Urban cultural tourism increasingly affects how cities manage visitor flows, cultural assets, and everyday urban life, making governance more complex as tourism growth creates uneven pressures and benefits. Existing Smart Tourism approaches improve connectivity and prediction but offer limited support for comparing the consequences of alternative interventions. This review reconceptualizes Metatourism as a problem-driven, simulation-based governance framework through which policy-relevant urban relationships are represented, alternative interventions are tested, stakeholder adaptation and policy spillovers are examined, and multidimensional outcomes are evaluated under uncertainty. Using a concept-centric, systematized integrative review of the literature across tourism, urban studies, planning, information systems, computer science, and governance research, the study clarifies the relationship between Metatourism, Smart Tourism, metaverse tourism, and tourism digital twins. The synthesis develops a recursive governance architecture linking sensing, representation, simulation, intervention, evaluation, and feedback; identifies four urban governance mechanisms; and derives seven theoretical propositions concerning platform-mediated value distribution, resident legitimacy, representational adequacy, policy spillovers, agent calibration, cultural-value conversion, and participatory credibility. It also identifies four implementation challenges and five directions for future research. Its main contribution is to shift Metatourism from a technology-centered idea toward an accountable decision-support framework that makes policy trade-offs, uncertainty, and distributional effects more visible before interventions are implemented.

Driven by advances in artificial intelligence, immersive technologies, and related digital innovations, public cultural spaces are undergoing significant mediatization. Although architectural research has addressed this transformation through media architecture, responsive architecture, digital architecture, and intelligent architecture, it has largely focused on urban-scale interfaces or treated media as an external addition to space. To address this gap, this study examines mediated space at the interior scale of public cultural spaces and proposes a holistic analytical framework that understands media as an intrinsic condition of spatial operation. Through literature review, case analysis, and theoretical modeling, mediated space is classified into four types: physical, digital, interactive, and intelligent. The concept of the Spatial Organism is then introduced and structured into three interrelated entities: the media functional entity, the information exchange entity, and the symbolic representation entity. Building on this framework, the study develops a space–user perceptual interaction model and identifies four interaction stages and three interaction modes. The study argues that media intervention is reshaping spatial organization, meaning production, and evaluation, with interactivity, adaptability, and operational capacity as key evaluative dimensions. It thus offers a mechanism-oriented framework for understanding the mediatization of contemporary public cultural spaces.