Going s-Low in Cambridge: opportunities for sustainable tourism in a small global city

The chapter analyzes the case of Cambridge as a small city projected in a global tourism dimension, thanks to its main University. The campuses act in fact as an engine of territorial development because they participate in the creation of research and innovation centers, and because they are a powerful attractor for an international tourism. The authors underline strengths and weaknesses of tourism in Cambridge, in order to produce some basic knowledge aimed at showing proposals and reasons for a diversification of tourism, moving towards a more sustainable approach in connection to other sectors of the local economy. Furthermore, they show the results of the first phase of application of the methodology Centrality of Territories and present some ideas and practices to develop a more sustainable tourism development within the European network. The research, although still in progress, presents the main potential and difficulties of tourism in relation to the local context, the diversification and multiplicity of stakeholders and the difficulty to create processes of territorial governance with local communities.