Overlay or scaffold? The continuity assumption in smart tourism ecosystem theory and the post-conflict blind spot

Imagine a city that has been shattered by war. Its buildings are rubble, its streets are silent, and its people have scattered. In the world of tourism, there is a long-held belief that technology is something you add to a place that already exists. You take a functioning city with its hotels, its museums, and its crowds, and you layer smart digital tools on top to make it run better. This idea, known as the "continuity assumption," suggests that technology is a finishing touch, like a new coat of paint on a solid house. But what happens when the house is gone? What happens when a destination is not just damaged, but erased, and the only thing left standing is a digital memory of what used to be there?

This is the puzzle that a team of researchers from universities in Ukraine and beyond set out to solve. They looked at the field of "smart tourism," which studies how technology transforms travel, and asked a simple but profound question: Does this field have a plan for places that are being rebuilt from scratch? They suspected that the current theories might be blind to the reality of post-conflict recovery, where the digital record of a monument might exist before the monument itself is ever rebuilt. To find the answer, they did not just read a few articles; they conducted a massive, statistical investigation into the entire body of research on this topic, treating the academic literature like a map to see where the paths actually cross and where they simply run parallel without ever meeting.

The researchers gathered over 2,000 scientific papers from a major global database, covering three distinct areas of study. The first area was smart tourism, which focuses on how data and digital tools improve travel in existing destinations. The second was digital cultural heritage, which deals with using lasers, cameras, and virtual reality to preserve and recreate history. The third was post-conflict tourism, which examines how travel returns to places after wars or disasters. The team wanted to see if these three conversations were talking to each other. They looked for shared words, shared authors, and shared journals. They wanted to know if a researcher studying the digital reconstruction of a war-torn city was also reading the latest papers on smart tourism technology.

What they found was a startling silence. Despite the fact that these three fields are all related to the same real-world problem, they are almost completely disconnected from one another in the academic world. The researchers calculated that if these fields were interacting naturally, they should have found nearly 120 papers that combined smart tourism and post-conflict recovery. Instead, they found zero. There were no shared keywords linking the two topics, and only a tiny handful of researchers had ever published in both areas. The digital heritage community was busy building virtual twins of destroyed buildings, and the post-conflict community was studying how societies heal, but they were doing so in separate rooms, using different languages, and rarely looking at the same work. The only time the two worlds touched was through the concept of "resilience"—the idea that a system bounces back to how it was before. But this concept assumes the original system is still there to return to, which is not true when a city has been destroyed.

The study suggests that the current theory of smart tourism is built on a premise that no longer holds true for many places in the world. It assumes a destination is already there, waiting for technology to make it smarter. But in places like Ukraine, where thousands of cultural sites have been damaged or destroyed, the order of events has flipped. The digital record is being created first, often by volunteers and citizens scanning ruins with their phones, before the physical stones are even laid again. The researchers call this a "scaffold model," where the digital infrastructure acts as a framework around which the physical destination is rebuilt, rather than a layer added on top of an existing one. This is not just a theoretical shift; it is a practical reality happening right now, yet the international academic literature has not caught up.

The researchers used advanced statistical methods to prove that this separation is not an accident. They showed that the gap between these fields is so wide that it would be statistically impossible for it to happen by chance. The fields are growing at different speeds, with digital heritage expanding much faster than post-conflict tourism, and they are publishing in different journals that rarely overlap. The few people who do bridge the gap are mostly senior researchers or practitioners working directly in the affected countries, often publishing in local journals that are not seen by the wider international community. This means that the most urgent and innovative work is happening on the ground, but the global conversation about how to rebuild these places is missing a crucial piece of the puzzle.

The study concludes that the field of smart tourism needs a new model. It cannot simply apply its old rules to places that are being formed anew. Instead, it needs to recognize that in post-conflict zones, the digital layer comes first, guiding the physical reconstruction. The researchers propose that future studies should focus on how these digital records can help communities decide what to rebuild and how to welcome visitors back without causing further harm. They have identified specific areas where research is needed, such as how to use virtual reality to tell the stories of destroyed heritage without re-traumatizing the people who lived through the war, or how to use data to manage the flow of visitors to sites of memory.

This work serves as a wake-up call for the academic community. It shows that while technology is advancing rapidly, our understanding of how to use it in the most difficult circumstances is lagging behind. The researchers suggest that deliberate efforts are needed to bring these separate fields together, perhaps through special funding or joint conferences, so that the lessons learned on the ground in places like Ukraine can inform the global theory. Until then, the world of smart tourism remains blind to a major part of its own reality, operating on the assumption that the destination is already there, even when it is only a memory waiting to be rebuilt.