Underground4value: A COST Action for developing sustainable touristic routes

The presentation introduces how underground built heritage perspective changed from an often abandoned and unattractive feature to a cultural landscape, a place of the memory that can play an active role for local communities' heritage and become a touristic destination. Although several success stories, the transition from abandoned places into touristic attractions follows complex dynamics, which greatly benefit from community engagement and integrated planning. Perceiving the underground landscape as a dynamic entity, defined by its interacting parts and its integrative whole, its valorisation is not necessarily related to a manufactured construction - punctual architecture or archaeological artefact - but to an entire "underground" landscape, often demanding for new meanings and set of practices. Thanks to cultural tourism's development, several underground sites have become tourist destinations, sometimes integrated into new tourist routes linked to specific niches of tourism, such as the mining tourism, or the religious one, or the dark tourism. Noticeably, new models are required for engaging the local community and attracting competences and skills from outside, revitalising local narratives, and creating new shared meanings. This is one of the challenges of the COST Action Underground4value (U4V), which since 2019 established an expert network for elaborating concepts, methods, and tools. Through the study of 12 case-studies, underground4value helped local communities to create living labs, experiment different approaches, and empowering themselves. This process is just started and demands for more time for engaging local communities and overcoming significant knowledge and cultural gaps, which hinder their effective participation to planning processes, and to develop new resources for a sustainable tourism.