Living heritage: Resident-Centered Governance for Sustainable Tourism in Small Heritage Cities Under Pressure

TOPIC

“Heritage Cities Under Pressure” (Tourism-Pressured Heritage Cities): Small Heritage Cities like Siena (less than 100,000 inhabitants) face a growing challenge: massive daily visitor flows are putting pressure on streets, public spaces, traditional commerce, and the daily life of residents. While tourism is a vital economic driver, it can threaten the social fabric, liveability, and cultural identity of the city. This project addresses the main challenge of how to balance tourism growth with the quality of life of local residents, ensuring that the city’s heritage is preserved while communities thrive. 

1- Inclusive Urban Development: Ensuring residents’ voices and lived experience shape policy and urban design outcomes.

2- Participatory Governance: Strengthening democratic engagement and co-creation in decision-making processes.

3- Cultural Heritage & Identity: Protecting and enhancing heritage value as a living dimension of community wellbeing.

4- Integrated Urban Policy: Linking tourism management to housing, mobility, public space, economic vitality, and social cohesion.

CONTEXT

In recent years, the historic city of Siena has experienced increasing pressure from high volumes of visitors. As a small city recognised by UNESCO for its outstanding cultural heritage, Siena attracts thousands of tourists daily. While tourism contributes significantly to the local economy, this rapid influx and concentration of visitors have brought substantial challenges for residents: congested public spaces, reduced accessibility for day-to-day life, displacement of traditional commerce, fluctuating housing dynamics, and a perceived erosion of community identity. These dynamics are emblematic of overtourism — a complex phenomenon affecting many small and mid-sized heritage cities across Europe. However, unlike narratives that frame the issue purely as “too many visitors”, Siena’s experience underscores a deeper governance challenge: how to manage tourism in ways that sustain heritage value while placing the wellbeing of residents at the heart of urban life.

The primary challenge this project addresses is that current tourism management models often prioritise visitor flows and economic metrics over residents’ lived experience, community priorities, and social sustainability. Traditional data sources, such as number of overnight stays, ticket sales, or footfall counts, offer useful insights into tourism pressure but are insufficient to understand how these pressures affect everyday life in the city — especially for residents, local workers, and vulnerable populations whose voices are often marginalised in planning processes. This imbalance can lead to policy responses that fail to improve, or even inadvertently worsen, liveability for those who call the city home.

Moreover, as recognised in EU research and policy frameworks, overtourism cannot be addressed in isolation from broader urban policy goals. The European Urban Agenda highlights the need for integrated approaches that connect housing, mobility, public space, social inclusion, cultural heritage, and participatory governance to improve urban wellbeing and equity. In this context, cities must develop governance approaches that are not only evidence-based but also inclusive, place-sensitive, and locally validated.

The Living Heritage project, led by the City of Siena, responds to the 2026 URBACT IV Action Networks call by proposing an innovative, resident-centered model of tourism governance that co-creates solutions with and for local communities. This model combines smart, real-time data analytics with qualitative, participatory insights to create integrated tools for adaptive decision-making. Rather than prescribing fixed visitor limits or seasonal restrictions, the project emphasises co-creation, experimentation, and iterative learning — core principles of the Action Networks framework, which encourages cities to develop portfolios of actions tested and refined during implementation.

The European added value of this Action Network stems from its transnational collaboration and its contribution to a shared understanding of sustainable tourism governance in heritage contexts. Small heritage cities(less than 100,000 inhabitants) across Europe face similar pressures(UNESCO or with other high level recognition) — narrow streets, fragile heritage environments, limited public infrastructure, and a high density of daily visitors — yet they often lack frameworks that combine inclusive governance with real-time, multi-source data. By connecting Siena with 6–8 European partners, the network will facilitate knowledge exchange and co-development of methodologies that other cities can adopt, adapt, and scale.

By embedding residents at the core of tourism governance, the Living Heritage network transforms overtourism from a challenge of volume into an opportunity for co-creation, resilience, and shared urban futures. It demonstrates how small historic cities can innovate governance practices that balance cultural vibrancy with quality of life —not by limiting visitors alone, but by integrating residents, data, and adaptive policy into a coherent system for sustainable city life.