Beyond Tourism Scenario Activation: Touristic Desirability, Urban Regeneration, and the Conditions of Cohabitation

Urban regeneration increasingly uses tourism scenario activation to renew heritage, public space and local economies. Yet the production of urban attractiveness can intensify tourism gentrification, commercial reorientation and the erosion of ordinary urban life. This integrative review synthesises research across urban regeneration, touristification, tourism gentrification, place branding, speculative and platform urbanism, liveability, publicness and collaborative governance. Through a problem-driven comparison of these literatures, it formalises touristic desirability as the relational and institutionally organised value logic through which anticipated visitor-oriented attention, experience and value shape what becomes visible, investable, programmable and materially actionable. It develops urban cohabitation as an evaluative criterion for whether tourism-led regeneration sustains heterogeneous forms of residence, use, livelihood, memory and collective agency. The review identifies four operations of desirability and eight interdependent conditions of cohabitation, then translates their relationship into governance principles centred on anticipation, shared urban capacities, alignment of value, voice and responsibility, and sustained public and collective direction. It concludes that regeneration becomes inclusive when becoming more visitor-oriented strengthens, rather than narrows, the conditions through which cities remain inhabitable, plural and collectively governable.