Community involvement in tourism: Exploring the place image guided by the locals

This paper is intended as a contribution to the debate on tourism sustainability and the need to involve local communities in planning practices, key to sustainable tourism. The community-based approach has been widely theorized and used in projects of sustainable tourism development, because it tends to maximize the participation of local population from the earliest stages of development and affect tourism policies, while also responding to the changing needs of contemporary tourists, especially in terms of development of niche and special-interest tourism. The only exception is in the construction of the tourist imaginary: the involvement of the community in this fundamental sphere has always been scarce, with the result that often there is a strong imbalance - even dissonance - between the image promoted through the marketing, that continuously re-shaped by the locals and that experienced by the tourists. This contribution will explore the creation of tourism imaginary as negotiated activity.