ROCK has focused on historic city centres as real laboratories to demonstrate how Cultural Heritage (CH) can be an engine of regeneration, sustainable development and economic growth. It has applied a series of role-model practices in three testing sites in Bologna, Lisbon and Skopje, supporting the transformation of historic city centres afflicted by physical decay, social conflicts and poor life quality into Creative and Sustainable Districts.
Over almost four years, the ten ROCK cities have been developing innovative solutions that demonstrate how cultural heritage can be the driving force behind urban sustainability. They have been supported by project partners – as service providers and knowledge brokers – to test and advance tools and approaches aimed at shaping sustainable, CH-led urban futures. As a result, the project has provided an innovative, collaborative and systemic approach to promote the effective regeneration and adaptive reuse in historic city centres by implementing a repertoire of successful CH-led regeneration initiatives.
ROCK has worked on overcoming the idea of CH as an accessory investment and an object of isolated sectorial policies. Its aim has been to include CH in broader economic and development processes, such as a social economy and an increase in knowledge, creativity and overall quality of life.
The most important transformation processes triggered by ROCK have been the collective actions aimed at capturing urban transformation, as well as the dynamic construction of CH for all. As a result, the undertaken actions has fed processes of urban transformation involving the largest possible number of citizens.
The first goal has been to develop both a methodology and an operational framework (cultural, technological, managerial) valuable and effective in different urban realities. The application of these two shared elements has facilitated the comparison and collaboration between the 10 ROCK cities without inhibiting the site-specificity of places and communities, imposing a unique and standardized interpretative and operational model. A balance has been sought between, on the one hand, the sharing of methods and values in a European perspective and, on the other, the respect and enhancement of the specificity of places, attributing to the term "place" a broad interpretation that includes its physical, social, political, cultural and memorial structure.
Another objective has consisted in implementing pilot actions that, while supported by specialized and innovative skills, are not only able to intercept all the cultures of the city but also, in a circular process, to redefine themselves by supporting processes of empowerment and constant, mutual transfer of knowledge between specialized knowledge and ordinary "skills" of the "citizens", meaning by this term every actor operating in the city, whether his or her presence is stable or temporary.
