CROCUS Horizon Project on cultural and creative tourism

ATLAS is participating in the HORIZON Europe CROCUS Project on cross-border cultural and creative tourism in rural and remote areas. This project, which will run from 2024 to 2027, is co-ordinated by Aalborg University from Denmark, and involves a number of other ATLAS members, including Bergamo University from Italy, the University of Rijeka in Croatia, the University of Pannonia in Hungary and the University of Maribor in Slovenia.

The project aims to:

• generate knowledge about which Cultural and Creative Tourism (CCT) business models are most appropriate for different types of heritage and rural areas;
• create eight cross-border living labs in which sustainable CCT business models will be prototyped
• develop macro-regional and cross-border policy scenarios
  for each of the four EU macro-regions (Baltic Sea, Adriatic and Ionian, Alpine, and Danube); and
• synthesise knowledge and experience from the project to create tools and resources that rural and remote areas across Europe and beyond can use to develop sustainable and inclusive CCT in the future.

ATLAS is currently leading the development of the theoretical basis of the project, which will include an analysis of the current state of the art in cultural and creative tourism in rural and remote areas, as well as thematic issues such as placemaking and cross-border cooperation. The aim of this work is to identify current CCT business models, market trends and policy frameworks in the EU. The literature review for the project uses tools developed by the ATLAS Event Languages Project to capture extensive material in languages other than English. For example, an initial search of the SCOPUS and Web of Science databases generated a total of 433 relevant sources in English, but additional searching in other languages by the project partners turned up a further 476 sources in other languages – this underlines the lack of non-English language sources also identified in the field of events (Richards et al., 2022). This shows that literature reviews conducted only on the main English language databases will miss a lot of potentially relevant material available in other languages.

Outputs from this first phase of the project are expected to be available in October 2024, and there will also be opportunities for ATLAS members to collaborate in other project activities. You can find more information on the project on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13022258/.