SMARTDEST - Tackling Social Exclusion due to Tourism Mobilities

The SMARTDEST project’s ambition is to fill a knowledge gap about the effects of tourism mobilities on urban inclusion and cohesion, and about the contextual, political and technological factors that determine fundamental variations in such effects; and to explore, design and test the validity of potential innovative pathways to mitigate social exclusion, founded on the idea of citizens as co-creators. The project includes four research packages that respectively (1) analyse the role of tourism mobilities, mobile dwelling and ‘smart’ systems as transformative force-fields for places; (2) excavate social exclusion issues and coping practices through the engagement with affected communities in case study cities; (3) develop CityLabs as sites for the participatory design of human-centred solutions (both in the digital and non-digital realm) which demonstrate value for the broad ‘destination ecosystem’ of case study cities and scale up as innovative systems of governance; (4) transfer the insights gained by the project at local level and extend its impacts through a dialogue with policy entities, concern communities, innovators and scientists throughout the EU policy space.