Certified Slowness, Accelerated Change? Destination Value Co-Creation and Co-Destruction Across Türkiye’s Cittaslow Network

Özet

The Cittaslow (Slow City) movement aims to protect the identity, heritage, gastronomy, and ways of life of small towns against the homogenising forces of globalisation. Yet membership may increase visibility, tourism demand, investment, and development pressure. This tension raises a question: can a place-based sustainability certification designed to protect local distinctiveness also contribute to its commodification? Drawing on service-dominant logic and value co-destruction, this study approaches Cittaslow certification as an intervention through which destination value may be co-created, preserved, or eroded in the interactions among residents, visitors, local producers, and public authorities. An exploratory qualitative design combines a synthesis of documentary and published evidence on Turkish Cittaslow towns with an in-depth counter-case analysis of Tirebolu, a town not yet certified, drawing on institutional documents, official statistics, a criteria-based assessment, and a comparison of historical and contemporary photographs. The findings suggest that certification may strengthen place identity, resident participation, and heritage protection, but that where place branding, tourism intensity, and development pressure are not balanced by effective governance and participation, it may also intensify spatial commodification and the erosion of locally created value. The study proposes a framework for identifying the conditions under which certification supports value creation rather than erosion.