Sustainable Tourism: design as catalyzer of cultural, interaction spaces at Colta Lagoon in the Ecuadorian Andes

Abstract

Sustainable tourism is aimed at conserving the natural and cultural capital of the communities and at the same time forging income for the locality. To generate sustainable tourism it is necessary to understand the needs of the social group involved. In this respect, the social function of design entails satisfying individual and collective human needs by acting as a mediator in the social economic development of the community. Thinking about tourist spaces such as the Colta lagoon or Kulta Kucha, historically unused in the dissemination of tourism, is of interest because it is an ancestral icon of the indigenous populations of the Ecuadorian Sierra. This interest grows when considering that in recent years factors such as the reestablishment of its railway access and the restoration of its colonial architectural heritage have catapulted it as a potential tourist destination. From this perspective, the proposal seeks to consider design from a social and interdisciplinary approach, since it is a socially constructed discipline, and therefore appeals to cultural and natural resources to enhance the generation of sustainable tourism in the lagoon, considering a qualitative approach as it is oriented towards the meaning of the phenomena, investigating them from the point of view of the actors in their natural habitat and in relation to the current and historical context. In this way, in principle, the identification and interpretation of sustainable community development needs is planned, the identification and analysis of cultural and natural resources present in the context to determine their perspective of use, expressive and symbolic values and finally to establish guidelines in the project dimension of design for the planning of sustainable tourism models that make viable the economic, social, and productive development of the community. In this sense, through the appropriation of resources that materialize the environment, it is possible to think of functional structural models of tourist and community interaction.