HERITAGE ACTIVATION THROUGH ENGAGING EXPERIENCES TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The future of Europe’s rich cultural heritage is facing several challenges due to various threats including climate change, natural or man-made disasters and lack of finance. Meanwhile, global processes have a deep impact on the values attributed by communities to urban areas and their settings. Despite Europe’s common values and creative diversity of traditions, crafts, arts and architecture, social discrimination, based on ethnicity, race, sex or gender and other characteristics persists in Europe, and is one of the key drivers of social exclusion. Access to cultural heritage experiences contributes to social cohesion and inclusion, by strengthening resilience and the sense of belonging and improving well-being. In this view, there is a need for new design solutions that are resilient to the changing conditions and sensitive to local cultural heritage, and to local topographic and climatic conditions. HERITACT will consider cultural transformations driving sustainability and will explore new cooperation paths among relevant stakeholders, interested in designing a new European way of life in line with the New European Bauhaus. To this end, HERITACT intends to empower communities’ co-creation capacity and to redefine the role of cultural heritage in urban regeneration. HERITACT will identify and enhance community-oriented processes and will introduce innovative and inclusive architectural and design solutions and cultural-artistic practices to support environmental and cultural sustainability, and to strengthen the cultural and creative industries through community awareness and policy making across European urban areas of many different scales and cultural settings. Interdisciplinary methodologies will provide stakeholders at 3 different cultural urban contexts across Europe a decision-support system based on collaborative approaches for the reactivation of unused cultural heritage spaces, and/or for enhancing diverse communities‘cultural identity and values.