Co-Creating Strategies for Heritage Reactivation: HeritACT Pilot Cases in Eleusis, Milan and Ballina

HeritACT is an EU Horizon Europe project aligned with the New European Bauhaus (NEB) that explores heritage reactivation as climate action. This paper focuses on the implementation of a co-creation process for heritage reactivation strategies in three pilot cases of the HeritACT project, namely Eleusis (Greece), Milan (Italy), and Ballina (Ireland). The proposed process combines a selection of methods and digital tools to support local stakeholders to identify particular challenges and contexts for urban management; what each pilot case expects to achieve and how; and the associated barriers and risks. It involved three stages: 1. An online survey with each local municipality stakeholder to help identify the unique characteristics of each pilot case. 2. An online co-creation workshop for each pilot case. 3. An output-sharing workshop to generate discussion and refine outcomes. The paper presents the co-creation processes and associated results regarding each heritage reactivation strategy. The Eleusis pilot sets out to develop an effective model for the governance of historic structures; while the Milan pilot focuses on “cascina” remaining in the metropolitan area and transforming them into a network of resilient community hubs; and finally the Ballina pilot focuses on vacant religious institution buildings and their reactivation to build community resilience. The innovative contribution of this paper is a 3-stage process which enabled comprehensive discussions of the stepping stones for future community engagement activities planned in the project, which involves co-recognition, co-envisioning, and co-implementation phases. This process has been generalised to be applied to different cultural, planning and socio-economic contexts to ensure its replicability in future potential pilots. These activities leverage digital tools for participatory processes and are rooted in the NEB principles, fostering climate action initiatives in the pilot cases.