Creative Local Community Tourism Through the Preservation and Presentation of the Culture of Memory Case Study: The Belgrade Sound Map Project

Belgrade Sound Map ( www.zvucnamapabeograda.rs) is an ongoing project spanning several years that collects and presents the oral history of the city, focusing on local communities and cultural and linguistic micro units. Content is interpreted through the uploading of recorded conversations and atmospheric sounds onto the website and application and, later, through the creation of sound maps that mark out walking tours available both to visitors and locals alike. Though it initially began as a local project, Belgrade Sound Map has become a bona fide creative tourism product – the local community participates in guided content creation while users have the unique opportunity to experience and get to know the city, its social history, local legends and the significant toponyms of its intangible cultural heritage. Analysis of the project explores the creative use of the existing local resources of small communities with the aim of creating unique touristic content founded on ‘personal monuments’ to everyday life. In parallel, the study will seek to recommends models for inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary cooperation among various actors in the fields of culture and tourism, aiming to create an enabling environment for the development of similar initiatives. A second aspect of the analysis relates to the pros and cons of new media application in this field and the genuine level of user participation in similar projects. By exploring the challenges faced by these kinds of projects, the goal is to offer up potential mechanisms that can be used to overcome such hurdles through educational and interdisciplinary programmes aimed at local communities.