Project

RESTART- Resilience and Territorial Development, Heritage at Risk and its Safeguard, is a research project funded within the Alma CaReS - Climate Change, Resilience, Sustainability initiative promoted by the University of Bologna after the floods that hit the Emilia-Romagna region in May 2023. Financed with over 400,000 euro raised thanks to the 5x1000 campaign, the initiative supports multidisciplinary projects aimed at increasing the resilience of the territory and citizens to climate change.

Selected among five winning projects, RESTART- Resilience and Territorial Development, Heritage at Risk and its Safeguard focuses on the protection and management of cultural heritage at risk. The consequences of the adverse climatic events that have affected the Emilia-Romagna region have prompted reflection on the need to make cultural heritage a pivotal element of sustainable development processes. Although international action frameworks emphasise that the importance attributed to the relationship between heritage, society and territory can no longer be ignored (Yogo Framework for Action; Sendai Framework for Action, 2030 Sustainable Development Goals), there is still a need, on a local scale, for a strategic and sustainable vision of participated conservation and safeguarding of cultural heritage. The project will contribute to the localisation of the sustainable development objectives outlined in the Regional Strategy for the Agenda 2030 of the Emilia Romagna region, by putting territorial governance and citizens at the centre of change processes.

The project starts from a local scale with short/medium-term strategies for heritage protection, with the perspective of being subsequently adaptable to other contexts and translatable into a medium/long-term strategy. In this perspective, it is configured as a spin-off of SIRIUS-Management Strategies for Cultural Heritage at Risk, active in the PNRR PE05 CHANGES - Cultural Heritage Active Innovation for the Next-Gen Sustainable Society, to respond to two needs: (i) to implement the collaboration between professionals, Authorities and Institutions to define management priorities and operational plans; (ii) to make citizenship an ally of Local Authorities and Heritage Protection Bodies.