Exploring Creative Tourism Based on the Cultural and Creative Cities (C3) Index and Using Bootstrap Confidence Intervals

The relevance of this study stems from the need to fi nd new development paths for small and medium-sized cities amid the paradigm shift from traditional economics to noonomy. In today’s reality, material production based on mechanized labor is no longer a driver of growth; value is created through knowledge and innovation, and the creative sector is becoming a key resource for the development of communities, enabling economic diversifi cation, preserving cultural identity, and improving the quality of the urban environment. The aim of this study is to identify the specifi cs and state of development of creative industries in small and medium-sized cities, identify systemic barriers, as well as promising areas for expanding their potential. The study is focused on small and medium-sized cities in the Novosibirsk, Ivanovo, and Vologda Oblasts. The theoretical basis for this study is the concept of noonomy, research on the economics of creative industries, and the concept of the «creative city». Data from Rosstat, the List-org counterparty verifi cation service, Yandex. Maps, and strategic planning documents were used as the information base. The methodological framework included monographic, substantive, and comparative analyses, as well as a range of general scientifi c methods. The authors reveal that even in regions leading in creative industry development (Novosibirsk and Ivanovo Oblasts), the majority of organizations in this sector are concentrated in large cities. In the Ivanovo Oblast, only about 12% of enterprises are located in small and medium-sized cities, while in the Novosibirsk Oblast, the fi gure is only 5%. It was concluded that being located within the infl uence zone of a large city or within an agglomeration creates key prerequisites for the growth of creative industries in small and medium-sized cities. The institutional environment, including a set of regulatory and legal acts and existing institutions that set the direction for the development of the creative economy and ensure the systematic nootransformation of cities, also plays a signifi cant role. A SWOT analysis identifi ed the internal strengths and systemic constraints to the growth of creative industries in small and medium-sized cities in Russia.

Addressing the theme of how sustainable rural futures can be realized by considering 21st century realities, this paper presents a unique project on the future of rural economic development and social cohesion through the initiation of creative tourism products in rural areas and small cities. The promotion of crafts to fuel rural socio-economic development is gaining momentum and simultaneously a change towards what is known as ‘transformative tourism’ (Pritchard, Morgan, & Ateljevic, 2011) is observed, as tourists demand more immersive experiences. Craft movements in the urban space which also act as vehicles for social cohesion within cities where isolation is common, have been gaining in popularity for the last 10 years. Creative tourism, which differs from cultural tourism in terms of being an active transfer of the past into the present via local-visitor interaction, rather than a passive observation of the past (Richards & Marques, 2012), offers a novel rural development tool that this paper investigates. This paper focus on the CREATOUR project which investigates how rural organizations, tourists and rural communities interact and forge new alliances in the Portuguese context. This three-year project started in 2016 and now has 40 pilot projects, which are entrepreneurs or organizations who are incentivized to offer innovative creative tourism products within rural areas and small cities. In this article, the ways in which the CREATOUR project can act as a sustainable rural development tool are analysed in terms of the evolving creative tourism offers and the development frameworks that creative tourism offers can be placed within, suggesting that this research and application project can be a model for other countries and provides advice on how to practically achieve this. Whilst at a preliminary stage, this project will have a large amount of data from tourists (through questionnaires handed out by pilot projects), IdeaLabs (meetings of pilots and researchers for knowledge exchange), e-portfolios, a documentary and researcher site visits, which partly inform this paper and will come to inform future research.

Adaptation to climate change in small coastal cities: The influence of development status on adaptation response

In modern world, also in Russia, tourism is dynamic, independent branch of the economy. The tourism expands the boundaries of commercial offers and deepens specialization. Landscape, environment and space are the foundation for the tourism development. The potential of Russia's tourism industry, as one of the most important factors of regional development, is still underestimated. Many of landscape and cultural features remain unnoticed and unused. The tourism development in small cities is very important, since they have a valuable historical and cultural heritage, they are an important source of improving the welfare of the country. This territory can be represented as a system that
 
 opens great opportunities for knowledge about the history, culture, customs, spiritual and religious values of small cities in Russia. The article is dedicated to the regional features of tourism development in small historical cities of Russia. Nowadays the government has a great deal of attention to the development of tourism in the Russian Federation, in particular, the article discusses the federal programs that are currently being implemented. Many small cities have historical status now. The modern development of tourism in small historical cities was promoted by an increase of people's interest in their historical heritage, their past. This type of tourism is especially important for the preservation of the individuality of the peoples of the Russian Federation, their involvement in the world civilization. Creation in 2007 of the Association of Small Tourist Cities confirms this. The peculiarity of each of the cities is the perfectly preserved appearance of their historical part with a lot of unique monuments of architecture, history and culture. Some monuments are included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

As commonly understood, the importance of creativity in tourism studies and market can be conceived in relation to art crafts and creative products over the years, shifting to a wide range of tourism-based activities. It is believed that these activities can be considered as general forces for tourism development, as a result there is a dramatic growth in the popularity of creative tourism. Nowadays, tourists have a noticeable tendency to refrain from repeated activities in order to profit from new feelings and experiences. Creative tourism activities have provided an opportunity for tourists to learn more about local skills, expertise, traditions and unique qualities of the places they are visiting. In this research, the capacity of creative tourism in Tabriz city in Iran has been studied. Variables related to creativity including creative class, creative economy, creative experience, creative city, and creative tourism has been gathered from various researches. And, a questionnaire has been arranged and distributed among 60 tourism experts in this city. Then, the hidden factors in the development of creative tourism have been identified using factor analysis. Finally, eight factors, out of 29 variables, such as “physical capital and visual assets”, “personality upgrading”, “passive rules and scientific genius”, “informative environment”, “excellent coexistence”, “an introduction of new ideas”, “risk takers”, and “leisure time” have been extracted from the experts’ perspectives of this city. By investing in cultural affairs and the enrichment of urban space and the quality of educational affairs, this city has made impressive strides towards attracting creative classes and developing creative tourism in order to become a creative city.

A growing body of evidence supports the association between the built environment and children walking to school (WTS), but few studies have compared WTS behaviors in cities of different sizes. This case-comparison study utilized WTS data from fourth graders in the small city of Manhattan, KS, USA (N = 171, from all eight schools) and data from fourth graders in the large city of Austin, TX, USA (N = 671 from 19 stratified-sampled schools). The same survey instrument was used in both locations. After controlling for socioeconomic and demographic variables, built environment, neighborhood, and attitudinal differences were demonstrated by the odds ratios for WTS in the small city vs. the large city. WTS in the small city was more likely to be associated with walking paths/trails and sidewalk landscape buffers en route to school despite lower perceived neighborhood social cohesion, school bus availability, and parental concerns about crime, compared to WTS in the large city. Also, the small city lacked key pedestrian infrastructure elements that were present in the large city. This study highlights important differences related to WTS behaviors and, thus, provides key insights for encouraging WTS in cities of different sizes.

Most Indonesians nowadays live in the urban area, due to urbanization. 60 percent of the inhabitants of Java, the most populous island in Indonesia, will live in the urban area by 2010, a figure that is higher than the national average of 55 percent. Urbanization has brought a large influx of newcomers not only into the metropolitan or large cities, but also into small and medium cities. One of urbanization’s most concerning impacts is urban sprawl that harms sustainability. There is a dearth of academic literature studying the phenomenon of urban sprawl in Indonesian small cities. Urban sprawl in small cities is commonly ignored, considered as a contained problem the solution for which is a simple use of local spatial plan. Unfortunately, for Indonesia, this solution is difficult to implement because city spatial plans works only within administrative jurisdictions, whilst the urban sprawls themselves generally occur across the borders of different administrative jurisdictions. This study studies urban sprawls occurring in several small cities in Java. While those cities already have spatial plan, most were the general spatial plan (Rencana Tata Ruang Wilayah Kota/Kabupaten) that operates only within the city’s administrative jurisdiction. We are unable to find detailed strategies in these cities to deal with urban sprawl. We also found that all spatial plans are unable to come up with urban growth boundary strategy. Finally, we are also unable to find integrated detailed spatial plan among those cities to answer the urban sprawl situation.

This chapter is a synthesis of proposed recommendations to authorities and agencies at all levels (national, regional, and local) relating to the development of creative tourism initiatives in small cities and rural areas. It is centrally informed by the needs of the CREATOUR ® pilot organizations in Portugal, which were articulated within discussions between researchers and practitioners. The study also considers public policies related to rural tourism development and the types of public policies needed to foster and support cultural and creative organizations in small cities and rural areas. The recommendations recognize and reinforce the need to develop new structures to foster ongoing interconnections between the cultural and tourism sectors.

A confidence interval is an interval estimate of a parameter of a population calculated from a sample drawn from the population. Bootstrapping method, which involves producing several new data sets that are resampled from the original data in order to estimate parameter for each newly created data set, allowing an empirical distribution for the parameter to be estimated. Since certain statistics are harder to estimate, confidence intervals are rarely employed. Several statistics might necessitate multi-step formulas assuming that are impractical for calculating confidence intervals. This paper reviews research on the concept of bootstrapping and bootstrap confidence interval. The current narrative analysis was developed to answer the main research question: (1) What is the concept of the bootstrap method and bootstrap confidence interval? (2) What are the methods of bootstrapping to obtain confidence interval? This study has found general bootstrap method idea, various techniques of bootstrap methods, its advantages and disadvantages, and its limitations. There are normal interval method, percentile bootstrap method, basic method, first-order normal approximation method, bias-corrected bootstrap, accelerated bias-corrected bootstrap and bootstrap-t method. This study concludes that the advantages of using bootstrap CI is that it does not require any assumptions about the shape of distribution and universality of the approach. Bootstrapping is a computer-intensive statistical technique that relies significantly on modern high-speed digital computers to do massive computations.

Building smart city systems has become a popular strategy for urban planners and developers. Applying the perspectives of social informatics to a dataset comprising 12 cities in the USA, this paper explores the adoption of smart city initiatives in small, medium and large cities. Complementing previous studies, the analysis builds on a comprehensive conceptualization of the smart city concept that includes the dimensions of government, physical environment and society. Our findings suggest that all cities in the sample experience significant pressures from population growth, and that smaller cities have less complex approaches to smart city adoption. In addition, medium cities appear to emphasize more on the social dimension of smart cities.

Nitrogen oxides (NO X = NO + NO2) are a major air pollutant under stringent emission regulation in China. The nation has effectively cut its total anthropogenic emission since the peaking around 2012, with cities at the forefront of implementing mitigation measures. However, the city-level emission changes and cross-city contrast remains poorly understood, due to inaccuracies in existing emission data. Using the satellite-based high-resolution PHLET inversion, we derived city-level NO X emissions in China from 2012 to 2020. We found much weaker emission declines in small cities (by 14.7% from 2012–2014 mean to 2018–2020 mean, for the bottom one-third of cities ordered by economic volumes) and medium cities (by 21.3%, for the middle one-third), compared to those in large cities (by 30.6%, for the top one-third) and provincial capital cities in the North Region of China (by 54.2%). Emissions even grew in 43.0% of small cities, compared to 17.4% for large cities. Cross-city emission differences both within each province and among the provinces decreased substantially over time, resulting in a relative shift of emission burdens towards small and medium cities. Such a tendency is hardly resolved by bottom–up emission inventories, highlighting the value of satellite-based high-resolution inversion for tracking city-level emissions to support targeted emission control.

PurposeIn order to develop a feasible and efficient method to acquire the long‐run availability of a parallel system with distribution‐free up and down times, the purpose of this paper is to perform the simulation comparisons on the interval estimations of system availability using four bootstrapping methods.Design/methodology/approachBy using four bootstrap methods; standard bootstrap (SB) confidence interval, percentile bootstrap (PB) confidence interval, bias‐corrected percentile bootstrap (BCPB) confidence interval, and bias‐corrected and accelerated (BCa) confidence interval. A numerical simulation study is carried out in order to demonstrate performance of these proposed bootstrap confidence intervals. Especially, we investigate the accuracy of the four bootstrap confidence intervals by calculating the coverage percentage, the average length, and the relative coverage of confidence intervals.FindingsAmong the four bootstrap confidence intervals, the PB method has the largest relative coverage in most situations. That is, the PB method is the best one made by practitioners who want to obtain an efficient interval estimation of availability.Originality/valueIt is the first time that the relative coverage is introduced to evaluate the performance of estimation method, which is more efficient than the existing measures.

Creative tourist experiences and the environmental settings of creative attractions contribute to healthy and sustainable creative tourism. Taking the case of a popular cultural hub and creative attraction Hong Kong’s Police Married Quarters, this paper presents an empirical study on the experiential and environmental perception of creative visitors in Hong Kong. The study reveals that creative tourist experience is associated with esthetics, involvement, and education. Creative environmental attributes, as measured by visitor satisfaction, comprise facilities, catering, and accessibility. Participation and a distinctive spatial layout are also valued in creative tourism. From the findings, it is proposed that that Hong Kong’s creative tourism product and development should be better linked to its creative industry chain; at the same time, there should also be a closer relationship between different creative sectors, actors, and the local community at large.

Recent scholarship has called for renewed critical interest in both small cities and urban-environmental relationships. Work focusing on small city economic development as a socio-environmental process is well-positioned to address both of these calls. In this article, I track the small city of Geneva, New York’s socio-environmental development since 1945, using primary and secondary archival documents including planning and natural resource reports, personal correspondences, meeting minutes, and newspaper stories. I ask: how and why have developers engaged with nature to make and remake—and in doing so, imagine and reimagine—the small city through time? I find that local developers remade and reimagined the small city’s connectedness to nature to portray Geneva as urban, rural, or both in response to shifting economic opportunities. Geneva’s official “urban” status, small scale, and proximity to scenic nature played into a “uniquely urban” brand that developers used to bolster economic growth. In this way, developers render the small city a growth machine in ways that are comparable to both larger cities and smaller rural places. These findings shed greater light on the varying political-economic processes and relationships between larger “urban” and smaller “rural” places.

In Brazil, the majority of healthcare resources are concentrated in the largest cities, whereas most communities lack proper healthcare assistance in primary care and have difficulties accessing specialists and diagnostic examinations. Considering this, the Telehealth Network of Minas Gerais (TNMG) was created. It is a public telehealth initiative that provides support to primary healthcare (PHC), performing teleconsultation and telediagnosis (electrocardiogram [ECG], Holter, ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, spirometry, and retinography analysis) mainly for small and remote cities in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. To describe the successful experience of the TNMG in 10 years of activities. The TNMG was created in 2005 and supported PHC in 82 cities as a research project and was progressively expanded. A methodology for implementation and maintenance was developed, including quality control. Nowadays it provides support to 750 cities, 88.0% of Minas Gerais state. The examinations performed by the PHC team, with additional basic clinical data, are transmitted through the Internet to the TNMG specialists for remote interpretation. The TNMG teleconsultations system has been used by the PHC team to address written clinical questions to university staff. Until December 2015, 2,464,999 ECGs and 73,698 teleconsultations have already been performed: on average, 2,000 ECGs and 40 teleconsultations per day in 2015. More than 95% of users have declared to be satisfied or very satisfied with the service. A recent cost-benefit analysis of the project showed that for each dollar invested, 6.1 dollars are saved as a consequence of patient referral reduction. The TNMG is a successful example of a sustainable telehealth service, integrated to primary care centers of remote and small cities. It overcomes geographical barriers to provide specialized healthcare, reducing the number of unnecessary referrals, and contributing to improve the case-resolving capacity and the quality of the PHC.