Children’s Engagement for the Co-Governance of Urban Tourism

This article presents a methodological proposal designed to analyze the impacts of overtourism in socio-urban contexts under high tourist pressure, assigning a significant role to the contribution offered by children in providing innovative interpretations of the phenomenon, through their direct involvement in the exploration phase. To this end, the article delves into the involvement of children in decision-making processes for urban transformations of tourist cities toward sustainability, positioning the work into the research on overtourism’s impacts perceived by child-inhabitants, through the collection of qualitative data: a topic that is still under-researched in Italy. The proposal frames child-inhabitants as a sub-segment of the community actor and adapts a specific quintuple-helix model to interpret the actor platform. It interprets the social context as a specific co-governance model, which sees all stakeholder groups contributing to the shared management of the city and its transformations. Furthermore, the interaction’s modes between researchers/ facilitators and children are explored, considering the complex ethical issues and the role of the child in research. This allows to recognize the mutual learning approach as a particularly interesting perspective in the field of participatory processes as well as to identify the most suitable tools for interaction between research and children, adopting a youth-driven perspective. A specific toolkit is outlined, highlighting the potential of visual tools (drawing, photography) as particularly significant in the analysis of tourism, integrating them with shared mapping tools and shared space exploration through gamification. Future research perspective is related to the methodology’s test in a real context to verify its replicability.