Analysis of the Status of Creative Tourism and Urban Development (Case Study: Birjand City)
Keywords:
Urban Creativity, Creative Tourism, Urban Development, BirjandAbstract
Creative tourism is a sustainable form of tourism that provides opportunities for the development of creative capacities through active participation in specific learning courses and experiences within a tourist destination, which itself constitutes one of the key characteristics of sustainable urban development. This study is an applied research with a mixed quantitative–qualitative approach, employing a descriptive–analytical survey method for data collection. The statistical population consisted of 239,591 citizens of Birjand (with a sample size of 384 selected through simple random sampling) and 30 experts (selected through purposive sampling). The main research instrument was a questionnaire with confirmed validity and reliability (Cronbach’s alpha of 0.756 for creative tourism and 0.723 for urban development), measured on a scale ranging from 1 (undesirable) to 5 (desirable). Data analysis was conducted using SPSS and AMOS software, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and the Delphi method. This study, adopting a combined approach (Delphi technique, binomial test, Pearson correlation, and structural equation modeling), examined the impact of creative tourism indicators on sustainable urban development in Birjand. The results indicated that, except for the social capital indicator, the status of other creative tourism indicators in Birjand is undesirable. The indicators of sustainable urban development were also evaluated as weak across the economic, social, and environmental dimensions. A positive and significant relationship was found between creative tourism and sustainable development (at the 0.01 significance level). The strongest correlation was observed between innovation and urban development (r = 0.941). Structural equation modeling results showed that creative tourism indicators explain 62% of the variance in sustainable development. Among the indicators, social capital (β = 0.95) had the greatest effect on sustainable urban development.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Morteza Sadegh Bakhtiari (Author); Maryam Karimian Bostani; Gholamreza Miri (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
