Branding Built Heritage through Cultural Urban Festivals: An Instagram Analysis Related to Sustainable Co-Creation, in Budapest

Global tourism is posing challenges on the environmental and social sustainability of host communities, while the industry itself has proven to be vulnerable to threats such as a global pandemic. Proximity tourism was demonstrated to be a more sustainable form in every aspect, especially when locals can co-create the experience and develop place attachment in urban environments through placemaking practices valuing previously underused urban heritage. An alternative urban festival in Budapest focusing on the built environment attracts locals annually to visit open houses providing visitors with genuine experiences. Residents are actively involved in the cultural placemaking practices of the event. As visitors documented the festival and the architectural heritage and uploaded hundreds of photos of their experience to social media platforms such as Instagram, they contributed to the branding process of the event and to the placemaking process involving less known heritage values. In this study, a dataset of more than ten thousand posts was retrieved by scraping Instagram posts based on hashtags related to the Budapest100 festival and analyzed from a temporal and spatial aspect. Returning visitors were identified, who contribute substantially to the sustainability of the event and to the branding of the built environment. Results suggest that community-based local urban festivals are a sustainable form of proximity tourism, resilient even to the COVID-19 pandemic. Place branding through urban festivals focusing on the local built heritage can also decrease the growing pressure on city centers in tourist-historic cities dealing with overtourism.