town America focus on extremely small places (e.g., ones with populations under 5,000) (Davis and Morais, 2004). Others refer to SMSTs as ones whose populations range between 5,000 and 50,000 (Pecsek, 2016). Then there are those who consider towns that are even larger such as Della Lucia et al. (2017), who focused on Trento and Lecce in Italy, which respectively have populations of around 115,000 and 95,000. What emerges from most academic writings on tourism in SMSTs is that rather than focus on the population of the communities under investigation, they treat them as ones located beyond the sphere of influence of a country’s major metropolitan regions and secondary cores of economic and political power.