Tourism is more than travelling and consumption; it has great potential when it comes to culture, nature, knowledge and personal experiences. Travelling is a way to learn and improve oneself, to enrich one’s vision and improve mutual understanding. The INCULTUM project deals with the challenges and opportunities of cultural tourism with the aim of furthering sustainable social, cultural and economic development. It will explore the full potential of marginal and peripheral areas when managed by local communities and stakeholders. Innovative participatory approaches will be adopted, transforming locals into protagonists, able to reduce negative impacts, learning from and improving good practices to be replicated and translated into strategies and policies. Furthermore, INCULTUM fosters intercultural understanding through the implementation of bottom-up strategies that can have positive effects for both, locals and tourists. Ten pilot cases of living territories and communities will be investigated and on the basis of the findings innovative customised solutions will be co-created. Additionally, pilots will be used to identify and compare drivers and barriers that account for the success or failure of participatory models. Pilots will also enable us to assess outcomes and analyse the pre-conditions needed for a future full implementation and scaling up of potential solutions. Pilots will provide new quantitative and qualitative data that will be combined with official statistics and novel data gathered by the use of self-developed IT applications and the exploitation of previously untapped data sources. The implementation of advanced econometric methods and the pioneering introduction of machine-learning tools into tourism research will push the boundaries of our knowledge. Findings will enable us to suggest recommendations for effective and sustainable policies, create new synergies among public and private stakeholders and new investments, including Structural Funds

In recent decades, with the growing emphasis on the creative economy, culture has tended to be increasingly seen in political circles under the exclusive lens of the economy and its contribution to it. To counteract this tendency, it is necessary to define the social values associated with culture on a different basis from the traditional one. The work focuses on the valuation practices of the actors involved in cultural life. In this respect, three areas and three types of fundamental actors in the value dynamics of culture are distinguished: the field of cultural participation, in which citizenship is the protagonist; the field of cultural production and heritage, where the professionals of creation and preservation are the ones who take the initiative; and the field of cultural administration, in which it is the experts and politicians who decide. The project takes these three areas and this basic typology of actors as a starting point to structure the study of the different aspects involved in this evaluative dynamic: the emergence of values, the configuration of a value order and the political impulse of values.

The three-year REACH project will establish a Social Platform as a sustainable space for meeting, discussion and collaboration by a wide-ranging network of development bodies, tourism, education, creative industries, cultural heritage professionals, academic experts, arts practitioners, professionals in archives and galleries, associations and interest groups representative of non-professionals and local societies, and policy-makers – all those with a stake in research in the field of culture and CH. The REACH Social Platform’s activities will have a twofold scope: - Support: to map and provide analysis of research results achieved in previous programmes, to identify current and emerging research trends, and to offer authoritative new knowledge of the CH field to the European Commission and policy makers; - Coordination: to offer benefits to its participants, expanding knowledge of complementary research domains, and of new participatory research methodologies, generating opportunities for cooperation, offering pathways to wider user engagement with research outputs. In the context of radical social changes taking place at global levels, Europe faces a serious challenge: the need for its citizens to live together in peace and mutual respect and to value and enjoy the diversity of cultures, which they bring to their respective societies. The REACH project is based on the proposition that CH plays an important role in contributing to social integration in Europe, and that a fuller and more detailed picture of the range, type and impact of research and participatory research methodologies, current and future, associated with these subjects will further enhance their potential for social good.