Achieving sustainable development in emerging cultural and tourism communities requires not only economic efficiency, but also the long-term revaluation and adaptive integration of cultural and tourism resources. A key challenge lies in integrating diverse and interdependent resources in ways that enhance cultural value, satisfy heterogeneous visitor demands, and maintain resilience under uncertainty. As many emerging cultural tourism communities rely on newly constructed, place-based cultural scenes rather than historically rooted heritage, conventional resource evaluation approaches often fail to capture the cultural and social dimensions essential for sustainability. To address this gap, this study proposes a sustainability-oriented resource integration framework for emerging cultural tourism communities. Drawing on scene theory and customer value theory, a quantitative evaluation system is developed to measure tourists’ perceived spatial quality while explicitly incorporating community interaction and social influence. Based on this evaluation, a multi-objective optimization model is constructed to balance perceived spatial quality, system dynamic adaptability, and tourism suppliers’ cost expectation fulfillment. The model is solved using an ant colony aggregation-inspired dynamic allocation algorithm and validated through a case study in China. The results show that integrating spatial quality and community influence into resource selection enhances cultural sustainability and system resilience, while avoiding short-term, efficiency-driven development. This study provides a decision-support approach for responsible, community-oriented local development.
Sun et al. (Sat,) studied this question.