STEPS Pilot Project on Cultural Heritage and Diverse Societies implemented by Lisbon and Rijeka

The co-joint project of the EU and the Council of Europe "STEPS" will be piloted in Lisbon, Portugal and Rijeka, Croatia to feed into the European Year of Cultural Heritage and Rijeka 2020 European Capital of Culture.

This article originally appeared on <link https: ec.europa.eu culture news>ec.europa.eu/culture/news/20170606-cultural-heritage-diversity-project_en. This is a re-post.

STEPS is a EU-CoE Joint pilot project which aims to build and strengthen community cohesion and to promote trust, dialogue and mutual understanding across diverse societies, through the participatory heritage-based action plans. The cities of Lisbon (Portugal) and Rijeka (Croatia) have been chosen to pilot the process through a call open to all the cities of the Intercultural Cities network from the EU28 countries.

The cities are now proceeding to create and train a group of citizens that will be in charge of mapping the diverse cultural heritage of a neighbourhood. This is being done using the Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (Faro Convention, 2005) and the intercultural integration principles as a basis.

Rijeka and Lisbon will support the ICC Team to design a methodology and tools that will enable a wide range of cities across Europe to develop community cohesion strategies using cultural heritage as a resource. In particular, the two cities will mobilise a local team (involving NGOs, schools, universities, cultural Institutions, etc.) that will receive training on participatory heritage mapping, as well as on Asset-Based Community Development. Furthermore, they will design an action plan to develop and test a methodological framework for the use of heritage at the local level. 

STePS will feed into the European Year for Cultural Heritage and Rijeka 2020 European Capital of Culture.

<link https: ec.europa.eu culture news external-link-new-window external link to article on european website in new>Source [retrieved 23 June 2017]