Project description
Enhancing civic participation in urban heritage transformation
Urban cultural heritage sites undergo transformations driven by tourism and sustainable development; changes that leave local communities out of the process. While participatory design can help build local capacity, it often overlooks collaborative approaches to interpreting history. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the CoHisT project aims to strengthen civic participation in the transformation of urban heritage by involving diverse and marginalised local groups in cultural activities. The project focuses on the historic Beguinage site in Hasselt, Belgium. By combining participatory design, critical heritage studies, and public history, it will develop tools that enable communities to explore their past, imagine future possibilities, and create two exhibition prototypes.
Objective
Urban cultural heritage sites often undergo transformations driven by industrial shifts to tourism and sustainable development, but these changes frequently exclude local communities and fail to generate value at the local level. While participatory design addresses this exclusion by building local capabilities, it has largely overlooked the potential of engaging with the past - specifically through collaborative historical interpretation - to help communities reflect on long-term change and mobilise these reflections for collective action. Since narratives and experience of the past are often diverse and contradictory, a key challenge is how to bring together these different perspectives to strengthen local participation in future decision-making.
CoHisT addresses this gap by designing a capability-building programme that innovates civic participation in urban heritage transformation by including often excluded, diverse local groups in cultural activities. By integrating methods from participatory design, critical heritage studies, and public history, CoHisT creates tools and spaces for communities to explore their past, reflect on current changes, and collaboratively envision future possibilities. The project contributes two key tools, history-craft and co-curate, to guide participants in interpreting and curating urban transformations. These efforts culminate in two exhibition prototypes – design platforms where community members can deliberate on the effects of transformation processes and learn about ways to shape their community’s future. The project is executed through a situated action in Hasselt, Belgium, focusing on the transformation of its historic Beguinage site.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
3500 Hasselt
Belgium