a JPI/CH-Programme Project

Today’s world contains a host of phenomena and situations that constitute threats to objects, sites and practices deemed “heritage” by stakeholders. Yet there is still a dearth of systematic information about this broad palette of threats, a dearth that constitutes a gap in our general knowledge and an obstacle to the purposeful activity of governments and institutions at times of crisis evaluation and intervention or post-crisis reconciliation. The HeAT project aims to address this situation through

• systematic analysis of threat to and through heritage in different geo-cultural locations;
• the production of a sophisticated cross-cultural typology of threat in the form of practical manuals for use, among others, by governmental organs, global organisations, NGOs and peace-keeping forces;
• small and thought-provoking exhibition(s) to popularise academic findings.

The project is collaborative, transnational and interdisciplinary. It brings together scholarly results and insights gained from research into four different localities and situations:

1. the Near East between crisis and development;
2. Poland and memory in times of change;
3. Romania and “knowledge” registers that save/create or destroy/erase objects, sites and practices;
4. Italy and construction that inevitably endangers traces of a past that is considered important.

The research directly addresses the aims of HERITAGE PLUS in that it brings together multidisciplinary European academic projects but at the same time includes collaboration with partners who are stakeholders in the processes of heritage creation and protection. It also exposes the results to non-European review. Its outcomes transfer academic insights and analysis from academia into the public arena by providing reliable resources for numerous stakeholders in situations of threat to heritage as well as raising public awareness of the heritage issues at stake in our global community.