Social Media as a Database to Plan Tourism Development: “Venac” Historic Core in Sombor, Serbia

Abstract

One of the most significant novelties in urban planning last decades has been the inclusion of ICT tools. The most common approach is to form geographical and territorial information systems (GIS and TIS) to create, monitor and visualise urban plans. However, accurate statistical data is necessary in this process, which can be a challenge for the sectors with fast development, such as a tourism. It exemplifies a fast developing, unconventional and often hard-to-control sector. Official statistical data for tourism quickly become outdated for urban planning. In the other side, tourism has vibrant social-media coverage and rich available e-data shared through it. Although such e-data can be found everywhere today, it is still new for formal documents like urban plans.

The core aim of this research is to show how the e-data in social media can be utilised to analyse city space for a new urban plan. The case in the research in the “Venac” Historic Core of Sombor. Despite being the best-preserved medium-sized city in Serbia, Sombor peripheral location in the country hindered its development. Nevertheless, the recent rise of cultural tourism means that Sombor has been rediscovered for tourists. The city authorities recently initiated a new urban plan for the regeneration of “Venac” Area, where local experts and the team from the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade worked together with e-data from online social media to address the recent tourism development in planning measures. This research analyses four locally popular social media applications: Instagram, Google Maps, Google reviews, and Snapchat.