Enter Title

Full title
Smart Cultural Tourism as a Driver of Sustainable Development of European Regions- SmartCulTour 

Project duration
42 months  

Funding
Horizon 2020, grant agreement number 870708

Project budget
2.980.000,50 EUR

Principal investigator
KU Leuven, Belgium

Research group members

  • Breda University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands
  • Faculty of Economics, Business and Tourism, University of Split, Croatia
  • University of Lapland, Finland
  • MODUL University Vienna, Austria
  • Ca’Foscari Università di Venezia, Italy
  • UNESCO, France
  • Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Zaragoza / International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies (IAMZ-CIHEAM) Spain
  • Toerisme Vlaanderen (Visit Flanders), Belgium
  • Quantitas, Italy

Project aims:

  • SmartCulTour 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:

  • Redefine the phenomenon of Cultural Tourism;
  • Describe and deploy a set of adequate and innovative indicators to quantify a) Demand; b) Supply and c) Impact of Cultural Tourism;
  • Develop a Decision Support System (DSS) that monitors and helps to manage sustainable tourism development at the NUTS3 level;
  • Create and critically evaluate the instruments for sustainable cultural tourism development through desk-research;
  • 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 to enhance collaboration between the cultural sector and the tourism industry, in order to facilitate a process of capacity building;
  • 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.

Key deliverables:

  • Deliverable 2.1 – Theoretical framework for cultural tourism in urban and regional destinations
  • Deliverable 2.2 – Future of cultural tourism for urban and regional destinations
  • Deliverable 3.1 – State of the art of cultural tourism interventions
  • Deliverable 3.2 – Cultural tourism interventions towards sustainable development
  • Deliverable 4.1 – Report on the most appropriate indicators related to the basic concepts
  • Deliverable 4.2 – Report outlining the Sustainability-Resilience-TALC (SRT) framework
  • Deliverable 5.2 – SmartCulTour Platform on-line version
  • Deliverable 5.4 – SmartCulTour Platform final guidelines 
  • Deliverable 7.1 – Set of Service Design and Art-Based Methods for Co-Design and Stakeholder Work in Cultural Tourism

Project website