Cultural Heritage and City Development
In all member states, historic towns and cities bear witness to both a shared European heritage as well as rich cultural diversity.
Many urban landscapes and identities are marked by a built environment whose physical characteristics refer to a process of development stretching back over centuries. Individual monuments and landmarks, groups of buildings, street patterns and coherent ensembles inform us of our cities’ pasts, continuity of change through time, periods of ascendancy, remarkable events, or ruptures in the urban fabric as a result of conflict or transformation. Emotional, physical and even economic attachment to the built heritage has generated a valuable culture of monument preservation, conservation areas, heritage sites, etc., where considerations of authenticity interact with those of functional adaptation.
Tangible heritage is an integral part of the “living” city, it is a force of attraction contributing to image and quality perception, it provides special locations for many key urban activities and interactions, it has a strong economic potential (and not exclusively from tourism). Therefore as urban settlements develop, change or grow, a recurrent and ongoing questioning of the role of this feature of our cities is justified. While the guiding principles of the Venice Charter, and UNESCO (World Heritage) criteria, retain absolute validity the main challenge for city authorities and agencies in this respect is to construct a responsible and manageable interpretation in the face of contemporary ambitions, (sustainable) development pressures and processes. This is infinitely more complex than a “museological treatment versus unbridled modernisation” discussion might suggest.
The project REPAIR presents an interesting angle to approach this debate via the re-use of abandoned military heritage, particularly focussing on “new” objectives or moral obligations to take energy efficiency, waste management, sustainable accessibility and local employment into account in the restoration formula. In addition HerO provides a worthy complement here in its search to devise integrated systems of cultural heritage management, preserving and developing historic urban landscapes as a key facet of the dynamic multi-functional city. It is hoped that CTUR and Creative Clusters a project from the Economic development and Jobs Pole can also make a contribution to this sub-theme on the issue of innovative entrepreneurship in the context of the urban cultural heritage.
To find out more about the aims, methods, events and outputs being planned by these networks read the synthesis of their baseline studies.