Smartdest H2020 W/ MITdesignX Venice
Innovation Camp
SOCIAL INCLUSION IN TOURIST CITIES: THE SPACE FOR INNOVATION
July 6-7, 2023
Fabbrica H3,
Giudecca 624-625 Venice (Italy)
Organized and hosted by SerenDPT
The SMARTDEST project (H2020 program, ref. 870753, https://smartdest.eu/), coordinated by the Rovira i Virgili University and including 12 other research partners from 8 European countries, focuses on issues of social exclusion in tourist cities.
The Innovation Camp took place on two days at the premises of SerenDPT, one of the partners in the SMARTDEST project in charge of the Venice case study.
All contents (including full video recordings and presentations) and the Technical Report are available on https://smartdest.eu/innovation-camp-full-video.../
DAY 1 - Thursday 6 July 2023 hosted an innovation workshop presenting and discussing the project results and a round of presentations from social, technological and policy innovators, from the local to the European level, who presented their own activities and how they could take stock of the issues and avenues of solution identified in our project.
Day 1 - Highlights
DAY 2 - Friday 7 July 2023 was organised as an ideathon, where young researchers and practitioners in the field of urban planning, tourism studies, and digital technology, recruited for the event, were invited to work in groups to draft plans that provide ideal solutions to a number of challenges derived from our project and the conversations held in the first day. The best project presented was awarded with a prize.
The ideathon also constituted a preparatory activity for the 2023 call to access to MITdesignX Venice, a SerenDPT program managed in collaboration with MIT of Boston and Fondazione di Venezia. It is a competition of ideas dedicated to the development of entrepreneurship and the creation of startups in the Venetian area.
Day 2 - Highlights
"SMARTDEST main ambition is to contribute to the definition of a policy agenda for cities that takes tourism mobilities seriously, at all levels of government, and that brings out the potential of social innovation from citizen engagement for more resilient communities. It has thus produced new evidence on how urban inequalities and exclusion are produced, lived, and coped with in cities that are the hub of tourism and other related mobilities, under the pull of city spaces and assets that reorient progressively towards the affordabilities of a transnational mobile class. It has similarly looked into the uneven negotiations that unfold from the digital to the physical and social space, identifying criticalities in the construction of inclusive smart cities. The Smartdest Innovation Camp event, aims to bring together scientists, policymakers, innovation agents and networks, practitioners and researchers in training as an opportunity to present some of the project findings and exploring how such results may inform innovation actions and new initiatives" (A.P Russo, Smartdest Project Coordinator).
