Cultural Resources for sustainable tourism 

Italian Cultural Heritage (CH) richness is a matter of fact. Pandemic crisis, climate change, migrations and technological change are impacting local and global multifaceted "heritagization" processes. Attraction of resources, investments, and talents to exploit culture as a sustainable asset must thus be enhanced to reach social cohesion. Within this frame, a top-down approach to Cultural Tourism (CT) tends to underestimate the role of citizen science and community-based practices. The deficiency of community-based policies could generate tension between economic goals and social sustainability: historical/natural sites are suspended between tourism as an economic driver and tourism as a harmful feature in social relationships. The Spoke aims to reconcile such tension by showing how a participatory bottom-up strategy (following Faro Convention, Council of Europe and Unesco/ICOMOS guidelines) can drive (im)material CH in a laboratory for innovation and creativity, generating sustainable CT. CH is a crucial resource for the country’s future growth if we can develop technological and web-based tools to: promote sustainable CT; enhance traditional CH practices; integrate local communities into making alternative itineraries/routes; boost the (im)materiality of the CH and the diversity of the senses of place; mitigate over-tourism's risks; ensure environmental protection; secure the recovery of minor historical centres. The Spoke will develop scalable solutions based on the long-term active involvement of local stakeholders and citizens in forging creative bottom-up green projects. The main objective of CREST is to design a systemic approach to sustainable CT in which local communities become engines of territorial development to boost CH as leverage for social and economic recovery. 

Planned activities are:

• Define the hybrid process of community-based heritagization in the global post-pandemic arena; Creation of shared frameworks for co-design CH based sustainable routes; Analysis of the impacts of CT and global tourism in local communities and on their heritage; Critical challenges to the current CH practices and regulations in the framework of participatory practices. 

• Suitable skills and tailored tools to promote (im)material CH and tourism in formal and informal environments; Collaborative multilingual and learn-by-doing toolkits for Universities, schools and local communities; Multidimensional infrastructures and toolkits on mental and real travellers; National and international networking events, virtual and physical exhibitions, interactive labs promoting community-based CH. 

• Human-centred tools and innovative digital solutions for reading and writing heritage stories; Collaborative multilingual writing labs connecting Universities, schools and local communities; New business models centred on making culture-based narratives; New fruition models that integrate bottom-up conceived edutainment functions.

• Model of sustainable touristic offer rooted in the preservation of the intangible heritage and improvement of social inclusion; Tool-kits for enhanced public-private partnerships in cultural districts, executive template for impact assessment. 

• New models of participated governance; Investigating indicators for the economics of overtourism and for assessing the culture-led development; Exploring private and public strategies for cultural districts and networks; Transferring knowledge to policymakers and local cultural professionals.

• Models for AI-powered tourist experiences bottom-up; Phygital solutions for customers' journeys in mixed realities; Systems of integrated multi-platform technological solutions; Systems for measuring quality impacts related to user experience