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 critical integrative review synthesises diverse perspectives from urban regeneration, touristification, tourism gentrification, place branding, speculative and platform urbanism, liveability, publicness and collaborative governance, integrating them into a coherent conceptual framework through an abductive and integrative process of conceptual development. A second-phase structured verification search in Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection produced 5954 search occurrences and 3865 unique records after deduplication, which were used to test literature coverage, conceptual boundaries and counterarguments. The review 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 centred on the joint viability of heterogeneous urban lives, uses and claims under transformation, and cohabitation-oriented governance as the intervention-oriented component identifying capacities through which tourism-oriented trajectories can be anticipated, shaped and redirected. Four operations of desirability, eight interdependent dimensions of cohabitation and four governance capacities are consolidated through cross-domain comparison. The review concludes that tourism-led regeneration becomes inclusive when visitor orientation strengthens, rather than narrows, the conditions through which cities remain habitable, plural and collectively governable.