Thirty years ago, in the wet tropics of Far North Queensland, we were wrestling with tourism challenges and conceptualising destinations as living systems with complex flows, nodes, and adaptive processes. The work wasn't perfect and the system didn't want to know, but the thinking existed and share it here.

A Living Lab is an experimental ‘collaboratory’ that builds the social, environment and environmental resilience of communities environments

New approaches to community engagement in tourism require that we redraw our expectations and our practices