Creative Industries in Traditional Intercultural Spaces
The project named “Creative Industries in Traditional Intercultural Spaces” (CITIES) is a joined initiative generated by 9 partners from 6 countries: Lithuania, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Slovenia. Klaipeda City Municipality as the main initiator of the project will perform a role of the Lead Partner. The project addresses Priority 1 of INTERREG IV C Programme (sub-theme: entrepreneurship and SMEs). The project aims through interregional cooperation to improve regional and local policies addressing the promotion and support of creative and cultural industries, as one of the most significant growth sectors for the European economy in terms of GDP and added value. According to the European Commission’s report ‘Culture and the Economy’ (2006), the creative industries have a growing relevance to the European competitiveness, sustainability and social cohesion: they represented 2.6% of the GDP of the EU in 2003 and 3.1% of employment in 2004.
In most partner countries this sector can hardly be estimated as separate economic activity and most countries do not have sound analysis on the impact of this sector on local or national economy, business competitiveness. Thereby only several participating partners have set and undertaken special instruments in promoting the growth of these industries. Some of these already applied instruments are proved as successful and have already provided tangible and measurable results. These approaches as good practice examples will be identified, analysed and transferred to other participating countries as well as exhaustive benchmarking research (comparative surveys) and mapping will be made on local levels. Project provides the medium intensity of cooperation. Project activities encompass not only traditional cooperation tools, but also comparative studies and developing, introducing and piloting a new strategy, instruments on regional and local levels.
This will ensure successful exchange of know-how between more and less developed regions. 
Project activities are scoped around several main goals:
- supporting creativity among SMEs as important condition for developing innovation based businesses, and fostering knowledge economy;
- performing  thorough benchmarking researches in different countries; 
- developing, piloting and introducing new  strategies, instruments and tools to be used at regional or local level in order to promote and support entrepreneurship in creative and cultural industries, especially revitalizing abandoned, retrogressive, traditional city zones; 
- establishing a virtual platform for constant exchange, share and transfer of experience, knowledge and good practice, thus ensuring that project created added value will be shared to the organizations outside the partnership, EU wide.