European projects

The EPIC project “Experience Prato Industrial Culture,” approved within the “European Urban Initiative” call for proposals, is led by the Municipality of Prato, acting as the lead partner, together with nine other partners, both public and private. Thanks to this project, the city of Prato will have five million euros available to invest in industrial tourism over four years.

EPIC will enable the implementation, enrichment, and further development of the “TIPO – Turismo industriale Prato” (Prato Industrial Tourism) experience, a project that has been part of the city’s tourism offerings since 2021. EPIC will enhance the city’s industrial heritage as a key resource for attracting tourists, developing a tourism offering where visitors can explore industrial sites and appreciate the historical and contemporary heritage of the District’s operating companies.

This “never-ending tourism” approach aims to attract tourists year-round, expanding experiences from the real world to digital and virtual domains. By integrating physical and digital experiences, the project will build an unprecedented industrial tourism experience, extending both in space (inside and outside the destination) and in time (before, during, and after the visit).

The project will involve stakeholders from the city and neighboring areas in a participatory co-design process, with thematic meetings to co-design new actions, initiatives, and events to be tested in the field. These products will merge physical and digital experiences, integrating real visits to the city’s industrial, cultural, and natural sites with immersive experiences offered by advanced digital technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality.

The experiences of this new way of experiencing the territory touristically will be available at specific locations, which will be installed at the Campolmi hub, the Manifatture Digitali (Digital Manufacturing), and other points throughout the city.A digital marketing strategy will also be co-designed to promote Prato as an attractive, sustainable, inclusive, and circular city, accompanied by a catalog of itineraries and products that will be published on major tourism platforms.

The project will also implement a capacity-building program for tourism stakeholders and build an innovative multi-level governance structure to manage the tourist destination.

The project also includes a phase of capitalization and transfer of the Prato experience to other cities.

i-Game is an European research project – funded by the European Union within the HORIZON Europe Programme- aiming to create an accessible open-source game development platform that will facilitate the co-creation games by diverse actors, in an inclusive approach by ensuring participation of under-represented groups, within different ecosystems of cultural and creative sectors and industries, to enhance innovation and to bring positive impact on social cohesion and sustainability.
To achieve this, at first the project team will engage with a variety of stakeholders (e.g. experts from cultural organisations, from the game industry, from fashion and textile industry, policy makers, etc.) of different abilities, expertise and disciplines to understand and build-upon their many perspectives, ideas and background for the creation of new solutions and opportunities. Thus the project aims to capture the needs and obstacles for platform users and end-user organisations in order to provide them with techniques, knowledge and skills to engage, motivate, empower, learn, explore and discover new pathways towards innovation.
i-Game will also design and implement a collaborative platform equipped with the necessary digital tools that allow users to more easily co-create mobile and virtual reality games, by forging closer collaboration between game industry, culture/museum and fashion & textile sectors. Beside the digital tools that will support users to manage their projects and communicate, some advanced tools, based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), will also be integrated. This includes for example: (i) tools that can create new content and ideas, including stories, images, video, or music, the so called Generative Artificial Intelligence (generative AI); (ii) tools (e.g. reusable game AI components) to make smarter and more realistic and intuitive games (e.g. non-player character modelling, game balance, etc.); and (iii) tools that can explain and make it easier for the users to understand how the used AI models work and why they gave the particular result during the game design, the so called Explainable AI.
And last, the project also targets to understand why and how are online games positively impacting people, culture and society, and which are the necessary ingredients for developing a new generation of games targeted to improve people’s well-being.
11 partners from 8 countries work together, following an interdisciplinary approach (inclusive and motivational design, AI, social impact lifecycle), to co-develop a collaborative platform for the creation of games, which will be piloted in 3 different CCSI ecosystems.

The project aims at studying the social and economic potential of SMart Industrial Tourism in the Mediterranean regions, assessing the state of the art by analysing existing good practices in industrial tourism and in the use of advanced technologies in the tourism sector, exploring pathways for the development of SMIT activities in the regions and cities involved.

RECHARGE is a project funded within the European Union’s HORIZON Europe programme, the key funding programme for research and innovation within the EU, aiming at to reinvigorate community participation as added economic value for cultural heritage institutions across Europe.

The project supports cultural heritage institutions in diversifying their funding through a replicable and sustainable participatory business model, to acquire the necessary tools for its future developments, both in the digital realm and onsite.

RECHARGE builds on new and existing communities, networks and relationships related to cultural heritage institutions, to engage them in participatory management through cultural heritage Living Labs. These labs, developed collaboratively and open to professionals and the public, aim at testing and devising innovative ways to harness resources, to ensure the development of sustainable future business models, focused on the creation and integration of value within each institution and in the sector at large.

Participation is central in every aspect of RECHARGE: from financing to planning and management, from communication and public engagement to sustainability and the future of the project itself.

The project aims to enhance the European textile and clothing heritage and in particular the high craftsmanship content of this sector.

The purpose is not only to preserve the material features of textile heritage but all the intangible values connected to it: skills, know-how, success stories, etc. Traditional craftsmanship is also an inexhaustible source of inspiration for contemporary creatives, a resource that must be appropriately preserved and made available for research.