World Heritage Monuments Management Planning in the light of UN Sustainable Development Goals: The case of the Old Town of Corfu

Abstract

This paper focuses on the topic of world heritage monuments tourism planning and more specifically at the area of strategic management design, as the integration of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals “SDGs”, described in the Agenda 2030 introduces a wide range of conditions that affect the policy design. With the introduction of Sustainable Goal 11, countries have pledged to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”. Within this goal, Target 11.4 aims to “strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage”. The main goal of our research is to determine whether a tourism promotion methodology, experientially used in the case of the Old Town of Corfu, may assist in the monitoring of the existing management plan of the site, providing with data and metrics that allow its adaptation according to the 17 SDGs. Our proposed methodology has been applied within the “Hologrammatic Corfu” project, a digital tourist guide designed specifially to enable exploration of the site covering user requirements before, during and after the trip, with the use of transmedia content such as photos, 360-degree videos, augmented reality and hologrammatic videos. Here data collected regarding the travellers’ visits to specific points of interest are actively utilized for dynamic re-rooting during their visit, safeguarding sustainability and accessibility along the entire tourism cycle.