Network in Action to preserve and enhance cultural heritage and identity
Every day, the local administrators of the cross-border area face the real risk of closing museums/cultural sites, mainly smaller and peripheral ones. They know this means a loss of cultural roots and identity for their communities. Depopulation, stores and social services going out of business and the deterioration of historical and valuable buildings compromise the area’s extraordinary landscape. Local administrators must deal daily with people looking for work, not looking to lose or reinvent their jobs, including resident immigrants, because these people want to live where they recognise/discover their cultural identity. These two complex challenges may represent an opportunity for each another. The RACINE project tries to capitalise on many successful local experiences, by networking them and taking them as a method for cultural and socio-economic development policies, so that they will become factors of sustainable and intelligent growth. It puts in place innovative co-planning “Local pacts for the development of cultural identity ecosystems” by which museums/places of culture and the community share creative objectives, actions and resources to obtain mutual advantages based on cultural and geographical identity. It improves the accessibility to places of culture for the sake of inclusiveness and the removal of physical, cognitive and cultural disadvantages. It assigns new community functions and services to cultural sites, committed, in turn, to their communities for the mutual assumption of social responsibility.