Cultural Heritage regeneration remains an open issue in the urban policies and practices, the current discourse struggling between protection/ preservation and valorisation in a sustainable way. In this light, ROCK project envisions Cultural Heritage as a common good, opening various perspectives to investigate its potentialities for leading urban transitions and regeneration/ transformation processes.
2019 has been very intense in terms of activities implementation for reaching out the envisioned results and innovations in the context of cultural heritage regeneration, relating to technological tools as process enablers. In short, ROCK has been represented by URBASOFIA at the following international events:
• Placemaking week in Valencia, Spain – tackling the topic of Heritage building stronger communities (https://placemakingweekeurope.sched.com/event/) and looking at how cultural heritage can be used as a placemaking tool in different urban contexts.
• Changing Cities IV conference in Chania, Greece – responding to a pre-organised session invitation entitled Smart adaptation. Modernistic heritage for sustainability of the future and highlighting a particular ROCK case study of industrial heritage adaptive reuse in Eindhoven, Strijp-S area (https://changingcities.prd.uth.gr/).
• Replication workshop in Lisbon, Portugal – a ROCK labelled event, opened to a wider cities’ audience, where the innovative practice of Lisbon (the Interpretive Centre of Marvila and Beato – https://rockproject.eu/news/159/view) has been investigated in terms of transferability aspects of a participatory approach for collecting and disseminating local cultural heritage.
• Getting Cultural Heritage at Work in Kavala, Greece – focused on how to get Cultural Heritage work for the sustainable and inclusive development of the city, where ROCK has been presented as a best practice given the variety of practices and demonstration actions implemented in 10 creative and knowledge-based cities (https://rockproject.eu/news/212/view).
• EURAC 3rd International Conference in Bolzano, Italy – discussing a Data-driven approach for urban transformation of cultural heritage areas, with a comparative case study of Location-Based Analytics (given by Wi-fi sensors) for assessing crowd flow movement within the historic centres of two ROCK cities: Cluj-Napoca (Romania) and Turin (Italy) – http://www.sspcr.eurac.edu/.
Besides public appearances, ROCK has delivered a set of important deliverables, one particularly related to the Regulatory Framework, ROCK Procurement and Policy Recommendations (available here: https://rockproject.eu/), addressing 5 Overarching challenges (Governance, Protection rules, Capacities, Side-effects and Fragmentation) and proposing a set of Cross-policy recommendations (such as Decentralisation – Ensure multilevel governance platforms on local level, Equilibrium – Generate a balance of regulations and flexibility, Accessibility – Guarantee shared cultural heritage and fair use of public space, Integrative Approaches – Regulations to reconcile needs from both residents and visitors, Transversality – Support cooperation between cultural heritage and other sectors., Evidence – Ensure appropriate impact assessments in cultural heritage valorisation projects, etc).
Willing to find out more? Visit www.rockproject.eu and save the date of the ROCK Final Conference and Business Matching Event: 14-15 May 2020, Bologna (https://rockproject.eu/events/89/view). Stay tuned, registration will open in January 2020!