Posted on: 10th December 2019

Underground4value

Cost Action 18110 – Underground Built Heritage as catalyser for Community Valorisation

Promoting “Underground Built Heritage” as a valuable resource to celebrate and preserve and, when sustainable, to re-use and valorise, realising its full potential to support local communities’ development.

Project structure

The experts are organised in five working groups:

1. UBH Knowledge Base Development;

2. UBH conservation and monitoring;

3: UBH reuse and valorisation strategies;

4. UBH planning approaches;

5. Dissemination and exploitation strategies.

field work

Underground4Value sets up and coordinates small teams of participants for performing every year four Short Term Scientific Missions (STSM) in selected UBH case studies. For each, local teams investigate on field best-practices and report on governance mechanisms, planning framework, stakeholders’ involvement management, financing mechanisms, technical needs, and their direct impacts on the underground built environment preservation, environment, society and economy, as well as potential negative externalities (i.e. ‘gentrification’, hard-branding, mass tourism, recreational villages, underground degradation…). Underground4Value STSMs stimulate interaction with local communities, dissemination of innovative thinking and support them to explore alternative social trajectories, by establishing living labs.

sustainability of project results

Collected information is the basis for developing new research and training, open and accessible to all parties interested in the underground regeneration, and it provides knowledge on main technical and organisational barriers to the underground regeneration and correlated solutions.

Uderground4value aims at guaranteeing continuity of use and significance to the underground historic fabric, revitalisation of the public realm and skills development for townspeople. It disseminates knowledge on underground culture and assist local communities’ decision-making with adequate cultural, scientific and technical knowledge of the underground built environment from many different aspects (i.e. archaeology, geotechnics, history, urban planning, cultural anthropology, economics, architecture, cultural tourism). Finally, it aims at contributing to other EU programmes implementation.

Main objectives

Providing a balanced and sustainable methodology for supporting the conservation and re-use of the UBH
Realising the potential of UBH for empowering local communities
Managing and treasuring the wide-ranging participants’ competencies in order to identify key areas of scientific, technical, commercial, managerial, political, cultural and social nature, which are currently deemed problematic for a sustainable use of the UBH.
Setting up and coordinating small teams of participants to perform yearly four case-study assessments
Interacting with local communities, disseminating innovative thinking and supporting them to explore alternative social trajectories, such as establishing Living Labs, and experimenting transition management tools.
Improving network openness by delivering presentations at regional and local conferences
Developing new skills for planners, decision-makers, promoters, and local development facilitators

accumulated knowledge for a sustainable use of the UBH

Exploring new planning approaches, such as the Strategic Transition Management (STM), and their use in the built heritage conservation and re-use, through the WG activities, the case-studies STSMs, and the training courses
Creating a multi-disciplinary network on the sustainable use of the UBH
Disseminating results of the methodological and knowledge advancement at international, regional, and local level
Developing new training modules for planners, local community facilitators, promoters, and decision-makers