Cultural Cities Twinning

ended

Cultural Cities Twinning is a Town Twinning project developed between 8 EU medium sized towns Pavia Italy, Grand Poitiers Communauté Urbaine France, Câmara Municipal de Coimbra Portugal, Primari Municipiuli Iasi Romania, Ville de Besançon France, Stadt Hildesheim Germany, Ayuntamiento Salamanca Spain, City of Turku Finland. They represent the contexts in which resources, capital, skills and talents are concentrated and, at the same time, places where many challenges are concentrated regarding environmental, economic, political and cultural dimensions. They are the best environment therefore, that allows to experiment the paradigm shift from linear economy to circular economy, in which to promote synergetic, fair and inclusive processes capable of activating new forms of urban productivity and social and economic innovation. In particular their cultural heritage is one of the main drivers of development and cultural heritage adaptive reuse strategies can play a decisive role not only in terms of increasing the life cycle of the heritage but also as an urban strategy capable of generating new, even values (economic, aesthetic, cultural, educational, political), supporting innovative dynamics of local development and which underline the importance of preserving cultural heritage and the instrumental values for its livelihood in a “circular” perspective. Therefore the general objective of the town twinning project is to share and discuss between citizens and relevant stakeholders, with a long lasting prospective, best practices projects and examples related to the conservation of the cultural material heritage and create a permanent Culture and Heritage Living Lab between EU cities as a practice-driven organization able to facilitate and foster open, collaborative innovation, as well as real-life environments or arenas, where both open innovation and user innovation processes can be studied and experimented with, and where new solutions are developed.