Spatial Redesign Examples on Boosting the Identity of a Region Through Tourism Practices

Since the dawn of twenty-first century, a growing interest in rethinking and reconfiguring heritage has spread among architects, theorists and residents as well. Lately, the health crisis has also destabilized the semantic content, and planning of mobility. The pressure exerted by these multiple a complex entanglement of climatological, social, technological and economic conditions seems to rapidly transform the up to then self-evident interrelationship between mobility, culture and sustainability rendering the boundaries between mobility and identity volatile. Such conceptual transformations are reflected in tourism, revealing the relocation of associations between region, community and environment. At the same time, the urgency of these multiple crises resulted in a new ‘tourism question’, accelerating transformations both in terms of theory and design. The overarching goal of this paper is to investigate in a systematic manner the new reconceptualization of cultural heritage, tourism practices and its architectural—spatial interaction. Moreover, the project aims to problematize the notion of ‘tourism crisis’ and examines its interconnection to identity and to region through a study of specific designed examples from the Department of Interior Architecture, University of West Attica, Greece. The paper’s outcomes are expected to enhance knowledge that is relevant to this new problematic on changing tourism practices and mobility modalities problematic as it is being imposed by multiple crises.