Objectives

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 DSS that monitors and that 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.