Digital Platforms for the Sustainability of Cultural Heritage: A Focus on Clickproject.eu

1. Introduction

Currently, sustainability and sustainable development are cornerstones of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. Thus, they are at the forefront of public debate in terms of both national and international policy orientation as well as of production and consumption models rethinking (Donham, 1927; Bowen, 1953; Davis, 1973). This long-lasting debate led to critically thinking about the possible consequences that anthropic action has on planet earth and if this action and the related consequences are still “sustainable” (Nyström et al., 2019). It follows that institutions, for-profit and no-profit organizations, and even individuals are even more concerned about sustainability and its issues. Some of the most challenging issues come from cultural heritage and its peculiar characteristics and trends (Van Tulder et al., 2013).

The importance of cultural heritage for the transition towards sustainability as well as for sustainable development has been also stated in the “Agenda 2030” (UN, 2015) and in its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which governments of 193 UN member state subscripted. Some of these SDGs are related to the integration of cultural heritage protection and exploitation in national and international sustainable policies and plans (Hosagrahar et al., 2016). This issue has also inspired the academic debate internationally; thus, much research has been dedicated to better understanding the relationship existing between cultural heritage protection and enhancement, economic growth, and the protection of different local and national identities (Schreiber, 2019). In this sense, a growing number of academic contributions has been dedicated to better understanding the influence that human and humanistic as well as ecologic dimension of cultural heritage play on socio-economic development and its sustainability (Xiao et al., 2018). Several are projects nationally and internationally intended to boost the operationalization of sustainable development principles in cultural heritage. These are often based on and supported by the most advanced technologies, which offer interesting solutions to the issues that affect this sector, especially when intended to solve the problems that human activities (e.g., industrial activities, tourism, urbanization, etc.) and/or unexpected natural disasters or crises have caused (Deren, 2008; Bassano et al., 2018).

Being composed of a large network of different actors (e.g., institutions, companies, and individuals), a cultural ecosystem can develop specific abilities sharing technologies, knowledge, and skills that led them to cooperate for reaching sustainable development principles in cultural heritage (Liang et al., 2021). Thanks to the most recent digital technologies the interactions and the cooperation between different subjects/actors involved in the cultural ecosystem are facilitated to share their personal resources and to add viability and sustainability to the domain under investigation (Portalés et al., 2018).

In this sense, digital platforms – or technological modular, layered, and interconnected architectures embedded into business networks (Tiwana et al., 2010; de Reuver et al., 2018; Kazan et al., 2018) – offers new opportunities for enhancing cultural heritage. This is possible because these platforms contribute not only to change production, provision, and consumption of historical, artistic, or cultural resources but also to make the interactions among different subjects/actors (e.g., institutions, companies, citizens, performers, etc.) easier a more fluid (Claesson, 2009; Guthrie et al., 2015; Bratianu & Bejinaru, 2019).