Organic ‘folkloric’ community driven place-making and tourism Trevor Sofield a, * , Jaume Guia a , Jan Specht b a University of Girona, Spain b Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, Germany highlights  Organic place-making is described under five different disciplinary perspectives.  Some community-driven organic place-making results in new destinations emerging.  Organic community-led place-making restricts tourism management to place-marketing.  Relevant forms of creative tourism rely on community-driven place-making practices.  Organic community-driven place-making enhances destination sustainability. article info Article history: Received 30 June 2014 Received in revised form 6 January 2017 Accepted 7 January 2017 Keywords: Place-making Organic Community-initiated Creative tourism ‘Vernacular architecture’ abstract The term 'place-making' describes a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management of public places for improving urban environments and residents' quality of life. Place-making has since become an institutionalized industry often supported by multi-million dollar budgets, but rarely are communities in control. The emphasis on improved welfare outcomes for communities has frequently omitted tourism benefits as an objective, although the tourism industry is often quick to exploit public space developments. Even though there is an emergent literature on place-making and tourism that has started to analyze this phenomenon, there is still little understanding of the role of place-making in tourism when place-making is the result of a community-led organic process. Five cases of place-making through emic, organic, folkloric, community-driven initiatives that differ markedly from the formal 'industry' of place-making that have achieved tourism-related outcomes even where tourism was not a primary motivation, are explored. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The genesis for this study came from awareness during a decade of accumulated visits to five small tourist attractions in Tasmania, of the phenomenon of place-making that seemed to be embedded in community, coupled with curiosity about how they developed as distinct places and were able to maintain their vitality. As an area of academic study, place-making is an evolving field of academic research and industry practice set within a dynamic social context that is interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary, and is influenced inter alia by geography, economics, public policy, political science, sociology, psychology, law, architecture, con- struction sciences, technology and marketing. Past research has attempted to view, explain and unpack the inherent complexities of place-making through a variety of lenses, and in tourism it has often been restricted to image (re-)construction for marketing. The integrated synthesis across disciplinary boundaries that is utilized here thus denies a single paradigmatic approach although in broad terms it could be characterized as ‘complexity place-making.’ The beautification of public spaces through iconic architecture, monumental art works, sculptures and other artistic expression, has been a key factor in creating images of and identity for villages, towns and cities dating back centuries. This image creation has been an evolutionary process and the tourism industry is an avid consumer of such places. Highly distinctive and celebrated street- scapes of cities such as Rome, Paris, London, Athens, Istanbul, Bhaktapur, Suzhou, Kyoto and many more as highly attractive destinations, immediately spring to mind, their attractions sacral- ized through tourism (MacCannell, 1976). But these are places that have already been ‘made’ in the sense that they have had distinct, globally recognizable images/representations/signifiers for many * Corresponding author. E-mail address: Trevor.Sofield@utas.edu.au (T. Sofield). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Tourism Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tourman http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2017.01.002 0261-5177/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Tourism Management 61 (2017) 1e22