International Tourism Congress ITC2022 is a main event disseminating the achievements of the project SPOT - Sustainable Spatial Planning of Tourism Destinations. During the congress, the special session will be organized to present the results of both researchers’ and students’ work related to sustainable spatial planning and sustainable tourism development in selected European destinations. This special session is organized also to commemorate tragically dead prof. Konrad Czapiewski from the Institute of Geography and Spatial Organisation PAS, one of the SPOT partner leaders. Participation in this special session is free of charge. However, registration is requested.
The main theme of ITC2022 is: “Tourism – Going Back/Forward to Sustainability”. Sustainable tourism has been widely discussed since the beginning of the 1990s. The roots of the notion are embedded in the concept of ‘green tourism’, resulting from understanding the negative impacts of a boom in mass tourism dating back to the 1960s, and a much broader and older idea of ‘sustainable development’.
Recently, sustainability has been reconsidered as the response of tourism to nature-based challenges like climate change, bio- and geodiversity crisis, and cultural landscape degradation influenced by consumption-oriented and profit-oriented capitalist economies treating nature as a cheap asset. Similarly, sustainable tourism nowadays addresses social and spatial injustice resulting from social and economic inequalities, lack of territorial cohesion, and tourism’s spatial failures like over tourism or tourism hypertrophy. Sustainability, along with innovation (including information technology, mobile technology, robotics, and big data) are indicated as the most vital forces shaping the development of future tourism. Thus, in discussion about tourism during the ITC2022 congress, we are going both back and forward to sustainability.