From “Passing By” to “Stopping to Stay”: A Study on the Cultural Decoding Mechanism and Emotional Awakening Path in Urban Micro-Tourism

Against the backdrop of increasingly fragmented and digitalized urban life, urban micro-tourism has emerged as a cultural and tourism model emphasizing proximity and immersive cultural experiences, providing an effective approach to reconstructing emotional connections between people and places. Meanwhile, the rapid development of smart cities supported by electromagnetic information transmission, wireless sensing technologies, and digital communication infrastructures has created new opportunities for enhancing cultural interpretation and visitor interaction in urban spaces. From the perspectives of developmental psychology and environmental psychology, this study systematically investigates the differentiated psychological effects of urban micro-tourism across four age groups— children and adolescents, young adults, middle-aged adults, and elderly adults—through the dual mechanisms of cultural decoding and emotional awakening. The results demonstrate that micro-tourism provides children and adolescents with embodied contexts for identity formation and cultural recognition, offers young and middle-aged adults restorative environments for stress relief and meaning reconstruction, and enables elderly adults to integrate life memories while strengthening social participation. Based on the cultural heritage resources of Leshan, the study further explores how spatial environments, cultural assets, and community participation jointly construct a multi-level emotional resonance field and proposes an age-inclusive, demand-oriented micro-tourism product system. The findings suggest that urban micro-tourism not only represents an innovative model of culture–tourism integration but also serves as a comprehensive social practice that promotes psychological well-being, revitalizes community life, and facilitates human– city symbiosis, providing theoretical references for intelligent cultural space design and digitally enabled urban management.