European countries are proud of their rich heritage and landscape assets, both urban and rural. They have a lengthy and successful history of conserving them and capitalising on them culturally and economically. Throughout the 20th century, particularly since the 1960s, great progress has been made in creating structures and promulgating principles (often in conjunction with the international community through UNESCO) to guide heritage and landscape conservation. As the 21st century proceeds, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that a further paradigm shift is required. There are new far-reaching drivers for change, including rising and moving populations, greater connections through the digital world between communities, environmental degradation and climate change, as well as calls for democratisation in decision making and management. The significant steps forward made in heritage theory, aims and practice are no longer sufficient. Confronted with such a fast-changing context, heritage management needs to become more proactive. More powerful ideas, tools and training are needed to ensure that interdisciplinary, research-based heritage and landscape management and spatial planning are positively integrated with business activity, with city and rural development, and with democratic participation in decision making that shapes the future landscape. HERILAND participants have individually played a leading role in the development of such a new socially-embedded approach to heritage. They have now united in a consortium with the aim to train a new generation of academics, policy makers, practitioners, professionals and entrepreneurs. This new generation must devise and guide transdisciplinary, cross-sectoral and mainstreamed planning and design strategies for regenerating European heritage and landscape, foster social inclusiveness, and create socially, economically and environmentally sustainable future landscapes. HERILAND will achieve this by defining, evaluating and anchoring a new, pan-European research and training standard along these lines.
Drawing on the above, HERILAND sets itself six specific objectives: 1/ to conceive and operationalise a transferable research design with which to investigate at a multi-national level how heritage should be managed and planned in the context of contemporary spatial and societal transformations and related sustainable development goals; 2/ to develop a skill set with innovative analytical concepts, methods and tools, implementing and evaluating them in practice; 3/ to provide researchers and practitioners of spatial heritage planning with an innovative and diverse set of concepts, techniques and skills for promoting and supporting co-creative approaches; 4/ to establish a new European ESR-training standard in the transdisciplinary area of heritage and spatial planning; 5/ to offer ‘on the job’ training of scientific and complementary professional skills, expose the students to multiple audiences (also in dissemination) and raise students’ future job opportunities; 6/ To guarantee sustainability of the HERILAND College as a European-wide platform for collaborative research and training along the lines set out by HERILAND.
