FUTURSpaCE is an advanced research project created with the aim of radically redefining the concept of the movie theatre, imagining it as an innovative audiovisual space, capable of responding to the technological, cultural and social transformations that have profoundly affected the public entertainment experience in recent decades.

The movie theatre has historically represented one of the symbolic places of sociality and popular culture.
However, the evolution of digital media, the increasing individualisation of audiovisual experiences - increasingly consumed through personal devices and online platforms - and, more recently, the impact of the global Covid-19 pandemic, have profoundly altered the relationship between spectators and collective venues.
While the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of domestic audiovisual consumption models, it has also reactivated a widespread desire for sharing, community and physical presence, highlighting new needs for technological innovation and security in public spaces.

It is in response to these challenges that FUTURSpaCE proposes an integrated and interdisciplinary vision of the movie theatre, understood not only as a projection venue, but as a strategic node in the audiovisual chain and as a social, cultural and economic device. The project aims at valorising the cinema as a space to be reinvented and reinterpreted, capable of offering an enriched and meaningful experience, combining technological dimension, architectural quality, sustainability and public vocation.

The main objectives of FUTURSpaCE are articulated in four fundamental directions:

• Redefine public entertainment spaces through an interdisciplinary reading that considers the cinema as a place, technological apparatus, cultural enterprise and social node.
• Enhancing the cinema as an innovative environment, integrating its spatial, architectural and structural components with the new expectations of increasingly demanding and technologically aware spectators.
• To investigate the potential of new cinemas as instruments of urban and community regeneration, capable of promoting social cohesion, participation and inclusion.
• To elaborate a body of guidelines and design tools oriented towards a new conception of the cinema as a space for meeting, training and shared experience.

The project's academic partners are the Politecnico di Milano, the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and the University of Udine.
FUTURSpaCE relies on a network of institutional and sector partners of the highest level, including the Ministry of Culture (MiC) and the main trade associations (AGIS, ANEC, ACEC, FICE), and is based on research, experimentation and field activities that allow it to combine theoretical knowledge and practical impact.

The project intends to provide an up-to-date snapshot of the expectations of Italian audiences, while at the same time offering an accessible, replicable and useful body of knowledge to guide the transformation of theatres into real multifunctional cultural spaces. Through this approach, FUTURSpaCE aims at concretely contributing to the rethinking of the role of cinema within contemporary society, promoting new ways of collective fruition and new sustainable design models of public spaces for audiovisuals.