Slak Valek, Natasa2024-04-262024-04-26https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/49526<p>Nataša Slak Valek is an Associate Professor in the department of Management, College of Business, Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, UAE. She has delivered her lectures at the graduate and undergraduate courses at the University of Ljubljana, University of Maribor (both Slovenia), I-Shou University in Taiwan R.O.C. and now at Zayed University in the UAE. She also worked for ten years at the National Tourism Office in Slovenia (Slovenian Tourist Board) first as a Professional researcher, and later as a Marketing Manager. Her most recent publications appear in international peer reviewed academic journals such as Journal of Destination Marketing and Management, Event Management, Tourism Management Perspectives, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Changes and Journal of International Consumer Marketing.</p>While work on tourism gentrification in general and the role of aesthetics of gentrification in tourism in particular has been conducted, the nexus between particular aspects of gentrification, such as gentrification aesthetics, and specific forms of tourism, such as art tourism, deserves more attention. Specifically, less has been written on how local stakeholders affected by gentrification understand gentrification aesthetics and their potential role in promoting forms of art tourism. To fill in this gap, through a quantitative survey, this paper explores the opinions of a group of business owners in Mussafah, an industrial and commercial area in Abu Dhabi that could be potentially turned into an art tourism destination. we use a recall technic to explore a spontaneous support towards aesthetics and art from business owners, regression analyses to understand how the type and content of selected art predicts gentrification support, and chi-square tests to research the differences between respondents who support the place to become a creative place and those who do not. Using the findings of this research, we propose a model for extending tourism to more industrial areas.event