Creative crossroads: advancing sport-event tourism through creative placemaking for enhanced destination value and social impact

Sport-event tourism has evolved into a force of considerable economic and cultural importance, shaping destination identities and generating substantial global visitor flows (Gibson, 1998;Higham Müller, 2015). These challenges have intensified pressure on event organizers, host governments, and national tourism boards to demonstrate broader social and cultural value.Creative tourism has emerged as a promising but underutilized response to these challenges. Defined in this article as a form of tourism in which visitors participate in active learning experiences, artistic practices, and authentic cultural engagement that connect them with local communities and creative processes (Richards Richards, 2011), creative tourism prioritizes cocreation-understood here as the collaborative production of tourism experiences through the active participation of both visitors and host communities (Rihova et al., 2015)-as a mechanism for generating authentic, inclusive, and economically diversified destination experiences. The emergence of creative tourism has been further supported by international recognition of the creative economy's role in sustainable development (UNESCO, 2013;UNCTAD, 2018).Despite the apparent complementarity of these fields, their intersection remains surprisingly understudied. A scoping search conducted across Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar using the search strings 'sport tourism AND creative tourism,' 'event tourism AND creative placemaking,' and 'sport events AND co-creation' identified fewer than 15 peer-reviewed articles directly addressing their intersection. This empirical gap justifies the present integrative review at this moment in the field's development: sport-event tourism has reached a scale at which its social and cultural consequences are impossible to ignore, while creative tourism has accumulated sufficient theoretical and practical maturity to offer actionable integration pathways. A framework that bridges these fields is both timely and necessary.Two concepts are foundational to this article. Creative placemaking refers to the strategic integration of arts and cultural activities into the physical and social fabric of a community to foster civic engagement, cultural vitality, and a distinctive sense of place (Markusen Snyder, 2019), which is particularly appropriate for emerging research areas where integration of disparate literatures can generate new theoretical perspectives. A systematic search was conducted across Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar for publications from 2000 to 2024. Search terms included combinations of 'sport tourism,' 'event tourism,' 'creative tourism,' 'creative placemaking,' 'event leveraging,' 'co-creation,' and 'destination value.' Inclusion criteria required: (a) peer-reviewed articles or scholarly book chapters; (b) direct relevance to at least one of the five thematic clusters described below; and (c) availability in English. Grey literature (reports from UNESCO, UNCTAD, and the IOC) was included where directly relevant to the framework's empirical grounding.Approximately 40 sources were identified, reviewed, and synthesized.The literature was organized into five thematic clusters following Torraco's (2005) guidance on integrative review structure: (1) impacts and leverage of sport-event tourism; (2) theories of creative tourism; (3) creative placemaking; (4) social sustainability in tourism; and (5) co-creation in tourism experiences. The CSETN framework was developed through an iterative process of inductive synthesis and deductive reasoning: first, key theoretical models were mapped across the five clusters; second, points of convergence and complementarity were identified; third, integration mechanisms were inductively derived from documented empirical precedents and theoretical propositions; and fourth, the framework components were refined through iterative comparison with the case evidence.As an opinion piece, this article prioritizes conceptual novelty and synthetic contribution over comprehensive systematic coverage (Grant Smith, 2014). Operationally, event leveraging involves the strategic deployment of complementary activities-such as cultural programming, business networking, and community engagement-that use the event as a catalyst rather than treating it as a self-contained product. This creates explicit conceptual space for creative interventions as strategic leverage tools, providing the CSETN's primary rationale for integrating creative placemaking within sport-event tourism planning.The relevance of this framework is reinforced by the extensively documented 'mega-event syndrome,' characterized by cost overruns, community displacement, and exclusion from planning processes (Müller, 2015;Smith, 2012), which has generated sustained calls for participatory and leverage-oriented approaches that distribute benefits more equitably.The Creative Tourism Framework Richards (2011) synthesizes the Creative Tourism Framework from earlier definitional work by Richards and Raymond (2000) and subsequent empirical studies across European and Asian contexts. The framework rests on three interlocking components. First, the content dimension identifies the specific creative domains through which tourist engagement occurs, including crafts, performing arts, culinary arts, digital media, and heritage interpretation. Second, the process dimension distinguishes passive creative consumption (attending a performance) from active creative participation (co-producing a craft object or contributing to a community mural), with higher levels of participation associated with deeper experience quality and stronger place attachment. Third, the context dimension recognizes that creative tourism is fundamentally embedded in place: the authenticity and meaning of creative experiences derive from their rootedness in specific communities, traditions, and physical environments. Applied to the CSETN, these three dimensions map directly onto the framework's six integration mechanisms: creative fan experiences and digital co-creation engage the content and process dimensions; artisan activations and co-designed event spaces engage the context dimension; cultural side-festivals and immersive storytelling engage all three simultaneously.Pine and Gilmore's (1999) Experience Economy framework posits that advanced economies increasingly compete on the basis of staged experiences rather than goods or services. Four realms of experience are identified-entertainment, educational, aesthetic, and escapist-distinguished by the degree of active participation (passive to active) and environmental immersion (absorption to immersion). The framework has been applied extensively in tourism contexts to explain value creation through experience staging. Within the CSETN, the Experience Economy provides the commercial rationale for creative integration: experiential differentiation increases visitor willingness to pay, extends dwell time, and enhances destination competitiveness.However, a theoretical tension warrants explicit acknowledgment. The Experience Economy is fundamentally market-driven, framing experience as a staged commercial offering designed for and sold to consumers. Creative placemaking (Markusen Ap, 1992) provides the micro-level foundation for understanding community-visitor relationships within creative interventions. SET posits that individuals and groups engage in social exchanges when perceived benefits are seen to outweigh costs.Applied to the CSETN, this explains why residents may actively support or resist creative programming associated with sport events. When communities perceive tangible benefits-income from artisan markets, cultural recognition through co-designed event spaces, pride generated by heritage storytelling installations-they are more likely to participate in and sustain creative initiatives. Conversely, where benefits accrue primarily to external operators rather than local residents, disengagement and resistance are predictable outcomes. SET thus provides the motivational logic underpinning the CSETN's emphasis on inclusive co-design and equitable benefit-sharing, and it connects directly to the social inclusion outcome pathway of the framework.These four theoretical frameworks are not independent pillars but interconnected contributors to the CSETN's explanatory architecture. The Event Leverage Framework (Chalip, 2006) establishes why creative interventions are strategically valuable within sport-event tourism planning. The Creative Tourism Framework (Richards, 2011) specifies what forms creative tourism takes and how visitor engagement deepens across content, process, and context dimensions. The Experience Economy (Pine additional sport-event tourism and creative tourism studies cited in the text provide broader theoretical grounding.The CSETN framework was constructed through the iterative synthesis process described in the methodology section, drawing directly on the intersectional literature synthesized in Table 1. In the inductive phase, recurring themes across the identified studies were mapped: the potential for sport events to activate creative economy supply chains; the role of community co-design in generating authentic place identity; and the governance conditions required for creative legacies to persist beyond the event period. In the deductive phase, these inductive themes were structured using the four theoretical frameworks described above-Event Leverage, Creative Tourism, Experience Economy, and Social Exchange Theory-to identify which mechanisms correspond to which theoretical logic.The six nexus mechanisms emerged from this dual process: each mechanism has both an empirical precedent in the intersectional literature (Table 1) and a theoretical grounding in one or more of the four frameworks. The dual outcome pathways-enhanced destination value and improved social inclusion-were derived deductively from the framework's theoretical architecture: destination value maps primarily to the Experience Economy and Event Leverage logics, while social inclusion maps to Social Exchange Theory and the Creative Tourism Framework's context dimension.The Creative Sport-Event Tourism Nexus comprises five interconnected components (Figure 1): (1) sport-event tourism inputs-visitor concentration, media reach, and capital investment generated by the event; (2) creative tourism inputs-local creative assets, community participation capacity, and established cultural programming traditions; (3) the nexus domain where these converge through six integration mechanisms; (4) dual outcome pathways-enhanced destination value and addressed social inclusion challenges; and (5) moderating factors that shape the conditions under which mechanisms generate positive outcomes.The five components operate in a bidirectional and iterative rather than strictly sequential manner. Sport-event inputs and creative tourism inputs feed simultaneously into the nexus domain; the resulting outcomes, in turn, generate feedback that reshapes subsequent inputs through learning, reputation-building, and community capacity development. This cyclical dynamic is consistent with Chalip's (2006) leverage framework, in which leveraging activities require ongoing refinement across event cycles.Source: Authors' own elaboration based on Richards (2011), Chalip (2006), Markusen and Gadwa (2010), Pine and Gilmore (1999), and Duxbury and Richards (2019).The six nexus mechanisms are differentiated below according to their level of empirical grounding: Established Practice (supported by multiple studies with consistent empirical evidence), Emerging Evidence (supported by one to three studies or documented outcomes), and Theoretical Proposal (conceptually grounded but lacking direct empirical support to date).(a) Creative fan experiences engage as through and collaborative precedents community and digital at the and where participatory creative activations visitor engagement beyond the 2014). this mechanism with Pine and Gilmore's (1999) and experience which require active side-festivals the through programming such as arts and 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