SmartCulTour

Short description of the project:

SmartCulTour is a 42 months project, funded by the EU programme for research and innovation Horizon 2020, which kicked off in January 2020. The project aims at supporting regional development in all European regions with important tangible and intangible cultural assets, including those located in rural peripheries and the urban fringe, through sustainable cultural tourism. Specific objectives of the project are to: (i) Redefine the phenomenon of Cultural Tourism; (ii) Describe and deploy a set of adequate and innovative indicators to quantify demand; supply and impact of Cultural Tourism; (iii) Develop a DSS that monitors and that helps to manage sustainable tourism development at the NUTS3 level; (iv) Create and critically evaluate the instruments for sustainable cultural tourism development through desk-research; (v) Develop six living-labs in which novel ways of managing sustainable cultural tourism development will be implemented, tested and evaluated through experiments, serious games, arts-based methods, service or social design techniques, (vi) Identify best- and worst practices, and factors determining failure and success that may become an inspiration for destinations of cultural tourism at large, and that together make up a toolkit that allows these destinations to safeguard cultural tourism’s contribution to sustainable development.

Liaison with RURITAGE:

SmartCulTour collaborated with RURITAGE in the framework of a series of RURITAGE webinars called ‘Rural Connections – knowledge exchange with EU Rural projects’ .The first webinar of the series took place on 12 April 2021 and was related to the topic of ‘Rural tourism and marketing’. Four EU projects working in the area of sustainable local tourism – namely SmartCulTour, SPOT, IMPACTOUR and EuropeTour were invited to present the topic form their perspectives. The event gathered 56 participants. More information about the event is available at: https://www.ruritage.eu/news-events/events/#1489503959261-4697954d-1d499c31-6e5f. The recording link is available here: https://www.facebook.com/ruritage/videos/191540462780910.

RURITAGE and SmartCulTour exchanged social media accounts to be regularly updated about new project results and upcoming activities of mutual interest.

Further networking activities will be developed.