The objective of the International Research Project (IRP) Coss&Vita, “Generalized continua and their applications to engineering materials and structures”, is to promote new developments and applications and to strengthen the expertise in the field of generalized continuum mechanics. Specifically, the aim of the IRP is to bring the attention of the Paris–Rome mechanics community on the growing interest in this field in order to stimulate real breakthroughs by taking advantage of the Paris–Rome expertise in homogenization theory, statics and dynamics of heterogeneous media, multiphysics coupling, full–field measurement techniques and available computational mechanical methods.