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This chapter outlines and explains the development of the Abandoibarra megaproject, focusing in particular on the key role of the Bilbao Ría 2000 – an innovative cross institution, public–private partnership, responsible for coordinating the transfer of land between public and private agents. The chapter critically assesses the impact of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the centerpiece in the Abandoibarra scheme. The narrative is based on fieldwork conducted by the author in the city of Bilbao. The chapter utilizes scholarly research, official sources, and reports in the news media to support the arguments. The chapter questions the viability of revitalization schemes based on urban megaprojects. Applying some of the elements in the revitalization mix to most cities may be unavoidable due to rapid and acritical adoption of policy discourses from center to periphery, but expecting to replicate one city's success in another context may prove extremely hard. The motivations of the Basque political elite to attract a Guggenheim museum go beyond the potential (and we might add, limited) urban regeneration benefits of a building, and can only be understood within the political context of the Basque Country and its relations with Spain. The case of Bilbao's revitalization has attracted significant attention as of late. This chapter uncovers the key issues surrounding Bilbao's transformation and puts the process in the context of capitalist globalization and the formation of globalizing cities.

The paper aims to introduce social marketing (SM) as a tool to overcome the low cultural participation, a problem of the arts and culture sector that has worsened in the post-pandemic scenario.

The study uses a multidisciplinary literature review (SM, museum marketing, museology and cultural policy) to address the problem of museums and other cultural heritage institutions, at both the macro-level (prevailing cultural policies and antecedents, barriers and consequences to cultural participation) and micro-level (challenges faced by museums in the 21st century and marketing as a management instrument).

The downstream, midstream and upstream approaches can be used to design and implement SM interventions intended to address the problem of low cultural participation in museums. The three approaches should be considered holistically, with their synergetic and recursive effects.

Due to its introductory and conceptual nature, the study provides a comprehensive intervention framework to be used as a platform for future theoretical and empirical research. Further investigations may expand on the specificities of each approach (down, mid and upstream) and extend the framework to other nonprofit cultural institutions beyond museums, such as libraries and archives, cultural heritage sites and theater, music and dance companies.

The paper proposes a comprehensive SM intervention framework that integrates three interdependent approaches (downstream, midstream and upstream).

The paper provides a starting point for the holistic application of SM in the arts and culture sector. It also encourages researchers, cultural policymakers and cultural heritage professionals to investigate, design and implement SM programs that better understand, expand and diversify the audience and strengthen the legitimacy and relevance of cultural actors and activities to transform them into inclusive, accessible and sustainable institutions.

The Tourist Gaze has been debated, reimagined and applied to a variety of actors and settings. This paper helps investigate how contemporary architecture operates as subject and participant in gazing practices.

Using Yelp reviews of art museums in a regional US city, a thematic analysis of text reviews and image uploads was conducted.

Reviewers do refer to buildings as objects of the gaze; but they also connect their experience of the building to emotions and to actions and use the building to orient themselves spatially. This article demonstrates that contemporary buildings are important components of tourist experiences as objects of the gaze, but also as frames for gazing and as stages for tourist practices.

The research implications are both topical and methodological: the paper demonstrates that contemporary (neo-modern) architecture is a vibrant avenue of research, and that social networking sites are a promising potential source of data for studying architecture in the social field.

This research uses an underexplored data set, Yelp reviews, to capture what people pay attention to and think others will find interesting about architecture. It also adds important layers to studies on the tourist gaze. First, it emphasizes that architecture is important to tourists not only as an object of the gaze but also as a site for affective experience, action and daily life. Second, it addresses some building styles beyond the historical ones that are foundational to the idea of the tourist gaze.

Digital language has meant a revolution in the methods of production, distribution and conservation of contemporary art. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the new status of museums within the digital age. Works using new media must be understood as spaces of non-hierarchical communication where an artist’s role is diluted and the public becomes a user that completes an open process. Therefore, the function of the museum is challenged, being no longer a moral authority or a place of storing physical works. Because of its instability and obsolescence, the only valid method for the conservation of digital art is permanence through change.

This research contrasts the theoretical material emerged in the past years related to the characteristic of new media to the practical work of conservation of digital pieces made by the new generation of museums and cultural centres. In addition, the fresh material offered by the Web itself allows analyzing the virtual activity of the museums themselves and the new platforms (online labs, databases, websites and blogs) arisen in the past decades. The latter are perfect examples of the new paths opened by the digital contemporary technology offering collective sites of communication in real time.

The preservation of digital and intangible heritage is understood as a form of development of a collective memory that can help in the understanding of our age in the future. In this way, the goals and the responsibilities are common; citizens are required to keep an active culture that is no more a culture of the accumulation and concentration by a minority. In present context, there is a new possibility, maybe for the first time in history, of achieving a new narrative really democratized and decentralized through the new ways of interacting and sharing information offers by digital media.

The urgency of getting an open and free access to information and technology is part of the idiosyncratic of digital art. There is a real aim of generating alternative spaces of knowledge serving public interest, being apart from the economic and political interests of large corporations. In this respect, the role of the museum will be controversial. First of all, as an institution originally created to impose power and moral authority by the governments.

Museums remains as the main artistic institution nowadays. However, they are in a difficult position as a traditional space for preserving and exhibiting art. That is why, they are adapting themselves to the new digital context helped by offering practical databases and updated information on their collections via websites and social networks.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse museums and theme parks as a tourist package and how the proximity of airports to the city and public transport influence the development of this tourist package to stimulate tourism demand in cities.

Qualitative and quantitative indicators have been applied in our methodology to measure the most visited European theme parks and museums from 2012 to 2022. Moreover, the localisation of airports has allowed us to address the importance of theme parks and museums in cities and their regional economies.

The results suggest that the location of the city, entertainment complementary activity, airport proximity, intermodal passenger transport, air and train accessibility, tourism demand and supply, and a high concentration of population in cities have a high influence on the development of a tourist package that includes museums and theme parks to stimulate the tourism demand in European urban cities. London and Paris are two of the most visited cities in the world, and these are the most attractive European cities for tourists in terms of efficiency because tourists can optimize much better their space and time to visit the city’s tourist attractions during their holidays. Another important finding is that the public transport service plays an important role in museums and theme parks’ visits and the optimization of space-time for tourists when they are visiting a city and its tourist attractions on holidays, especially subways, trains and buses. Although time-space measures of accessibility in public transport in cities must be improved to optimize the time of the native population and tourists.

This research shows the complementary role of museums and theme parks as an attractive tourist package and an entertainment, cultural and educational activity to improve the quality of tourism supply and redistribute tourist flows in European countries. Moreover, there are limited studies that tackle the theme of parks and museums in a tourism context.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, a growing number of cities around the world have been looking to invest in extensive city-reimaging and place-marketing initiatives in efforts to announce themselves or to raise their profiles on the tourism market. In either case, the objective is to facilitate economic growth in times of rising importance of the service sector, of which tourism is widely seen as one of the most lucrative areas since it helps attract new investors, generate more revenue, and create additional jobs. It is in pursuit of such economic benefits that government officials, policy-makers, urban-planning agencies, land developers, and other private stakeholders have been coming together to identify potential urban precincts within cities, before transforming these precincts into art and cultural districts, often home to at least one visually striking art museum or a performing arts center – almost always designed by an elite band of celebrity architects. Fully or partially funded by taxpayer money, these signature art museums and performing arts centers are conceptualized and built as icons of the city, and as objects of the tourist gaze, with little or no interest in the physical and environmental peculiarities of place and with little or no regard for local residents including local artists and cultural producers. Traveling from Bilbao in Spain to Bhopal in India, this chapter expands on some of the events that led to an outburst of formally overstated and spatially exclusive venues of art and culture in the last two decades, before sharing some thoughts and restarting conversations on reclaiming and reimagining these venues as open, inclusive, and pulsating public spaces embedded in the actual fabrics of cities, at once accessible to locals and tourists.

This paper aims to deconstruct the validation process for contemporary art with a fresh take on the components and terminology of this process, here referred to as the art machine.

Existing literature is analysed and key theoretical aspects combined to support the theory that an art machine exists that may process contemporary art for legitimation, sustainability and market success.

Roles played by art professionals and institutions within what is pioneered in this paper as the art machine frequently overlap. Opportunities for success are maximised when and if artists, art schools, galleries, critics, auction houses, museums and collectors manage to work in unison towards the common goal of optimal symbolic and financial value for the contemporary art market.

A clear and intelligible deconstruction of the art machine's interacting components should enable interested agents in both established and emerging art markets to better operate mechanisms towards short‐term marketing objectives and long‐term sustainability within the highly competitive and fluid art environment.

Existing literature recognises layered spheres of activity that may combine for success in an art market seeking increasing symbolic and financial value and sustainability. This article innovatively pictures the dynamic, interlocking mechanisms in this on‐going, one‐way process of turning inconspicuous raw materials into a valued end‐product: this is the art machine.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of the creative city, the factors conditioning creativity in cities and how they stimulate urban innovation and local development. Furthermore, by way of examples, the paper aims to illustrate two emblematic case studies and the main elements which were considered for the sustainable urban regeneration.

The paper gives both a theoretical contribution on the relationship between the creative regeneration and cultural tourism, and empirically illustrates two cases for comparative study. The case studies are explained taking care to present information and figures of interest for the purposes of the work, with useful data to implement project descriptions and draw appropriate conclusions.

The research found that, in order to achieve the long‐term success of urban and cultural regeneration, the involvement and integration of the local community at all levels throughout the process, and the need to enhance and consolidate place identity, all in respect of economic, social and environmental sustainability, are critical factors.

The theoretical and empirical contribution of the paper is organized so as to emphasize the interdisciplinary relationships between some aspects of creative projects that are considered of particular importance to boost cultural tourism such as: place identity, sustainable development, urban regeneration and involvement of the population.