CUP 4 CREATIVITY: Cultural Urban Platform to nurture creativity and fight digital loneliness

Isolation, a major stress factor in itself, turns into digital loneliness when amplified by digital communication: an illusion of companionship obscuring degraded social contacts and skills, often leading to mental problems and poor cognitive performance.
Cultural and creative activities on the other hand decrease social isolation and have major potential in mental well-being and endurance. Fighting digital loneliness with culture through advanced technologies is a concept never tested at urban level. It revolutionises the perception of urban culture and introduces creative activities as valid forms of regular mental training, reproducing the recent success of the body fitness movement.
CUP 4 CREATIVITY integrates passive consumption with creative contribution, lowers access barriers and involves people exposed to digital isolation into community-sourced activities. By sparking dormant creativity, residents of Újbuda also become mentally fit and shielded against contemporary urban stress factors. At the same time, they become connected, encouraged and anchored contributors of the Újbuda community and embrace its social and cultural identity.
The main process is community building, exploiting the same technologies that intensify digital loneliness: an online cultural community is created, gradually involving its members into attractive online and real-life cultural events, creative activities and shared adventures, taking advantage of contemporary digital, immersive and AR/VR technologies.
The overall objective is to improve life quality in Újbuda through increased mental well-being and attractive urban environment, built on a flourishing cultural and community life. The expected results are:
- A Cultural IT Ecosystem providing a complex, sustainable, community-sourced digital networking space, facilitating outreach, connecting, marketing and co-creation.
- New physical cultural facilities serving sensitization to high-end culture and digital arts.
- A cultural community representing at least 10% of working age Újbuda citizens, the majority of cultural institutions and CCIs, as well as representative corporate and commercial players, actively using either online or physical functions of the platform.
- A comprehensive monitoring system providing quantitative and qualitative information to maintain content quality, mutual trust and interest of users, and to support business and operational sustainability.