CREATIVE TOURISM IN UZBEKISTAN’S HERITAGE CITIES: LEVERAGING URBAN INFORMATICS FOR SUSTAINABLE AND RESILIENT DESTINATION PLANNING

Abstract

The rapid adoption of smart tourism destination models in heritage cities worldwide raises critical questions about the compatibility of technology-driven destination management with the preservation of cultural authenticity. This opinion article examines the applicability of dominant smart destination frameworks—developed in well-resourced institutional contexts such as Seoul, Singapore, Barcelona, and Kyoto—to the Silk Road heritage cities of Uzbekistan  (Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva), which are currently undergoing ambitious digitalization initiatives amid unprecedented tourism growth. Drawing on a critical-interpretive synthesis of smart tourism destination theory, creative tourism studies, and postcolonial development critique, the article identifies a fundamental tension: technology-first approaches implicitly presuppose institutional prerequisites, digital infrastructure, and stakeholder coordination mechanisms that remain underdeveloped in Central Asian contexts. The analysis reveals that prevailing models risk homogenizing the distinctive cultural attributes that constitute these destinations’ global appeal, while systematically positioning heritage communities as subjects of governance rather than agents of development. In response, the article proposes “heritage-first informatics”—a paradigm that subordinates technological implementation to community-defined cultural priorities—and presents a multi-stakeholder benefit distribution framework demonstrating that community agency and destination competitiveness are mutually reinforcing rather than contradictory. The heritage-first approach repositions heritage communities as principal agents whose cultural values, transmission priorities, and permissible interaction parameters precede and regulate technological deployment, simultaneously generating distributed benefits for destination management organizations, travelers, and government entities. The article concludes that targeted, community-managed technology implementation aligned with established institutional capacity offers a more sustainable pathway than comprehensive digitalization strategies that exceed local readiness, with implications extending beyond Uzbekistan to heritage cities globally navigating the tension between modernization and cultural continuity.