Heritage Alive Conference -
Pécs, Hungary

Municipalities are for keeping or increasing the quality of life, retain the young and serve the local society. Abandoned iconic buildings and sites are more than signs of change of time. These are challenges for municipalities now. Interregional cooperation could help to find good practices, develop common solutions, test ideas and suggest models.

Heritage Alive public conference gathered those European projects which aim  to find solution for the challenge of cultural heritage management.

Forget Heritage project has developed a policy handbook for citizens' involvement, a management manual with trainings and an application (OffSpace) to help municipalities in their problem solution. The management package is tested in eight pilot actions  involving CCI-s and a final recommendation will be promoted as a result of the project. 

REFREsh is also an Interreg CE project.  The consortia elaborates models to integrate creative and cultural activities (incl. enterprises and productive activities) in historic former productive abandoned buildings, involving local communities. 

YouInHerit (Interreg CE project) concentrates on the young. The consortia develops models to youth involvement in the innovative valorisation and revival of traditional trades and crafts as cultural heritage to make urban regions more attractive and competitive in a dynamic age.

Open Heritage is a Horizon2020 project with a more financial approach. OpenHeritage promotes the re-use of neglected, non-touristic heritage sites by building heritage communities around them. The project creates sustainable financing, business and governance models to support maintenance of the sites. These models involve new ways of community involvement, emphasize resource integration and embed the re-use in a broader territorial scale.

Heritage Alive conference allowed participants to compare the goals and methods, find connection points between the projects and establish cooperation in project capitalisation in the close future.