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

Tourism is more than travelling and consuming and it has a great potential for sustainable development when it focuses on culture, nature, knowledge, and experiences. Creative Cultural Tourism can be used as a driver for innovation and cooperation and, to counteract its negative impacts, SECreTour will primarily focus on the local communities’ needs, perceptions and expectations. Tourism will be conceived as a tool to complement and diversify the income of the territories and communities, but also as a way of giving visibility and recognition to rural areas and their inhabitants, also promoting the installation and generation of services other than cultural. By developing a Fair, Creative and Sustainable Tourism (FaCS-Tourism) approach together with Heritage Communities (HC), the SECreTour consortium will assess the sensitivities and affordances of different local realities, needs and types of cultural heritage, visualizing and avoiding touristification and promoting alternative business models. FaCS-Tourism and HC will therefore enable governance and citizen engagement not only for touristic-economic planning, but also for community building and cultural heritage management and protection. Through a series of pilot cases, the project will demonstrate how cultural heritage can be used as a real driver for sustainable and fair development, promoting at the same time its conservation. Pilots have been carefully chosen to represent a full range of European territories, communities and heritage, including not only rural and agrarian landscapes, but also memory places of local identities, minorities, conflictive dark heritage. Pilots will be a focus for every part of the research as they will enable to test general ideas and observations in local detail and in specific governance contexts, and to facilitate effective communication, cooperation and problem-solving through an interdisciplinary and trans-sectoral approach.