Sustainable cultural tourism, understood as heritage-based tourism, can support inclusive and sustainable development, especially in remote or peripheral areas. While participatory processes are mandatory, they are not sufficient to ensure sustainable cultural tourism planning. For the latter, cultural tourism must embrace the four pillars of sustainable development: focusing on economic, cultural, environmental, and social sustainability. Nevertheless, a comprehensive methodology that addresses all the aspects of sustainable planning at each stage of the process through inclusive and diverse participation of local communities is still missing. The paper introduces a specific participatory methodology for cultural tourism developed and tested in eight case studies across Europe and beyond and analyzes how the devised participatory process and tools guarantee proper incorporation of the different pillars for sustainable development at each stage. The methodology and tools presented are based on three replicable steps that aim to enhance cultural tourism in a sustainable, diverse, inclusive, and innovative way. The paper specifically focuses on three activities designed for the participatory workshops: the co-mapping exercise, the Action Co-creation, and an adapted Business Model Canvas, providing an analysis of how those contribute to an innovative participatory process, constantly considering the four pillars of sustainable development.

Tourism has become an important engine for development, especially in more remote areas. The potential of cultural tourism for sustainable tourism developing was explored in the H2020 funded TExTOUR project. A total of eight territories developed action plans based on their local heritage for sustainable tourism development. This article situates the actions created through the participatory TExTOUR approach are framed within larger global initiatives, to the Sustainable Development Agenda and the UNWTO pillars of the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development, to show how TExTOUR has contributed to sustainable development through the means of cultural tourism. The results of this article show that local communities can contribute to global goals through cultural tourism strategies. In particular, these areas show that cultural tourism can support, safeguard and enhance heritage and promote positive economic growth through job creation.

The paper investigates the pivotal role of storytelling as a pedagogical tool in tertiary education, specifically in the context of the practice-based doctoral framework in design disciplines. In such a doctoral model, storytelling assumes different meanings and nuances that open to a study in relation to the self-reflective process at the core of the learning paradigm. The research methodology integrates a qualitative and participatory approach with visual and design-based methods through which the authors interact with primary sources (the body of work of PhD candidates) and relevant research literature. Drawing on the expanding field of creative practice research, the research work evidences the emergence of storytelling as a research method and learning tool applied at different levels of the candidates' Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) journey and provides methodological insights into the practice-based doctoral training paradigm. The paper demonstrates the role of storytelling as a learning tool and evidences the multiple levels that storytelling assumes over the course of a practice-based doctoral journey, integrating processual, operational and contextual dimensions.

The paper explores the concept of ‘listening to unheard voices’ in the urban environment as a design intention and strategy that contributes to an inclusive and alternative approach to urban public space, considering and promoting the imperatives of caring that such space should deliver to the city and its inhabitants. The ideas discussed in the paper find their background in the research on the concept of care in feminist urbanism and feminist studies in general, and specifically in relation to the model of the Caring City, promoting a city that places care at its centre, and aims to include a wider selection of citizens in the construction of the public good. Through the analysis of two case studies of public spaces designed by solo-women architecture practices, this paper identifies an alternative relational paradigm which gives space to unheard voices in the urban environment through processes of inclusion and participation. The two cases, Plaça d'en Baró in Santa Coloma de Gramenet (Barcelona, Spain), designed by Catalan architectural collective Equal Saree, and Ruskin Square in the London Borough of Croydon (London, UK) designed by British architectural practice muf architecture/art, have implemented the concept of listening to ‘unheard voices’ offering insights into the contribution of women to the urban environment and how it is transformed, shaped, and used.

Cities are never neutral. As Leslie Kern argues in Feminist City. Claiming Space in a Man-Made World (2020), everyday urban life is patterned by intersecting identitiesgender, race, class, sexuality, age, and abilitythat shape who feels welcome, who is rendered vulnerable, and who remains unseen. The converging crises of recent years, from pandemic care failures to climate emergencies and culture-war backlash, have exposed the inadequacy of one-size-fits-all urbanism. A feminist city insists instead on plurality: spaces that are inclusive, caring, comfortable, sociable, and playful, and processes that are collective, reflexive, and accountable. This special issue takes up that invitation with a deliberately pragmatic editorial stance. We treat feminism both as a label for finished objects and as a working methodan ethic of relation, a commitment to participation, a reliance on situated knowledge, and a willingness to test ideas at multiple scales. The question is both how a feminist public space looks like and how it comes into being, who is invited to shape it, and how its benefits are sustained over time. The essays gathered here span literature, choreography, collective curating, design practice, and participatory urban research. Read together, they offer a toolbox of concepts, strategies, and tactics for remaking public space with care. We situate this conversation in this historical and political moment because several issues are converging with renewed urgency: care infrastructuresfrom public lighting and toilets to shade, seating, safe paths, and maintenanceremain unevenly distributed, shaping who can inhabit public space with dignity and ease; questions of temporal justice have likewise come to the fore, as the rhythms of night work, caregiving, and fragmented mobility destabilize public-space provision which is still calibrated to a normative user; and despite widespread claims of inclusion, participatory processes often stall at the level of procedure rather than transformation, reproducing the inequities they purport to undo. Feminist urbanism gathers these concerns into a shared project and asks designers, researchers, and decision-makers to move beyond representational gestures toward forms of practice that are situated, collective, and accountable. The volume opens with Isabella Webb's "Tactical Spatial Interventions: Design for Gendered Spatial Justice in Peri-Urban Victoria, Australia", which focuses on small-scale, community-led actions that are co-designed, adaptable, and grounded in care ethics. In places marked by car dependency, thin infrastructure, and planning delay, these tactics become testable and transferable methods for addressing gendered inequities, demonstrating how feminist design justice operates as both process and product. Building on this concern for how care reshapes practice, Marta Maria Nicolazzi and Patrizia Leone's "Situated Knowledge in Motion: Reconsidering Urban Feminist Methodologies" offers a candid examination of the gap between feminist epistemologies and the structural, temporal, and emotional constraints of fieldwork with marginalised women in Milan and Bologna. Rather than treating contingency as failure, they theorise participation as partial and affective and recast friction as a generative condition for an ethics of care, reflexivity, and relational accountability. This attention to relationality and the politics of encounter leads naturally to Doris Posch's "Feminist Worldmaking through Collective Curating: Kaleidoskop's Relational Urban" which moves the discussion to