Photo by shade jay on Unsplash

The O-City project was starting to increase the network of Creative Cities, interested in be part of the project map, when the COVID-19 pandemic spread all over Europe and the World. 

The current situation has already a strong impact on two sectors the O-City concept was relying on and on which Creative Economy is strongly based: tourism and creative industries.

Cities have become ghost town, with citizens invited to stay home to reduce the risk of spreading even further the virus, while the first public spaces to be closed have been those where culture and creativity are produced and consumed. 

Cities have become ghost town, with citizens invited to stay home to reduce the risk

We do not know what the future has in store for us but today we probably need to start thinking at how the two sectors will restructure themselves after the crisis and how cities will have to rethink their spaces, their policies for human interaction. 

Creative cities have always developed their success on creative and cultural spaces, on the vibrancy of their cultural life and opportunities for audiences to be involved both in the production and in the co-creation of cultural products. They have also built their tourism strategies on this capacities and on the strengths of their creative economy. 

What will be the future of Creative Cities? 

While cultural institutions have immediately started to make their cultural offer available online and for free to keep people having access to cultural contents while home, European governments have reacted in different ways and with different intensity to the situation reassuring the creative sector or forgetting about it. 

Tourism organizations worldwide have started to think at how, by when it will be possible to travel again, the way tourists will make their experiences will be changed, looking for areas with less crowd, more real experiences and that famous link with locals to be considered not as part of the tourist offer but as part of a life time experience able to change the travelers. 

Apart from the reaction of policy makers, the cultural and creative sector is trying to make the most out of the online facilities and tools rethinking the relationship with the audience, exploring new ways to apply arts and culture education, expecting the human interactions to be very different when the emergency will be over. 

In this scenario, O-City project will keep on developing multimedia item to narrate world Creative Cities

In this scenario, O-City project will keep on developing multimedia item to narrate world Creative Cities, mapping them, involving the stakeholders from local Creative Economy and building from each item presenting cultural heritage of a city an innovative learning path to build the future class of creative professionals.