Placemaking in Literary Tourism: The Bottom-Up/Top-Down Continuum

Rita Baleiro (ESGHT – University of the Algarve, CiTUR, Portugal)

Placemaking entered tourism studies as an import from urban design, where it originally denoted the planning and management of public space to enhance the quality of life in the community (Laven, Bradly & Polyak, 2019). Its migration into destination development reframes it as a strategy through which places differentiate themselves competitively by mobilising local assets, intangible heritage and community meanings (Lukić, 2021). As a forward-looking and context-sensitive practice, placemaking fosters relationships across cultural, economic, social and ecological dimensions. It is not a “one-size-fits-all” process but a collaborative, inclusive, adaptable and transformative practice that depends on local knowledge, community participation and the capacity of public spaces to generate social networks and local initiatives (Project for Public Spaces, [1996] 2016, p. 562). In literary tourism specifically, placemaking performs a further, more particular operation: it converts a textual or biographical reference into a spatial experience: a walking trail that inscribes a fictional narrative onto physical space, encouraging visitors to experience place through narrative, a themed festival that temporarily transforms a town into a literary landscape or a statue or memorial that monumentalises literary heritage and creates a literary place. In this scope, it is not only the promotion of a destination, which is being considered, but the production of place itself, understood as the outcome of meanings, attachments and affective relations generated through lived and narrated experience rather than as a neutral physical location awaiting discovery (Cresswell, 2004),

The bottom-up and top-down continuum

Lew’s (2017) continuum between organic, bottom-up place-making [sic] and planned, top-down placemaking offers a productive frame for organising literary tourism’s diverse strategies. In bottom-up processes, place meanings emerge organically from residents’ and readers’ practices, memories and everyday uses of space; in top-down interventions, institutions, planners or tourism stakeholders strategically shape place identity and visitor consumption. In the former, canonical literary destinations often accrue meaning gradually, through the sedimentation of writers’ biographies, readers’ engagement and cumulative literary memory; they are, in Herbert’s (2001, p. 313) phrase, “accidents or history, sites of a writer’s birth or death.” In the latter, destinations are deliberately assembled; they are: “social constructions, created, amplified, and promoted to attract visitors” (Herbert, 2001, p. 313), where tourism authorities and cultural intermediaries brand and design a literary identity from scratch, combining tangible infrastructure (museums, trails, heritage sites) with intangible assets (myths, stories, curated narratives).

Rather than constituting a dichotomy, top-down and bottom-up approaches tend to coexist along a continuum, in mutually reinforcing dynamics that combine organic and planned elements in varying proportions, with that balance shaping the resulting sense of place (Lew, 2017). The same happens in most literary tourism destinations, which often emerge from the interplay between locally grounded, organic meaning and deliberately designed infrastructure, converging on the same underlying move: linking a textual or biographical reference to spatial experience, whether through a signalled literary walking trail or a museum built around an author’s life. In destinations without an evident literary heritage, strategies tend instead to concentrate on creating literary events:  book fairs and festivals, for instance.

A typology along the continuum

Table 1 positions the main placemaking strategies identified in the literature along Lew’s (2017) continuum and shows that most places and processes fall somewhere between bottom-up and top-down placemaking. These positions are tendencies rather than fixed classifications, because the place of any given case depends on who initiates, plans and controls the process. However, taken together, the strategies show how literary art helps transform geographical settings into meaningful literary tourism destinations and, despite their varying degrees of institutional involvement and organic participation, they all testify that literary destinations are often produced rather than merely discovered (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998, p. 1).

Table 1.  Placemaking strategies in literary tourism, positioned along Lew’s (2017) bottom-up/top-down continuum

Commissioned museum literature (Zampieri, 2023) is an example of a top-down placemaking strategy, in which the institution commissions contemporary writers to create literary works inspired by museums and their heritage, thereby establishing a literary association and, ultimately, a literary destination. Although the place (the museum) already exists, the text (which may take various forms, such as autofictions, poems, or graphic novels) is instrumental in promoting it as a literary place. While the creation of literary places typically materialises an existing literary or biographical association, in this instance, the institution controls the content and directs it toward institutional goals (e.g., attracting diverse audiences, branding, and heritage valorisation).  Place, in this sense, is discursively produced: it names, frames and legitimises heritage through the very acts of selection and narration that placemaking strategies perform. Once published, a commissioned work can still generate a secondary, bottom-up afterlife if readers engage with it personally and visit the museum on the strength of their own reading — sliding toward the “personal authenticity” pole at the reception stage. But the placemaking mechanism itself — the production of the literary-place association — sits at the top-down end of the continuum.

Digital or virtual placemaking also occupies the top-down end of the continuum as platforms and apps are often produced by institutions.

The creation of literary venues represents one of the most established forms of literary placemaking. This strategy involves identifying a meaningful connection between an author or literary work and a physical location, often via the development of literary museums, namely, writers’ house museums, literary cafés, literary hotels or other themed infrastructure. Well-known examples include the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth (England), maintained by the Brontë Society in honour of the Brontë sisters, and Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon (England), a museum in the 16^th-century half-timbered house where William Shakespeare was born and spent his childhood. Although this strategy often sits at the top-down end, in which destination managers, cultural institutions, or public–private partnerships convert literary association into tangible infrastructure for strategic and economic purposes, the creation of literary venues is not exclusively top-down; for instance, community-based literary cafés exist without institutional intervention. This hybrid character is consistent with Lew’s (2017) observation that most placemaking initiatives do not fall neatly into a single category but instead combine organic and planned elements to varying degrees, with the balance between the two shaping the resulting sense of place.

Between the top-down and bottom-up ends, literary trails and routes take a different approach by connecting multiple geographically dispersed locations into a coherent interpretative itinerary. They create literary places and landscapes, encouraging visitors to experience the literary landscape through movement and sequential storytelling. Examples include the Wordsworth Way (England), a point-to-point trail, which identifies sites associated with William Wordsworth.  Also in the continuum, festivals and other literary events create temporary literary places through recurring cultural programmes that bring together writers, readers and local communities. Examples include the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye (Wales), the Jaipur Literary Festival (India) and Bloomsday (Ireland). These events temporarily transform ordinary urban spaces into literary landscapes, demonstrating that placemaking can be temporal as well as spatial.

Finally, personal authenticity sits at the organic pole and, in contrast to the preceding strategies, it depends on the visitor’s individual, unmediated engagement with a text or author, producing a self-generated interpretation of place rather than an externally imposed one. In this perspective, literary placemaking is ultimately completed by the visitor, whose personal experiences, memories and imagination transform the physical landscape into a literary place.

Positioning these strategies along a single continuum should not obscure what they share: in every case, place is understood not simply as a physical location but as the outcome of meanings, attachments, and affective relations generated through lived and narrated experience (Cresswell, 2004).

Together, these strategies illustrate that literary placemaking operates along a continuum ranging from institutionally planned interventions to highly personal experiences of place. They are not mutually exclusive and frequently coexist at the same destination, confirming that literary placemaking is neither purely organic emergence nor purely strategic.  What the typology in Table 1 makes visible is that most literary tourism placemaking strategies are, in practice, positioned between these poles, and that the balance between organic and planned elements in any given case is itself a variable, rather than a fixed property of the strategy in question. However, identifying isolated strategies can provide a useful conceptual framework for analysing literary destinations and literary experiences.

This work is financed by national funds through FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology, IP., under the Project CiTURUID/04470/2025. Doi.org/10.54499/UID/04470/2025

How to cite this entry: Baleiro, R. (2026). Placemaking in literary tourism: the bottom-up/top-down continuum. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University of the Algarve. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

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