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With continued growth in tourism, demand for guided local excursions, sightseeing, and entertainment has increased rapidly, particularly in European tourist destinations cities. Many touristic sights can often be viewed best from the water. Operators offer a variety of sightseeing cruises on motor barges along rivers, canals, lakefronts, or ports. In many tourist destination cities and around urban heritage sites, however, increasing boat traffic and the associated air pollution from diesel-powered engines have become a local environmental concern. Based on complaints from residents and visitors, several cities have already announced plans for (mandatory) tourist boat emission reductions. Today, electric mobility offers alternative options for safely and conveniently powering commercial tourist boats, that may contribute to mutually beneficial solutions for local operators, tourist visitors, and residents alike. However, the technology is still expensive and new businesses may also face considerable challenges when entering established local competitive tourism markets. Focusing on the local waterways of the city of Berlin, Germany, the authors have conducted a local case study, including interviews with several operators of (electric) tour boats, as well as an initial empirical survey of their tourist customers. The authors point out the viewpoints of the various stakeholders, identify opportunities, discuss constraints, and offer policy recommendations with a view to enhance the sustainability of waterborne transport in tourist destination cities.

The nonhuman world is under substantial threat from human activities and economies. Rewilding gardens and community action can build relationships of care with the nonhuman, restore habitat, connect people and land, and empower humans to work with and for the nonhuman. Stories about family relationships to land and through land, and creating a wild garden are used to explore place attachment, creating relationships of care through gardening, and purposeful rewilding of a garden; stories about participation in a community service organization examine how collective action can take rewilding ideas out into the larger community. By consciously creating care for the nonhuman and participating in rewilding, we can actively build ecological paths forward for ourselves and our nonhuman neighbors.

A study of community college students enrolled in a for-credit study abroad program in Costa Rica sought to identify the experiences that influence intercultural competency growth during study abroad trips and to learn how the experiences influence the development of global leadership competencies. The results led to a modified global leadership development expertise model for understanding the process of global leadership development in student populations. The study revealed a key link between antecedent characteristics of participants and their transformational ability during the study. The study also revealed that there are types of transformational experiences that, when experienced sequentially, can maximize transformational potential and the development of intercultural competencies.

How much goodness do we expect from our neighbours? People living nearby might be locked with each other in interdependencies by spatial proximity but often do not know each other more personally. This chapter explores the question of how latent neighbourliness – an expectation that neighbours will have our back even though we might not know them – emerges. We draw on statistical analyses of survey data from four neighbourhoods in Berlin, Germany, and a pre- and post-COVID-19 methodology, therefore capturing a time when people were asked to stay home and within their neighbourhoods. Our findings demonstrate that latent neighbourliness is neither significantly associated with personal support from neighbours when facing important challenges, nor personal support experienced in the neighbourhood with others whom we know, but who are not neighbours (e.g., family members). Neither is latent neighbourliness a fixed attitude that can be explained by individual characteristics and/or positions (such as age, gender, education, income, one’s employment situation and others). In contrast, we find that, apart from individual generalised trust towards others, the neighbourhood setting itself shapes levels of latent neighbourliness among all demographics. Additionally, those with younger children show higher latent neighbourliness, most likely a result of moral geographies. We argue that caring for children in public and experiencing or displaying moral codes that others can read makes it easier to develop an expectation of goodwill (or for that matter, hostility) from neighbours, without having more durable ties to them.

The chapter presents experiences of volunteers to organise and operate public transport services in Germany. A brief overview of the practical issues and a discussion of the possibilities and limitations is given.

The work is based on the author’s experience as a consultant and researcher in the field.

Approximately 250 Bürgerbus presently exist, mainly in rural areas where everyday operations are carried out by a group of volunteers. Service planning is done in partnership with local authorities and transport providers, and benefits from the volunteers’ local knowledge. The services use small vehicles and have a complementary function in the transport system. They primarily cater to local shopping and leisure journeys and, although available to the general public, are predominantly used by pensioners. In recent years, the original concept has evolved and a much greater variety can now be seen.

Beyond providing mobility, the establishment of a Bürgerbus service is an important community achievement and contributes to social cohesion. Variations in the general popularity of volunteering can also be seen in the differing numbers of Bürgerbus schemes in the German regions.

Civic engagement is an important resource for community life, which can also be used for improving mobility. However, experience shows that the professional public transport industry and transport policy must understand the volunteers’ motivations, provide a suitable framework and support to develop concepts tailored to local needs.

Towns and cities across Canada face rapidly changing economic circumstances and many are turning to a variety of strategies, including tourism, to provide stability in their communities. Community Economic Development (CED) has become an accepted form of economic development, with recognition that such planning benefits from a more holistic approach and community participation. However, much of why particular strategies are chosen, what process the community undertakes to implement those choices and how success is measured is not fully understood. Furthermore, CED lacks a developed theoretical basis from which to examine these questions. By investigating communities that have chosen to develop their tourism potential through the use of murals, these various themes can be explored. There are three purposes to this research: (1) to acquire an understanding of the “how” and the “why” behind the adoption and diffusion of mural-based tourism as a CED strategy in rural communities; (2) to contribute to the emerging theory of CED by linking together theories of rural geography, rural change and sustainability, and rural tourism; and (3) to contribute to the development of a framework for evaluating the potential and success of tourism development within a CED process.

Two levels of data collection and analysis were employed in this research. Initially, a survey of Canadian provincial tourism guides was conducted to determine the number of communities in Canada that market themselves as having a mural-based tourism attraction (N=32). A survey was sent to these communities, resulting in 31 responses suitable for descriptive statistical analysis, using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). A case study analysis of the 6 Saskatchewan communities was conducted through in-depth, in person interviews with 40 participants. These interviews were subsequently analyzed utilizing a combined Grounded Theory (GT) and Content Analysis approach.

The surveys indicated that mural development spread within a relatively short time period across Canada from Chemainus, British Columbia. Although tourism is often the reason behind mural development, increasing community spirit and beautification were also cited. This research demonstrates that the reasons this choice is made and the successful outcome of that choice is often dependent upon factors related to community size, proximity to larger populations and the economic (re)stability of existing industry. Analysis also determined that theories of institutional thickness, governance, embeddedness and conceptualizations of leadership provide a body of literature that offers an opportunity to theorize the process and outcomes of CED in rural places while at the same time aiding our understanding of the relationship between tourism and its possible contribution to rural sustainability within a Canadian context. Finally, this research revealed that both the CED process undertaken and the measurement of success are dependent upon the desired outcomes of mural development. Furthermore, particular attributes of rural places play a critical role in how CED is understood, defined and carried out, and how successes, both tangible and intangible, are measured.