Underground Built Heritage as a Driver for Community Valorisation

It's a proposal prepared for the COST Association 2016 Call. It will establish and implement a multi-national/cultural/sectoral network of academics, practitioners, decision-makers, and innovators, aiming at promoting a sustainable use of the Underground Built Heritage, by integrating policies and practices of conservation into the wider goals of regional and local development, in respect of the inherited values and traditions of different cultural contexts. The Action will organise four thematic working groups. The first will define a reliable knowledge base, which will provide decision-makers with historical and archaeological backgrounds, integrated geophysical explorations, and surveys of the earth and subsoil resource. The second will map different strategies for the underground built heritage conservation and re-use in different countries, and improving the overall comprehension of success factors. The third will deal with the emerging innovation processes, from both the technological and the social side. The forth, finally, defines a planning framework that, referring to the Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (UNESCO), will explore, test and adapt a range of traditional and innovative tools, based on civic engagement, knowledge and planning tools, regulatory systems, and financial tools to different local contexts and built heritage. A fifth group will deal with the dissemination and exploitation of results, by coordinating meetings, short term scientific missions, a training school, and other various communication and dissemination activities. Special attention the Action will give to the yearly assessment of case studies of re-use of the underground built heritage and the organisation of a new training approach for planners and decision-makers