Annotation
• The Culture of European Societies will be viewed through representation of states, nations, regions and cities as a tool and outcome of processes of social adaptation and strategic use of cultural heritage in temporal perspective. This course will analyse them in bottom up direction, claiming that the towns and regions in their diversity produce culture and need to be studied in comparative perspective.
• The course will integrate research results stemming from current projects into teaching programme, and offer students insight into a real project work. It will be built from the results of regional case studies which serve to construct pilots for the REACH project. They were chosen to represent variety of remote regions through their towns, and their cultural heritage.
• We ask how the regions were established from administrative perspective, historically, how they identify, how towns contribute to the identifications. The representations of cultural heritage in cities and towns are explored on the grounds of what will be done in REACH project, what has been offered by associate partners. We will discuss as particular cases also the small towns which will chose students out of their personal experience. They will be studied as a distinctive feature of European settlement and are often per se part of cultural heritage for their architecture, monuments, churches and it’s any other form in public places, as well as for intangible heritage linked to the territory.
• The analysis of the representations of small towns’ heritage (from local history to particular heritage objects, to small-town landscapes), as displayed through museums, local histories, pageants and festivals, heritage trails, the urban space and alike, will be discussed to make clearer the major frames of identities and values to which this heritage is associated. This will open ways for more innovative and participatory re-scaling of small towns’ heritage that will accentuate its distinctively European dimension. The case studies will cover small towns’ innovativeness in relation to new technologies and how they can be used to improve citizens’ engagement and participation in culture. Particular role of national heritage lists, EHL and UNESCO WHL for small settlements. Further, consequences (even economic) of natural disasters (earthquakes, floods, and the like) on the intangible heritage of the small towns will be studied. The case of local handcraft activities will be investigated.