Assessing Umeå’s Tourism Strategies: Can Smart City Principles Support Sustainable Tourism?

Sammanfattning

This thesis reviews how the municipality’s tourism strategies rely on smart city practices to promote sustainable tourism. With the help of qualitative discourse analysis, the research carefully looks through key policy documents, like the Västerbotten Sustainable Tourism Strategy (2022–2026), Umeå’s Comprehensive Plan (2022), and Visit Umeå’s Annual Report (2024). SCITHOS is used to guide the study, which helps evaluate many aspects, such as collaborative governance, using technology and data, hospitality and life quality, and how the hospitality industry will be sustainable. It is clear from the findings that Umeå’s official approach to smart city development is in line with worldwide trends and the UN’s Agenda 2030, but the actual realisation of those ideas is yet to happen. The study reveals that while there is a lot of talk about collaboration, participation, and sustainability, these areas remain largely undefined. While technology and digitalisation are strongly linked to progress, and they are mainly discussed in terms of money and city image, not much attention is given to ethical, inclusive, or environmental issues. Hospitality and living standards are shown in a perfect way, stressing how residents and tourists gain from each other, but there is no way to assess how the city or its residents are affected. Even though sustainability commitments are often mentioned by using global frameworks, they usually have few details, weak monitoring, and are not linked to wider environmental goals in the city. It is important to note that the study finds that the voices of residents, local civil society, and the Sami are rarely heard in policy making, which maintains the dominance of certain groups and keeps key parties from being involved. The findings help the discussion by highlighting the gap between what is planned and what actually happens in the effort to make tourism more sustainable in local areas. The analysis explains why it is important to go past promises of inclusion and focus instead on inclusive governance, ethical strategies in digital fields, openness about sustainability, and involving the community in handling natural and cultural resources. The last part of the thesis suggests that Umeå Municipality and similar cities in Europe should increase their stakeholder involvement, set clear goals for their policies, and include marginalised groups to make the most of smart city approaches to sustainable tourism.