Original title: Urban micro-travel, deep integration of culture and tourism.
"Citywalk", also known as city walk or city walk, is a leisure method that integrates tourism, culture and social characteristics, and is also one of the most popular urban leisure activities in the past two years. On the one hand, the rise of city walking stems from the cultural consciousness of some cities; On the other hand, it comes from the consensus in the field of urban planning and design to return urban space and streets to the people, and to show tourists and residents the unique charm of the city through urban walks led by local tourism agencies, cultural organizations or communities.
The connotation of city walking coincides with China's concept of "promoting the in-depth integration and development of culture and tourism with cultural and plastic tourism and tourism to promote culture". In September 2023, the "Several Measures on Unleashing the Potential of Tourism Consumption and Promoting the High-quality Development of the Tourism Industry" issued by the General Office of ** clearly put forward key tasks such as "increasing the supply of high-quality tourism products and services", "carrying out urban renewal actions empowered by the cultural and tourism industry, and building a number of national-level tourism and leisure cities and blocks with distinctive cultural characteristics". The Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and other departments have launched a series of policy measures, successively organized and assessed three batches of a total of 117 national tourism and leisure blocks, and built 50 demonstration zones for the integrated development of national cultural industries and tourism industries. Various localities have made frequent efforts in the integrated development of the cultural industry and the tourism industry, and many city cultural and tourism bureaus have issued official guidelines for citywal** roads. Through the development of integrated formats such as city walking, we will optimize the supply of urban leisure tourism products, dig deep into the potential of the integrated consumption value of culture and tourism, create an urban cultural space and urban cultural brand shared by hosts and guests, and continuously create a new situation of in-depth integration and high-quality development of culture and tourism.
Leisure and slow pace, immersive micro-travel, optimize the "poetry and distance" of urban tourism products. With the transformation of national tourism consumption demand to leisure vacation and in-depth experience, people are no longer obsessed with the "distance" in spatial distance, local residents integrate short-distance "micro-travel" and "micro-vacation" into daily life through city walks, and foreign tourists go deep into the fireworks of the neighborhood to "live and travel like a local". Participants need to spend enough time and energy to obtain a more sense of gain, ritual and identity through slow-paced, immersive, and themed experiences, so as to deepen their perception of urban culture and local identity, and experience the self-interpretation and identity brought about by the social attributes of city walking activities. The city walk brings a new way for participants to explore urban space, perceive urban history and culture, and create urban cultural experience, which is an excellent way to create a city business card, and a new fulcrum for enriching urban life and developing the concept of "city, better life".
Connecting urban formats and parallel life scenes, and digging deep into the potential of cultural and tourism integration consumption value. Through the strong supply of cultural activities and tourism products, the city walk has created a new demand for scenario-based consumption, and at the same time provided a cultural impetus for activating and cultivating the city's cultural tourism format, promoting urban renewal and tourism infrastructure construction. The emergence of city walks connects a "consumption line" that is strongly related to the local life services of the city, organically integrating local history and geography, climate and humanities, folk art, celebrity anecdotes and cultural museums, commercial retail, special food, leisure and entertainment and other formats, re-stimulating people's enthusiasm for offline consumption and injecting new vitality into the originally tired business format. With the combination of different participants, activities and facilities, the city blocks form a differentiated cultural scene, which provides a large number of market opportunities for the local cultural industry and businesses, and also creates a rich and diverse interactive experience for tourists. The cultural scene attracts tourists to integrate into the urban consumption space and shapes the specific cultural style of the city, which in turn becomes the foundation of the integration of culture and tourism, bringing stronger social and economic value to the integration of culture and tourism.
The building can be read, and the block can be walked, creating an urban cultural space shared by the host and guest. City walks provide a leisure way with both quality and depth, and people have the opportunity to "talk" with the city through "reading" of the city's blocks and buildings. Tourists and residents can participate in the exploration and discovery of the city, experience the charm of the city together, and in the high-frequency "host-guest communication" interaction, the city has become a veritable public carrier of the deep integration of "host-guest sharing" space and cultural tourism, and show, promote and inherit its own history, culture and tradition to participants with a high-quality spatial environment. Urban walking makes "walkability" an important indicator to measure the construction of urban space and environmental quality, promotes the construction of "walkable" cities, and enables cities to provide more comfortable, safe, visually interesting and entertaining pedestrian spaces. At the same time, city walking allows more leisure resources hidden in the city to return to the public eye, which plays an important role in empowering urban renewal, revitalizing urban resources, releasing the vitality of scenic spots, and promoting the reform and innovation of cultural relics protection and utilization.
Author: Dang Ning, associate professor at the School of Economics and Management, East China Normal University, and deputy director of the Tourism Planning and Development Research Center
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