Placemaking negotiated through progressive sense of place: regenerative hospitality in Parma, Italy

Tourism-driven urban regeneration plays a crucial role in transforming urban spaces, yet it often faces sustainability challenges. Regenerative tourism has emerged as an alternative to traditional tourism strategies, aiming to create net positive impacts and offering a more place- and community-centred approach. Despite recent advances in regenerative tourism and hospitality research, significant gaps remain in understanding how different stakeholders can influence and be influenced by regenerative practices, and how hotels can embed themselves in cities’ socio-spatial context. This study examines the intersection of regenerative hospitality and urban regeneration through a hotel-led placemaking case study in Parma, Italy. The study uses a multi-method ethnographic approach to gain project developers’ intentions and community perceptions during the project’s early development phase, using a theoretical lens of progressive sense of place. The findings demonstrate both tangible and intangible elements of hotel-led placemaking and the hotel’s perceived role in the local context as a shared social space. In addition, this study highlights current challenges around the conceptual novelty of regenerative hospitality and captures contested narratives about potential negative changes. The study contributes to tourism placemaking and regenerative tourism by encompassing hotels within current tourism-led urban regeneration discourses and offers a comprehensive set of practical recommendations.