Sustainable Tourism as a driving force for branding Gjirokastra, Creative Tourism and Tourism for all, as enhancers of Cultural Toursim in achieving sustainable development.

abstracteng

Although we are well into the 21st century, our cities are still governed by political, environmental, economical and social problems. With globalization spreading all over the world, these issues are not local anymore; instead they are quickly becoming evident at a global scale. As a consequence, cities, places, destinations are suffering the effect of an increasing standardization and the declining quality of urban spaces, followed sometimes by loss of identity, structure and meaning. This has pushed researchers and experts to investigate issues of space and places as means of correction by offering new marketing tools focusing in Branding Places, especially Cultural Heritage sites. In disposition to these common trends, nowadays there is an increased competition between different countries and cities throughout the world in attracting investments and investors, followed by local and government policies, which leads cities to implement marketing and branding strategies almost every year. Albania as many other countries in the world, is also know of holding many potential regarding tourism development. Beside the fact that for the past ten years Albania has been trying to create a brand for attracting more investments, and attention as a touristic attraction attempting to build up a tourism brand, the country is still lacking many basic resources and new methodologies in transitioning from an aggressive tourism (intervention to the landscape, cultural heritage, environment) to more sustainable tourism trends in branding the country and especially Gjirokastra. Referring to the standardization of cultural tourism as a simple mean of branding a place, in accordance with change in tourists’ motivations and interest, has resulted in identifying and developing new trends and forms of sustainable tourism worldwide: such as cultural tourism experienced through cultural routes; creative tourism, and accessible tourism, as new forms which avoid mass tourism and the “Mathew Effect” of places enhancing new possibilities of the applied place with social, economic, and environmental benefits. Similar to many other destinations that have been working on basing their branding methodologies relying to new trends of sustainable tourism which have gained contribution to the economical and cultural activities of the area applied, this research explores the possibility and means of transforming Gjirokastra in an sustainable tourism destination by creating a winning strategy for long-term sustainability of the region, potentially impact the visitor experience and at the same time enhancing the economical, social, and environmental factors of the area.