“Right now, policy experts in cities are asking themselves how they can involve local people in governing cultural heritage, how to merge it with other policy areas and, maybe at the top of the list, how it can help us through the Covid recovery. Thanks to a year of research in the field, we finally have the answers to those questions,” asserts Julie Hervé, Eurocities’ policy expert on culture and cultural heritage.
The answers she is referring to come in a new publication for city experts dealing with cultural heritage on a technical level, Cultural heritage: a powerful catalyst for cities and regions. The publication is the result of one year of cultural policy focused visits to cities through the EU-funded Cultural Heritage in Action project, led by Eurocities. The chief challenges it identifies are climate change, social inclusion and economic competition as well as global megatrends such as rapid urbanisation, digitalisation and individualisation.
With examples from cities, from chair-building workshops to archiving rock concerts, this new publication shows how cities can leverage cultural and cultural heritage policy to mitigate or solve these challenges through experimentation and participation.
As an invaluable resource for cities, cultural heritage needs to be adequately nurtured, managed and sustained. In Cultural heritage: a powerful catalyst for cities and regions, you will also find the 10 steps to sustainable local cultural heritage policies that ground your policies in a robust understanding of your local ecosystem, as well as explaining how to make the most of them.
For 18 months, the peer learning programme Cultural Heritage in Action allowed exchange on cultural heritage as a key to Europe’s future and a crucial resource and strategic asset for cities and regions’ sustainable development. Throughout its activities, Cultural Heritage in Action had an important impact on capacity building in cultural heritage-led development in European local and regional administrations as well as for stakeholders. Read more about the project and check out its case studies and other material here.
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