Cultural ecosystem services and placemaking in peripheral areas : a tourism geographies agenda

In a time of rapidly shifting tourism geographies in which rising rents, the COVID-19 pandemic, and rural gentrification have triggered widespread urban-to-rural migration, placemaking in peripheral areas has become an increasingly critical research agenda for tourism geographers. Cultural geographer, Yi Fu Tuan broadly asserted that the geographer’s central task is to contribute to a deeper understanding of how people create and maintain place (Tuan, 1991, p. 684). The authors of this Special Section take on Tuan’s task in their examination of the crossover between placemaking and cultural ecosystem services (CES). While there is a large body of work on placemaking, and growing scholarship on cultural ecosystem services, we know much less about how they intersect in tourism practice. Cultural services account for the non-material ways people value and benefit from ecosystems and can include ‘cultural diversity, spiritual and religious values, knowledge systems, educational values, inspiration, aesthetic values, social relations, sense of place, cultural heritage values, recreation and ecotourism’ (Daniel et al., 2012, p. 8812), among others. In ecosystem services, ecological and economic exigencies are typically more prominent and better funded. Yet Chan et al. (2012, p. 745) implore, that ‘omitting such ubiquitously shared cultural benefits from explicit consideration risks decision-making and planning that is not connected to what matters to many people.’