Heritage Requires Citizens’ Knowledge: The COST Place-Making Action and Responsible Research

Abstract

This chapter reflects on responsible science with an eye toward concrete research practice. To this end, we briefly introduce the RRI paradigm (Responsible Research and Innovation) and then highlight seven EU research projects in the context of a transnational COST Action project. This COST Action will investigate how placemaking activities, like public art, civil urban design, and local knowledge production, reshape and reinvent public space, and improve citizens’ involvement in urban planning and urban design, especially in the context of heritage sites. The chapter introduces heritage case studies that either contrast, differentiate, and add to existing knowledge and practices in placemaking through specific initiatives, or enable the establishment of common ground within a wider constellation of societal actors and both, as we see, contribute in different ways to responsible research. We analyze how the four criteria of RRI, namely anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion, and responsiveness are considered and implemented, and the extent to which digital tools are supportive. Obviously, coproduction of knowledge is not sufficient when we call for responsible science in the narrow sense, hence the development of common ground also appears necessary.

Towards Inquiry-Based Learning in Spatial Development and Heritage Conservation: A Workshop at Corviale, Rome

“…These can be grouped within three categories: (1) developing the question, reviewing the state of research, and defining the problem; (2) designing the research plan/clarifying the methods, conducting and evaluating the research, and classifying the results; and (3) evaluating, reflecting and presenting, explaining, and publishing the results [30] (p. 107). Within the IBL discussion on education, these formats are defined as community-based learning [31,32] and aim explicitly for collaboration between academia and local communities to co-produce knowledge-in our case, knowledge about using and living in a building that is a legacy of Modernism.…”