The transition from conventional tourism models toward more regenerative and place-based approaches has increased interest in the relationship between circular tourism and responsible tourism, particularly in remote heritage sites that, despite their significant cultural assets, often remain outside major tourism flows and struggle to convert heritage value into broader territorial benefits. In this perspective, circular tourism is understood not only in terms of resource efficiency, but as a broader approach linking heritage conservation, local economies, environmental stewardship, community well-being, and long-term resilience. Against this background, the paper analyses three Scottish castles—Doune, Caerlaverock, and Blackness—as case studies for testing a participatory and place-sensitive approach to the co-creation of Circular Tourism Action Plans. Methodologically, the study adopts a collaborative multicriteria evaluation approach combining documentary analysis, site-based evidence, and stakeholder engagement to identify challenges, prioritise intervention fields, and support locally grounded strategies. The findings show that a shared evaluative framework can be applied across different heritage contexts while generating differentiated and site-specific priorities. The process proved effective not only in defining action fields, but also in supporting co-evaluation and collective learning among local actors. The paper argues that Circular Tourism Action Plans can emerge as transferable yet context-sensitive outputs, adaptable to other heritage destinations facing similar challenges of conservation, accessibility, local benefit, and resilience.

The paper’s argument is that the specific characteristics of cultural heritage goods help minimise insensitivity to the scope, also known as the embedding effect, of contingent valuation (CV) estimates. This bias happens when estimates of willingness to pay (WTP) do not increase with the quantity of the goods presented, as expected from economic theory. The presence of such effect has been actively debated in the literature since it raises major concerns about the validity of the method itself and its uses within a social cost benefit analysis framework. The research presented in this paper discusses one of the few methodological studies testing the embedding effect within and across samples for cultural heritage goods. The research uses empirical data gathered from three independent and comparable samples focusing on the archaeological park of Campi Flegrei in Italy and two of its components: the Castle of Baia and the archaeological park of Cuma. Findings successfully prove that CV estimates relate to the quantity being valued and could be used with confidence by policy makers concerned with an inclusive, sustainable approach to cultural capital management.

This paper discusses the challenges inherent in the valuation of the social benefits of urban regeneration projects. The transformation of cities involves public and private investments, whose returns should include calculation of social benefits. Since traditional financial methodologies do not allow to capture the large and complex set of benefits, typically accruing to citizens in terms of quality of life, the application of non-market valuation methods such as Contingent Valuation (CV) and Hedonic Pricing (HP) offers an innovative opportunity. Here we analyse inhabitants' and city users' responses to the regeneration project of the Navigli canal network in Milan to understand how urban communities value such transformations. The Municipality of Milan proposed the project to restore the canal network in 2018 to enhance recreational amenities, improve environmental quality, and reduce negative externalities. While the political benefit from restoring the canals is clear, public and private benefits from the scheme need to be assessed to ensure the scheme's long-term sustainability. This paper presents an assessment (CV) of the socio-economic benefits associated to the reopening of the first section of the Navigli canal network, based on analysis of the views of 583 residents and city users, and compares these results with those of a HP method application developed by Boscacci et al. (2017). The paper explores whether the joint use of CV and HP could overcome their mutual weaknesses, providing a coherent methodology for assessing efficiency and effectiveness of policies and projects.

There is a gap between theory and practice in the valuation of urban cultural heritage assets and the application of valuation methods in the policy arena. This special issue addresses current debates in urban heritage conservation that engage with the conceptual, methodological and practical problems in the field. In this introductory paper, we begin by discussing the special issue's rationale and theoretical foundation. We outline the conceptual framework which derives from the economic concept of cultural capital and its associated range of values. The paper goes on to discuss methodological issues in heritage valuation and their usefulness in urban policymaking. Our paper highlights the role that economic valuation techniques might have in developing a participatory approach to the management of urban cultural heritage within an integrated policy framework. This paper concludes by summarising the papers brought together in this collection.

Regeneration processes activate stable regimes of interaction and interdependence among the architectural, economic, cultural and social sub-systems in settlements. The thesis of this paper is that in order to progress towards sustainable and inclusive cities, urban governance should widen the decision-making arena, promoting virtuous circular dynamics based on knowledge transfer, strategic decision making and stakeholders’ engagement. The historic urban landscape is a privileged la b for this purpose. The paper adapts the Triple-Helix model of knowledge-industry-government relationships to interpret the unexpected regimes of interaction between Local Authority and Cultural Heritage Assets triggered in the late 90es by the establishment of a knowledge provider such as a Faculty of Architecture in the highly degraded heritage context of the city of Syracuse, Italy. Following this approach, the authors explain the urban regeneration happened over the last 20 years in the port city of Syracuse, based on knowledge sharing and resources’ protection that promoted processes of social engagement and institutional empowerment for both new residents and entrepreneurs.

The paper addresses an apparently unsolvable philosophical question: can the Christian Dogma of the Trinitarian nature of God be rationally explained? The authors argue that the conflict between fides and ratio can be resolved by a novel interpretation of the concept of time within a new philosophical paradigm: the Purposeful Evolution Theory (PET), where time, as in Plato, is a movable image of Eternity. In this paper, the PET is used to explain the Christian Dogma of Trinity through a deductive reasoning centred on the concept of atemporality. The Purposeful Evolution Theory has strict links with Plato’s philosophy and represents a key for a systematic interpretation of Plato’s unwritten doctrines. The authors argue that Plato’s unwritten doctrines already addressed and partially solved the problem of Eternity and Time, indirectly giving a reason-based explanation of the Trinitarian Nature of God and His Goodness, before it was even revealed.

This paper discusses ways of improving the management of cultural heritage sites and cities, focusing on new forms of involvement and public participation based on public preferencesÂ’ elicitation. The problem of city governance and of the appropriate level of democratic participation needs an integrated approach, capable of bridging the practice of urban design, conservation of the built environment and decision-making support system. This paper reports results from a survey using conjoint choice approach questions to elicit peopleÂ’s preferences for cultural heritage management strategies for an outstanding world heritage site: the Temples of Paestum, in Italy. The potential of the above-mentioned methodologiesÂ’ within the current cultural heritage research scenario is also discussed.

This paper discusses the potential of current advancements in Information Communication Technologies (ICT) for cultural heritage preservation, valorization and management within contemporary cities. The paper highlights the potential of virtual environments to assess the impacts of heritage policies on urban development. It does so by discussing the implications of virtual globes and crowdsourcing to support the participatory valuation and management of cultural heritage assets. To this purpose, a review of available valuation techniques is here presented together with a discussion on how these techniques might be coupled with ICT tools to promote inclusive governance.

The evaluation of cultural assets is a research activity that finds its roots in environmental evaluation. The latter aims to assess from an individual or societal perspective the economic meaning of environmental goods (or a degradation of such goods). Cultural heritage forms a particular subset of environmental goods with specific characteristics in terms of uniqueness and historical orientation. Nevertheless, various general principles from environmental valuation apply also to cultural goods, as they have similar attributes: scarcity, non-priced nature as a result of externalities, and site specificity (see, for example, Carruthers and Mundy 2006). The principles of environmental evaluation can be found in the theory of hedonic prices and implicit markets advocated decades ago by Rosen (1974). Ever since then, a great effort has been made to operationalise evaluation concepts and to extend the domain of valuation by developing adjusted new methods (for example, travel costs methods, and survey-based methods such as contingent valuation and conjoint methods). After significant progress in disciplines such as ecological economics and environmental economics (see, for example, van den Bergh et al. 2006), the question arises whether the evaluation of cultural heritage has a sufficiently strong basis.

This paper discusses the use of in-depth focus groups to assess residents, tourists and other stakeholders’ preferences for e-services that would enhance access to cultural heritage in Amsterdam, Leipzig, and Genoa. Several e-services are mentioned, and in particular the integration of e-services in these cities is highlighted. The way this integration takes place very much relates to the maturity of each city in terms of cultural tourism, and information and communication technology (ICT). Our results show that the need for tailored information (profiling), interactive maps (geospatial dimension), booking service “one-stop shops”, and consumer-generated content were all common in the three cities. In some cities the focus groups expressed a need for various forms of e-governance. Mobile devices and navigation systems were also high on the agenda in the more ICT-advanced cities.

This engaging book addresses the question of how diverse communities, whether in a nation, city or organization, can live together and prosper whilst retaining and enjoying their cultural differences. This is a particularly pertinent issue in the context of the modern world where mass migration and immigration are pervasive global phenomena.

Urban cultural heritage is the physical representation of a community identity that demands to be passed on to others. Preserving the environment for future generations is one of the key concepts of sustainability, which refers to the need for intergenerational equity. This paper discusses the meaning and nature of urban cultural heritage, and the currently available methods for its valuation in the perspective of sustainable city development.

Many mature and popular tourist destinations are attracting large volumes of tourist flows. This may lead to congestion phenomena in different parts of tourist cities, especially during peak periods. This paper presents the results of a tourist survey carried out in the city centre of Amsterdam, during the high tourist season (2006), when tourism congestion phenomena were clearly present. In addition to a descriptive and exploratory statistical analysis based on multi-attribute choice analysis, the paper also presents unique findings from a statistical choice experiment on virtual questions regarding the willingness-to-accept tourism congestion, coined willingness-to-wait. Various interesting results are presented and discussed, with a specific focus on the question as to how these results can feed into the policy debate to manage congestion in mature cultural destinations.

This paper discusses to what extent one can value in economic terms the positive and negative externalities brought by cultural tourism to heritage destinations, and which are the currently available valuation techniques for this purpose. It discusses the role played by preliminary phases in the development of the appropriate valuation framework when stated preferences methods are employed reporting the case of the city of Syracuse, Italy. It builds on this research to analyse the role economic valuation can play in the management of cultural destinations to mitigate the negative impacts brought by the tourism presence whilst spreading the positive ones in the region.

In this paper, we illustrate how surveys can be used to elicit the preferences of the public and of policymakers and city officials for regeneration projects at urban sites. Our methodology uses rating exercises, coupled with conjoint-choice stated preferences for the general public and with ranking exercises for the public officials and other stakeholders, and is then applied to investigate alternative reuses of the Venice Arsenale, Italy, and their economic, environmental and social impacts. One interesting feature of the conjoint choice questions for members of the public is that the responses to these questions can be used to estimate the social benefits of regeneration projects, i.e., how much people are willing to pay for these urban transformations. Another advantage of our approach is that it can be used seek and foster broader public participation into urban decisionmaking processes.