Speaker
Description
The urban landscape of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H), is rich in memorial heritage sites dedicated to the Bosnian civil war of the 1990s (Kamber et al., 2016). Soon after the war's end, some of these sites started to be consumed by non-local visitors despite the largely devastated urban areas (Zivali, 2023). This consumption was driven by private entities and is linked to the academic discourse of dark tourism (see Dolenec, 2024), a form of tourism where visitors engage with memories of death and the deceased (Seaton, 2018). Recent literature on dark tourism suggests that it could contribute to the development of capital cities, including Skopje, Sofia, Beirut, and Sarajevo (see Dolenec, 2024). In the case of Sarajevo, dark tourism mainly contributed to the post-war spatial reconstruction (Zivali, 2023). However, it also brought many issues to the city (such as gentrification; see Pobric & Robinson, 2019). Sarajevo's tourism and spatial planning are still in their early stages (Economic Institute Sarajevo, 2024), which presents numerous development opportunities to tackle the mentioned issues. These opportunities include engaging public sector stakeholders in tourism planning (Pobric & Robinson, 2019), allowing them to either embrace or reject dark tourism, or to focus on other attractions. A non-local visitor's perspective/preferences should be considered when planning urban tourism (see Zhang et al., 2024) of Sarajevo's urban environment. This represents the literature gap that this study aims to fill.
This study aims to provide (1) insights into the consumption levels and dimensions of urban dark tourism and (2) initial planning recommendations for the systematic urban (dark) tourism development in Sarajevo, grounded in scientific evidence regarding tourist consumption/experiences. It uniquely combines urban and dark tourism studies with heritage consumption, focusing on the urban environment of Sarajevo. It employs innovative methods to analyse TripAdvisor reviews, and it utilises an inductive thematic approach supported by MAXQDA 2024 software for data analysis, which are approaches that helped to fill similar research gaps in other tourism contexts (see Zhang et al., 2024; Ertas & Karakan, 2024).
The findings indicate that among the most visited attractions in Sarajevo, recent non-local visitors either spontaneously or systematically consumed/experienced memorial heritage sites related to the Bosnian civil war in 71% of cases. This suggests that dark tourism is a notable trend in Sarajevo's urban environment. Those who systematically consume these sites mainly report complex experiences in terms of connection to war narrative, knowing the past, and an intensive and complex emotional journey while encountering the memories of past tragedies of B&H, raising their awareness of the importance of preserving peace and urban accessibility of these sites. Public sector stakeholders in Sarajevo's urban environment can improve the experiences of non-local visitors by integrating dark tourism related to the memorial heritage of war events into tourism and spatial urban plans, which ensure greater accessibility to these sites and respect the sensitivity of non-local visitors and the people of B&H regarding past tragedies.
This study (1) responds to the research call to explore tourism in Sarajevo's urban environment (Kanovici et al., 2023), (2) adds to existing knowledge on dark tourism in this specific environment (see Kanovici et al., 2023; Zivali et al., 2023), and (3) enhances understanding of the under-researched form of urban tourism and urban dark tourism, highlighting the need for evidence-based planning (Koens & Milano, 2024).
References
Dolenec, S. (2024). Attitudes of local stakeholders towards the development of dark tourism: an example of the heritage of antifascism of Istria County (Doctoral dissertation, University of Primorska).
Economic Institute Sarajevo (2024). Draft of the Sarajevo Canton Development Strategy until 2030. [Online] available at: https://skupstina.ks.gov.ba/sites/default/files/2024-11/nacrt-strategije-razvoja-turizma-u-ks-do-2030.gif__0.pdf
Ertaş, Ç., & Karakan, H. I. (2024). The future of events in the tourism industry: the case of the “Best of the Best Things to Do 2023” on TripAdvisor. Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes, 16(4), pp. 474-484.
Kamber, M., Karafotias, T., & Tsitoura, T. (2016). Dark heritage tourism and the Sarajevo siege. Journal of tourism and cultural change, 14(3), 255-269.
Klepej, D., & Marot, N. (2024). Considering urban tourism in strategic spatial planning. Annals of Tourism Research Empirical Insights, 5(2), 100136.
Koens, K., & Milano, C. (2024). Urban tourism studies: A transversal research agenda. Tourism Culture & Communication, 24, pp. 275–286.
Pobric, A., & Robinson, G. M. (2019). Recent urban development and gentrification in post-Dayton Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Cities, 89, 281-295.
Zhang, et al. (2024). A Predictive Model Based on TripAdvisor Textual Reviews: Early Destination Recommendations for Travel Planning. SAGE Open, 14(2), pp. 1-15.
| Keywords | Sarajevo city; urban tourism; dark tourism; heritage consumption; tourism planning |
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| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
