This event took place online on 26 March 2025 as part of the 2025 series of LDnet webinars. It was led by Rosalba La Grotteria and Giuseppe Pace and was attended by some 50 participants. The summary of the proceedings is available below together with links to the presentations and the recording of the event.
Empowering Local Communities for Smart and Sustainable Cultural Heritage: Bridging Expertise, Digital Change, and Partnerships
In his introductory address, the moderator, Alexander Colvine, Project Manager at Interpret Europe, the European Association for Heritage Interpretation, presented the overarching themes of this transnational session focused on participatory and digital approaches to cultural heritage. Speaking as a Scottish professional based in France, with a background in rural development and sustainable tourism, Colvine outlines the shift from traditional, expert-driven heritage practices to more inclusive, community-centred models of co-creation. Currently coordinating two European initiatives, EMPATHS and HI-People, Colvine highlighted a growing paradigm change in the heritage field. These projects advocate for the active involvement of local communities, not as passive beneficiaries but as equal stakeholders in shaping and interpreting the meanings of their heritage. As he noted, although the principle of inclusion may appear self-evident, it remains under-implemented across much of the heritage sector. Emphasising “heritage is about people and places”, Colvine called attention to the necessity of empowering communities in heritage management, particularly in a context marked by rising local expectations and fast-evolving digital technologies. While acknowledging the historical tension between heritage interpretation and digital tools, especially given the field’s emphasis on direct, on-site experiences, he advocated for a more open and critical engagement with digital innovation, exploring its potential to foster accessibility, interaction, and new forms of storytelling. With his introduction, Colvine framed the session as a collective learning opportunity, inviting participants to engage critically with the presentations, pose questions, and reflect on the broader implications for participatory governance and digital innovation in the heritage sector.
The session itself brings together case studies from Italy, Malta, and Greece, presented by Rosalba La Grotteria, Giuseppe Pace, Anthony Cassar, Haris Martinos, and Roberta de Bonis Patrignani, each demonstrating how participatory processes, supported by digital tools, are transforming cultural heritage sites. These contributions explore how heritage, whether ancient or contemporary, can be reimagined through shared ownership and lived experience, reinforcing the social value of heritage in everyday life.
Rosalba La Grotteria’s presentation explored community-based cultural heritage development, drawing from European projects, especially the Hangar Piemonte initiative in Italy’s Piedmont region. As an expert project manager, she framed heritage as a dynamic, community-owned process, shaped by digital innovation, sustainability, and strong partnerships. At the centre of her vision is the idea that territory is a collective work, and memory, as the cultural legacy of a place, is key to how communities reclaim and reinterpret their spaces. This process has tangible outcomes: disused factories and military sites are being transformed into open cultural spaces through digital tools. La Grotteria stressed the strategic role of capacity-building. Communities often possess deep local knowledge but need training and support to manage their heritage effectively. Empowering them with skills, confidence, and leadership is essential for sustainability and shared cultural authorship. Digital technologies, she argued, act as powerful enablers in three main ways: a) Preservation and accessibility of heritage resources; b) Smart city integration to improve visitor experiences and efficiency; c) Digitisation and cataloguing to organise and share local knowledge. However, the digital shift is not only technical; it comes with social and cultural challenges: new speeds, forms of interaction, and the digital divide, especially in under-resourced areas. That is why she insisted on keeping the human dimension central, using digital tools to enhance creativity, participation, and inclusive spatial development. Sustainability, both environmental and cultural, is another pillar. From green technologies and eco-tourism to preserving rituals and crafts, her projects reflect a model where digital and ecological transitions go hand in hand. Finally, La Grotteria highlighted the need for multi-level partnerships—public-private, academic, international—to secure funding, expertise, and long-term impact. In this model, community activation is not a buzzword but a methodology that fosters co-responsibility and authentic participation. She called for a new generation of heritage projects: participatory, digitally savvy, and rooted in lived experience.
Giuseppe Pace’s presentation tackled a key question: Why activating communities in heritage processes? He argued that local communities should not be seen merely as custodians, but as true interpreters of heritage—essential to both its material preservation and symbolic redefinition. Drawing from his work coordinating the COST Action Underground4value (2019–2023), which involved 13 Living Labs across Europe, Pace showed how community engagement ensures heritage remains accessible, inclusive, and sustainable. Digital technologies, he stressed, play a transformational role, particularly for rural or isolated areas—helping overcome barriers, amplify local narratives, and enable participatory conservation through tools like mapping, monitoring, and virtual collaboration. Crucially, heritage valorisation was framed not just as preservation, but also as a driver of regeneration, inclusion, and economic opportunity. Examples such as virtual tourism, digital storytelling, and e-commerce for traditional crafts illustrated how digital tools can support tailored, community-driven development. A highlight of the presentation was Pace’s emphasis on participatory heritage interpretation, echoing Walter Benjamin’s idea that only those who live heritage can truly understand it. This bottom-up approach is now being implemented in a new Erasmus+ project, EMPATHS, led by Alexander Colvine, focused on designing a participatory interpretation course. Pace also stressed the importance of education and long-term cultural transition, calling on schools, grassroots organisations, and local actors to foster intergenerational dialogue and civic responsibility. Digital media and educational platforms are key to engaging younger generations in these processes. In conclusion, Pace made a compelling case for placing communities at the heart of heritage valorisation. With structured methods and smart digital strategies, heritage becomes not a relic, but a living, evolving resource.
Tony Cassar, Head of the Digitisation Unit at Heritage Malta, presented a compelling case study on how digital technologies are being used not only to preserve physical cultural heritage, but also to embed within it the intangible memories and lived experiences of communities, what he described as the transformation from “digital twin” to “memory twin”. Heritage Malta oversees around 90 sites, including UNESCO heritage locations, and Cassar’s team is responsible for digitising the national collection, both tangible and intangible, on land and underwater. At the core of his talk was the “memory twin” concept: using technologies like photogrammetry and laser scanning to create digital models that are then “soaked” in collective memory, transforming objects into monuments of meaning and identity. Cassar illustrated this with the Malta Dockyard project—an iconic industrial site tied to Malta’s colonial and post-independence history. Beyond digitising tools, ship models, and maps, Heritage Malta launched an oral history initiative, capturing the stories of former dockworkers in unstructured interviews. Hundreds of hours of recordings were transcribed and made searchable through AI tools, forming the basis of a hybrid documentation model that includes printed publications with QR-linked interviews and a growing online archive—soon to be featured on Europeana. Cassar highlighted how this approach has sparked unexpected community engagement. Former dockworkers and their families actively contributed to the project, and young people—many of whom had no knowledge of Malta’s industrial past—became curious and involved. The initiative also gave rise to monthly community meet-ups, pop-up exhibitions, and the digitisation of privately held artefacts, further expanding the scope of the national collection. Crucially, by embedding paradata, the contextual and emotional metadata, into the digitised collection, Heritage Malta is ensuring not only its long-term sustainability but also its interoperability and relevance for future generations. The digitised objects, enriched with human memory, are now being used in virtual exhibitions and immersive 3D environments, demonstrating how digital innovation can reinvigorate public heritage and create new forms of civic participation. Cassar’s presentation offered a powerful reframing of digitisation, not merely as a technical exercise, but as a humanistic and community-driven process, where memory and meaning are as essential as pixels and point clouds.
Haris Martinos presented the community-led efforts to protect the ancient marble quarries of the Aegean Island of Paros and promote their cultural heritage. Parian marble has been used since 3 000 BC for works of art which were encountered throughout the Mediterranean. The quarries enjoyed a thousand years of glory, from 7th c. BC to 3rd c. AD when the brilliant white marble of Paros, known as ‘lychnitis’, was used for famous sculptures (including Venus de Milo and Augustus of Prima Porta) and architectural features, such as the frieze of Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The ‘lychnitis’ marble was extracted from a network of underground galleries of the Nymphs’ and Pans’ quarries. After long periods of inactivity there was a revival in the 19th c. when a large industrial complex was created for the exploitation of the quarries. Although designated as a protected archaeological site, the quarries fell in a sorry state of neglect.
After years of complaints by civil society organisations the public authorities (Ministry of Culture and Municipality of Paros) agreed to work in partnership and in 2020 a coordination committee was established including six local associations. Although it provided a forum for discussing the problems of the quarries it was unable to initiate and implement specific actions. To fill this governance deficit, the local associations formed a non-profit organisation in 2022, called ‘Paros Ancient Marble Quarries Park’, offering a longer-term vision for the quarries and promoting, preparing and implementing specific projects. These have included digital surveys and geotechnical investigations of Nymphs’ and Pan’s quarries, installation of information boards and signage scheme linked via QR codes to an extensive website, as well as proposals for small scale improvements and major stabilisation works. A key project is the digital applications, including virtual visits to the underground galleries of the quarries, which kicked off in January 2025. The non-profit organisation has managed to maintain its leading role in these efforts, working closely with the local community (school visits, photography contest, and oral history documentation), organising fundraising activities, and cooperating with public authorities, universities, museums and foundations.
Roberta de Bonis Patrignani’s contribution explores a participatory and technology-enhanced approach to the management of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, focusing on the case study of Crespi d’Adda, a 19th-century company town in Northern Italy. Once a thriving industrial settlement, Crespi d’Adda has undergone significant transformation since the decline and eventual closure of its factory in 2004. Today, while the site retains exceptional historical value and integrity, it faces challenges typical of many heritage sites: underutilization, fragmented governance, and limited community engagement. The management of the site is entrusted to the Crespi d’Adda Association, which works closely with the local municipality and a City Commission to develop a UNESCO-compliant Management Plan. This process is guided by UNESCO’s four key principles: the plan must be accessible, strategic, participatory, and concrete. To this end, the plan is structured around four core phases: a preliminary cognitive analysis, active community engagement, strategic and operational planning, and a robust monitoring system informed by KPIs and execution timelines. Drawing from her work at the LINKS Foundation, a research centre affiliated with Politecnico di Torino and Compagnia di San Paolo, De Bonis Patrignani highlighted the integration of advanced digital technologies (including Artificial Intelligence, IoT, and Digital Twins) into heritage management practices. These tools are employed to support conservation, visitor experience, and data-driven decision-making, aligning heritage preservation with innovation and accessibility.
A particularly significant dimension of the Crespi d’Adda project is the involvement of young people. A structured programme combining classroom sessions, site visits, and pre- and post-engagement questionnaires revealed not only a growth in awareness among students but also a set of concrete, imaginative proposals for the site’s future. These included reopening disused spaces, reviving the factory, promoting responsible tourism, and creating opportunities for youth participation in cultural programming. In parallel, targeted participatory workshops were held with stakeholders (residents, property owners, local institutions) applying tools such as the Business Model Canvas and real-time digital polling. These sessions fostered mutual understanding, facilitated the co-design of management strategies, and reinforced the notion of shared stewardship. The experience demonstrates that participatory governance is not merely a methodological choice, but a critical lever for the sustainable and effective management of heritage sites. Engaging local communities, particularly the younger generation, not only increases the legitimacy and impact of planning processes but also ensures a balanced reconciliation of preservation, tourism, and the everyday life of residents. As Crespi d’Adda shows, safeguarding heritage requires not only protecting physical structures, but also cultivating the social fabric that sustains them.
Debate
The discussion effectively synthesised key insights from the presentations, underscoring the critical role of participatory processes in heritage site management. It emphasised that sustainable management strategies must integrate diverse perspectives, including conservation, tourism, and community needs. The conversation highlighted that effective management plans should address the long-term requirements of both heritage sites and local communities. A central theme was the idea that participatory processes are essential for fostering ownership and responsibility among local communities. This sense of belonging is vital for the enduring preservation of cultural heritage, encouraging active engagement and stewardship. Participants acknowledged challenges in implementing participatory frameworks, such as potential conflicts of interest, the necessity for capacity building, and the importance of trust among stakeholders. Training programs and workshops were identified as crucial for equipping communities with the skills needed for effective heritage management. The role of digital tools was also discussed, with technology seen as a means to bridge gaps between communities and heritage authorities, making heritage more accessible and engaging. The debate culminated in a collective call to action for policymakers and cultural institutions to prioritize participatory processes in cultural heritage management. Participants agreed that valuing local knowledge and community engagement is key to creating effective, culturally relevant, and socially equitable management strategies. In conclusion, the final debate reinforced that participatory governance is not just a methodological choice but also a fundamental principle for achieving sustainable and inclusive cultural heritage practices. By fostering collaboration and empowering local communities, heritage management can evolve into a dynamic and responsive process that honours the past while addressing contemporary challenges.
The rercording of the webinar is available HERE.
Click below for speakers’ presentations:
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