Cultural Cities Twinning (CultCities) is a Town Twinning project – co-funded by the European Union under the CERV Programme – developed between 8 EU medium sized towns so-called “intermediate cities”: Comune di Pavia (Italy), Grand Poitiers Communauté Urbaine (France), Câmara Municipal de Coimbra (Portugal), Primăria Municipiului Iași (Romania), Ville de Besançon (France), Stadt Hildesheim (Germany), Ayuntamiento de Salamanca (Spain), Turun kaupunki (Finland). The reciprocal connection in the CultCities project intends to create a specific context for discussion and sharing on cultural material heritage, its conservation, its enhancement and its sustainable reuse.

The specific objectives of the project are:

• to share, discuss and involve relevant stakeholders to present best practices that explored in total or partially new circular businesses, financing and governance models in heritage conservation, creating synergies between multiple actors, reducing the use of resources and regenerating values, capital, and knowledge;
• to involve young stakeholders as culture experts, young artists, students in discussing conservation policy and practice;
• to set up a permanent cooperation mechanism between cities: a “Culture and Heritage Living Lab” as a practice-driven organization able to facilitate and foster open and 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.

The main activity of the project was the twinning event from 4 to 7 April 2022 in Pavia: this four-day event represented an opportunity for each delegation from the cities to visit the cultural heritage of Pavia, to deepen the mutual knowledge, to implement the exchange of good practices and case studies relating to the enhancement of their cultural heritage, as well as to participate in the open discussion.

The 8 Municipalities signed a “Friendship Agreement” for the creation of the Culture and Heritage Living Lab, underlining their mutual intention to continue working together on the topics of the CultCities project.