'Place Experience' as a Key for Local Development: a Theoretical Framework

The promotion of local economic development processes in a metropolitan area often depends on its ability to attract sustainable tourism flows and to provide a high quality of life for citizens. Both are basic conditions to enhance the competitiveness of an urban context, but their achievement is possible only if territorial planning strategies are focused on the real "experience" lived by tourists and citizens while they get in touch (either virtually or physically) with that place. This is the reason why all the choices made by policy makers, urban planners, and territorial marketing managers should be aimed at promoting the best experience possible for people visiting and living the city. Thus, there is a need for theoretical models able to support practitioners in their efforts for "experience design", which can find in the marketing literature - and in particular in the studies on tourism experience - many interesting conceptual references. This research topic has grown very rapidly in the last years, but at the moment is still characterized by a high fragmentation and a lack of systematic theoretical models. Starting from these considerations, the purpose of the paper is to fill this gap by presenting a conceptual framework specifically developed in order to give a solid basis for the design, management and evaluation of the experiences lived by people when they plan, visit and remember a place.