Valorising Underground Built Heritage in Europe

This paper is prepared on activities and some of the results of the COST Action CA18110 project – “Underground Built Heritage as Catalyser for Community Valorisation” (Underground4Value – U4V) (2019- 2023). The action brought together more than 200 experts from 32 countries. Underground Built Heritage (UBH) is a unique cultural resource, being a focus of many recent scholarly papers from the fields of conservation, tourism, economy, IT, and others. Natural and human-made caves, underground burial sites, mines and quarries, other human-made caves used for habitation and work, subterranean infrastructures (cisterns, tunnels, ancient drainage systems, etc.), and ancient buried structures and settlements are all examples of the UBH site typologies. They represent very attractive cultural and tourism resources not only for foreign visitors but also for the local community and domestic visitors. Additionally, such sites are often located in the cities or their surroundings, which makes them accessible and suitable for daily visits. Therefore, research on UBH requires an interdisciplinary approach, various techniques, and methodologies. The main goals of the U4V project promote UBH as a valuable resource to preserve and promote sustainable (re)use of cultural heritage, and to valorise its full potential to support local community development. To achieve this overall challenge, the project focuses on managing and treasuring the wide participants’ competencies to identify key areas of scientific, technical, commercial, managerial, political, cultural, and social nature, which are currently perceived as problematic for sustainable use of UBHs. Project partners are interacting with local communities, disseminating innovative thinking, and supporting them to explore alternative social trajectories, such as establishing Living Labs, and experimenting with transition management tools. The main results of the project focus on developing new skills for planners, decision- makers, promoters, and local development facilitators, as well as networking partners from different European and other countries in-situ, online, and on digital platforms