Prato
EPIC - Experience Prato Industrial Culture
About the project
The EPIC (Experience Prato Industrial Culture) project leverages tourism as a means to promote fair, productive, and green growth in the city of Prato. Its approach is to achieve this by developing an innovative, competitive, and sustainable industrial tourism offer for visitors. The idea is that local industrial heritage is integrated into the existing cultural and natural attractions, highlighting and making accessible the previously untapped wealth of culture embedded in the city's industrial history and contemporary practices in design, fashion, and textile production.
Together with the stakeholders of the tourism ecosystem (hotels, restaurants, site managers, tourist guides, etc), economic actors (particularly SMEs of the local textile & clothing (T&C) industry), and civil society organisations, the project involves co-designing new tourism products that expand the offer and extend it both in time and space (the concept of ‘never-ending tourism’), thereby reducing seasonality and rebalancing tourism flows within the region.
Under the lead of the municipality of Prato and with the support of research and advanced technology providers, the concept behind the new co-created products is to combine real-life experiences with AI-powered Virtual Reality content, in order to offer an immersive all-round experience to visitors. These experiences are also designed to facilitate knowledge, information, planning, accessibility and sustainability, fostering environmental awareness and developing a deeper, longer-term engagement of the visitors with the city of Prato.
Challenges
Prato is a city with more than 200,000 inhabitants, globally known for its textile & clothing (T&C) district, which accounts for about 3% of the EU's textile production. However, despite its rich industrial heritage in design, fashion, and textiles, the city does not attract the significant tourist flows seen in nearby destinations in Tuscany. Prato aims to boost its industrial tourism activities to promote fair, productive, and green growth for all.
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The city does not attract the significant tourist flows seen in nearby destinations in Tuscany, limiting local growth.
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The current local tourism offer does not sufficiently valorise the city's rich industrial heritage in design, fashion, and textiles, which remains a relatively untapped resource.
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Currently, the tourism industry is characterised by a high degree of seasonality, is not as sustainable as it might be and fails to fully exploit new opportunities provided by digitalisation.
Proposed solutions
The project’s innovation is to exploit the city's industrial heritage as a key asset to attract and retain tourists for longer stays in the city, in ways that foster local growth in socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable ways. It does so by working with local stakeholders to develop an industrial tourism offer which attracts tourists to visit the city's historical and contemporary industrial heritage all year long by expanding real-world experiences into the digital and virtual domains.
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The Prato Metaverse – an immersive environment allowing visitors to fully experience Prato's industrial heritage through several points (VR museum, rooms, corners) throughout the city.
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‘Never-ending’ industrial tourism activities that integrate physical and digital experiences, extending visitors' experience in both space and time (before, during and after the visit).
Milestones
Dashboard to monitor tourism activities in Prato, supporting the city's Collaborative Destination Management Organisation (DMO).
Prato's Collaborative Destination Management Organisation governing the tourism activities.
An immersive virtual environment where visitors can enjoy Prato's industrial culture.
A marketplace for the promotion of the never-ending industrial tourism activities in Prato.