Heritage Conservation and Community Empowerment. Tools for Living Labs

With the scope of placing communities-led initiatives at the centre of HUL approach, this chapter introduces concepts, methodologies, and tools in a multi-disciplinary way, to provide sound theoretical references, for building a coherent operational framework in the field of civic engagement tools, and experimenting HUL tools in real community-led initiatives. It is only a first effort for assisting planners, decision-makers, promoters, and local development facilitators to move from theory to practice, also through a living lab approach. Only through real-life experiments, we consider possible to develop local capacity for transforming the Underground Built Heritage (UBH) into "a powerful economic, social and environmental catalyst for regeneration, sustainable development, economic growth and improvement of people's well-being and living environments". By using HUL as starting point, it leads the reader to examine the potential connections between heritage and sustainability, and to initiate cutting-edge approaches for empowering communities and helping them to collaborate in an integrated heritage-led development. Particularly, this chapter defines an initial taxonomy for the civic engagement operational tools, by outlining stakeholders and community (who), their empowerment process (what), and the sustainability challenge (why). Finally, it introduces an innovative approach based on the development of living labs (how), for supporting local communities and integrating UBH values and their vulnerability status into a wider framework of local development.