UNI-HERITAGE. European Postwar Universities Heritage: A Network for Open Regeneration

Abstract

[EN] This research project aims at the regeneration of European universities created in the 60s and 70s through a systematic, circular, open and integrated process of their cultural heritage. At present, these campuses represent both a tangible and intangible heritage (architecture, urban planning, landscape… but also pedagogy, specialization areas, educational policies) whose adaptation to contemporaneity involves issues related to environmental sustainability, to the institution organizational capacities, and to its social implication. Specifically, this proposal aims at lines of action that would offer strategies such as the renewal of infrastructures and services and the adaptive reuse of the built heritage (space recycling, sustainability), the updating of the physical teaching spaces to the new teaching methodologies (European Higher Education Area), and the campus social consideration as a comfortable, conflict-safe and cultural-integrated area. Beyond the simple conservation, restoration and physical rehabilitation of a set of buildings and a university fabric, this project has the added value of an integrated or interdisciplinary action model that seeks four aspects of innovation: the organizational, the formative, the technological and social. This research proposes to ensure a longer life cycle for the heritage through its participation as a resource in the dynamics of regeneration of the universities.