Welcome to our show Cooperation Cult of the Carinthian Koroska.
Today I am here with Giuseppe Bace and we are talking about a cooperation project
that has been going on for a few years and where there is new information
in the area of EU cooperation projects. We will design this interview in English
and I am looking forward to Giuseppe.
Hello, we are here now today and having our new radio broadcast. I'm here with Giuseppe Bace.
He is chair of cost action underground for value. Dear Giuseppe, thank you for making all this
possible for having a great conference here in Mendorizio, Switzerland. You are a researcher
at the Institute of Studies in the Mediterranean at the Italian National Research Council.
Why did you start with this project and what was the story about the beginning of all this
cost action?
Thank you, Sabrina. It's a long story. At the beginning I didn't imagine to apply for
a cost action that is a networking action but I was working for preparing a European project
in the Horizon 2020 framework. For 2016 I started to organize the network, finding the right people
and the right place and we applied in 2017 for the first time to Horizon 2020 and it was almost
successful but we were in reserve list with the first and reserve list and we weren't funded.
So waiting for the new horizon I decided to apply for the cost action and also in that case we
were well positioned but we didn't win. So I continued with another Horizon implementing
the network of people, knowing new people and also clarifying my mind about what I want to do
with this type of research. So finally we didn't succeed again with Horizon 2020 but
we arrived to apply again for cost action and we won it finally. Started our story in April 2019
and it was very exciting. The action, because now I am telling you about the action, is
speaking about underground built heritage from one side, so
places, sites and also histories but it speaks also about people, communities. How communities
living in these places can benefit of this heritage, they can make value of this heritage
and making value of this heritage they can preserve and improve the sites.
Normally when we look at this heritage we see their objective value for the world
and then we don't look at the people living there. If they are able to maintain the site,
to conserve it, if they are only there because you know you have a characteristic place for
tourists, tourists and maybe they are not part of the process of the benefit of the place.
The idea is to move the benefit to the community, to develop communities thanks to the heritage.
And for doing that we want to give power to communities, to decide and construct new meanings.
For this we need to have a network, not only planners, not only experts about heritage but
also informaticians, biologists, experts of tourism, experts also in decision making,
in legal problems. So we create a very large network of people that became bigger and bigger.
Now we have 30 countries plus two countries from Central and South America. About 300 people more
or less connected to the action in different ways and we arrive almost at the end of the third year
with a huge number of initiatives ongoing, complicated to manage I must say because
the cost action is a system of networking, it's not a project of research. So we are not paid for
our research but we are paying for having meetings, traveling, for doing some small
research, small grants for example for broadcasting but the real cost of the research is not paid.
So you need to convince people to do research in a voluntary way, you need to
create a momentum, you need to attract people to this, to create ambitions in them that can be
through publication but also through having an impact on the society. I'm feeling part of something
bigger and bigger so you need since the first moment to share, share experience, share knowledge
to give to the others, not only to take from this network benefits but also to give what you know
and spend time and action share us this role to maintain high the interest, to increase always
the ambitions. After three years I can say that we arrived to have an enormous quantity of
ambitions and a big number of activities running. We have five working groups,
now also we are creating different teams for running different outcomes because we are in
the way to create a toolbox for the promoters for creating an approach that is more related
to sustainability and more open to communities to not empower people.
This is something that we are running in these days in Mendrisio. Very nice the whole story how
it started so as your researcher I mean is it for you something that you do additionally to your job
or is it like you meet the people somewhere and think okay they can fit they can not fit and you
know like how do you get all these people from these different disciplines together?
Is it your personal interest or is it because you are well connected all over Europe?
First I was lucky because my institute is already a multidisciplinary institute
so it helps a lot this because I can ask for contacts to colleagues international contacts so
I use the institute contacts in order to start the first network. Second I was at the time I
not I wasn't living in my institute basically I was working at the university of Ghent in
Flanders in Belgium and I had other international contacts also in that team I was working for
transition studies with the Dutch Institute Drift in Rotterdam there were many connections outside
my specific field of interest that was planning. And I was also already doing some experiments in
another sector not in the cultural heritage but in the sustainable mobility sector so I used the
methodology and also the approaches especially from the informatics point of view so platforms
algorithms also tools for clustering for example user customers were already more or less in my
background. You mentioned that over 30 countries are involved in this action and they come together
at different places you have different meetings now we are in Midrissio and so I suppose every
half a year or so you have somewhere a meeting and while these meetings are during that time
there you share some work which people have done during this time I guess they are really tremendous
So I already have heard about different books which are published what else do you have as
different outcomes of your project? Basically we were not 100% lucky during these last years because
we got a difficult time for traveling because of COVID-19 and for about one year we couldn't
travel and meet so we worked a lot online and that helped to create much more confidence in
in online meetings working much more on the media on virtual interactions but from the other side
we miss you know the physical contact of people and also we miss going on site visiting places
and so balancing I say now we learned a lot about zoom meetings and so on but now we are trying to
recover the the pleasure to work together face to face and also having lunch continuing working
together coffee breaks working together in the evening also we continue working so it's much more
than only meeting for a few hours online but we are arrived now at the sixth meeting and we had
meetings with also with 70 people in Naples in the beginning but they were not so let's say
good environment as it today because working together year after year and sharing contents
was also very important to understand each other also understand the general vision of the cost
action I can say now after three years that now we have a common vision we put together elements
and now we are able to run faster than before because definition are more or less agreed
the way of thinking are closer
this is very important in order to achieve results and to produce
outcomes and we plan to have a lot of outcomes and the first outcome was an end book
both in ebook and in paper version then we had another outcome that was the
touristic platform of an underground built heritage that is u4v.org and everybody can
introduce his underground heritage site on the map writing a description giving information also
storing their videos pictures linked to youtube documents books doesn't matter also it can be
used also as a travel rating so you can read the site if you visit it you can make comments
that they go directly to the responsible of the site so also questions or requests special request
and that is important but it was not enough we call that element for tourists
explore it and then we are working now in these days to this toolbox that is the so-called module
promoted finally I didn't mention that during these years we are running a training school
the first one was in Naples just before covid in February 2020 then we have a second training
school during really difficult hard covid times in September in Murcia September 2021
and fastly we created third training school last February 2022 for not losing you know our agenda
in Cyprus and also was very difficult because many controls for covid many people at the last
minute they couldn't travel because the covid or other problems difficult last training school will
be in Malta next February and all these training school helped us to create an e-learning platform
this is another outcome of the course section so we have a lot of a lecture that they are
stored in video on this e-learning platform with documents with references written test and can
help people to do a sort of self-learning approach to these problems at the end all these they could
become only one association at the end of the project at the fourth year with
I would like to say this platform of learning it explore it and promote it
active for a long time implemented continuously also by the users and just to understand for
also the listeners this platform is for if you want yourself to be trained in
underground values or is it if you want to be yourself trained in tourism or in which
field can you train yourself if you want to go to a training that's a good question
very good question because basically what we train and what type of let's say
the competencies we train is the competencies of somebody going on the community in the community
for facilitating a process of empowering of the community and transitioning a normally state
approach for heritage to a more bottom-up approach to valorize the heritage and so
we could say the new professionalities that came out of the training school are facilitators
of this kind of processes but you're right we have a lot of other different competencies that can
come out of the training school also because people in the training school are not students
many of them are already professionals others they are they are doing their phd others they are in
the master so we have many different is also in in the studies done of these people they are a very
impressive mix also in the nationalities normally every year we support the 30 students with a grant
the call is going to be published middle of november and then we start recruiting the
students and also the trainers and i hope it will be a successful last training school
so we're gonna have all the information on our website that you can also apply for this if you're
interested in becoming one of these transition managers yeah this was now the first part i
gonna make a little bit of music and we hear each other in the second part of our radio broadcast
so
yeah we are here back again and our radio broadcast and with me is Giuseppe Pace we talk about
his project underground for value he's a chair of this cost action Giuseppe you have your personal
interest in underground buildings how did it come for me was enough natural because i'm native
of naples and naples has two type of cities the surface city and also the underground city is a
part of the city it was from one side used as a cave and another part of the city was submerged by
by the construction of the subsequent period so you can find the greek city underground the roman
city underground and you find the aqueducts you find every age is representative all the story of
naples is stratified underground so for me was enough uh natural thinking about underground as a
value as an heritage and in addition in the last 15 years has been a big transformation in valorizing
this heritage especially in a neighbor that is the rione sanita where they use this resource the
underground in order to transform the neighbor from also from the point of view of the external
image and because this neighbor was one of the most deprived neighbor in naples and it was one
of the most dangerous also in terms of criminality and a priest came there and start the process
we are speaking about 2002 of transforming the neighbor with culture and he was also the one that
was managing this this place this priest was managing a catacomb it was the first catacomb
and they start also to manage another catacomb so he create a system thanks also to this cultural
transition and now the neighbor is not anymore so isolated so discriminated but has become a place
for tourists for visiting thanks also to this process done with underground resources
for me as neapolitan was enough natural starting also an analysis what was right in this process
what could be done better and how to help them and then transform it to have an upscaling of this
story from the local to the general so i'm very very happy to have started it it's only the
beginning and i'm collaborating with also with the municipality now and with other institutions
because naples is very rich in underground heritage and so it's not only this neighbor
but all the city has impressive potential so and naples is the city where you grew up
yes i was born there and i left naples 20 more or less 22 years ago now i'm back to naples
since more or less the beginning of the project so i'm in naples for also for the project but
also because sometimes it's time to go back to your hometown yeah very nice that you now talked
about all these underground valleys of naples was it like if you were a child were you already
going to these underground tunnels or is it accessible for people absolutely yes but i must
confess my memories of a child i visited the catacombs i visited the fontanella cemetery
when i was a child but i remember dark places dark places without any kind of
let's say support for visiting especially fontanella was a place for devotion people
were going there for praying on the contrary the catacombs some general catacombs were places
really that you could run in the conicula without having idea what you were visiting
now these places are really outstanding places for tourists with the wonderful guides with any
type of information right lightning safety measures anything is done in the proper way and
also i think it is a also it gives a sense of excitement to see how they change in 20 years
these places yes and you also gonna be now next year at the end of the project you said
that you might build the association that takes over all the all the work which was done here
and will continue during this period after the project so what would be your wishes for the
future what would be yeah your if you could could wish something for this project to go on
my wish is at what we have done during these four years will survive in a more than survive
they will be implemented use it also transformed maybe but they will help communities to use this
very very fantastic heritage our imaginary is underground you know it's the obscure part of
and giving lights to this part and giving power to the communities to use it to use it but also to
to identify themselves with this part of the this their stratification of history for me
is is enough i'm not asking for a special thing for myself but i think it's very important that
people understand the value of what they have under them just just a few meters under
you have a treasure and sometimes you don't know and you waste it only giving them the idea that
they can use it this will be a very good success for me and i hope that somebody will take you
know the responsibility or some organization will take the responsibility for continuing it
in a stable way thank you for your work what you already done and yeah we will we will see what's
going on with this project but also with other projects in the european level
we gonna have some music and then continue with our conversation
so
do
welcome in our third part of our radio broadcast so i'm here with josepe bach he is the chair of
the cost action and we talk about this underground for value project yeah we heard a bit about where
he grew up that underground value was also important for him in naples now we want to go
a little bit into all these case studies what they discovered all over europe and yeah please
tell us about where these case studies are and what connects them or why did you just choose
these case studies or how is the process how one underground heritage building can become a case
study in your project this cost action is not about theory you see yes we also we try to define
make new definitions we try to implement the methodologies but is about real world real stories
real people also we work by case studies as you said so we have real case studies not let's say
they told stories but stories in in progress so every year we decided to have four case studies
at the beginning when i draft the project i was thinking that okay one year we study the case
studies we send somebody on site and we do an assessment of the case studies and then maybe
we publish a book and that's finished but then we discovered that this was much more than that
so we changed mind and the first year case studies were more or less pre-organized because i had to
put in my proposal so i took naples as a case study then we had gorema in kappadochia and then
we have a postumia in in slovenia and la union in spain murcia region this case studies were
pre-defined so were enough special because we already have the local host in the team
they were our case studies but also in that case these case studies were transformed in the
interaction with the local community we changed the goals we understand that is a longer process
that is only a simple assessment and we decided that okay every year we have four case studies
but they are not going to finish at the end of the year they are continuing so we are starting
processes and we don't know when this process will finish so somebody of the local host will
continue the case so now we have still 12 case studies more or less open we use a serious book
on the case studies not for telling you how successful we were in our
support but also to orient local communities to give to the local communities information
so one of the first book for example is about la union it was a mining place
3000 years old it was the main mining place of the roman empire so this book was written in spanish
it's just published and susana martinez rodriguez she's the editor of the book just published in
spanish the intention was not the global heritage community but was just focused on
local muscian region community and letting them know the situation the case what was okay it was
wrong and now we are going also to publish a book in italian about a case study in naples because
then we specialize in case studies we plan also a book in this case for a successful case that is
goreme in capadocia and when it's successful the local editor decides to publish it in english
because it's not anymore addressed to the local community we have another book for camerano in
market region it is a wonderful underground city from the middle age impressive case and a wonderful
place to visit and so we are doing a lot of cases now we are running the cases and we need new cases
because as i told you before we are building a toolbox for promote underground sites so if
there are people interested in promoting their sites they can contact us also we have four case
studies for the last year and we are still not decided about the cases if they are interested
trying to have our support interacting with us they can contact us and they can say we are
interested we want to try this experience we don't guarantee it's a living lab we can start with them
we can support create the goal supporting you in establishing the stakeholders a transition of rena
and also the agenda but then is not us that does the process is the community so if if i pause the
case if somebody is interested nobody knows we are always open to support them and also if we already
found our four case studies for 2022 2023 we are testing our toolbox and so they can welcome
you test the toolbox through their their experience their site so i think we have a lot of options
for people coming to us from outside so it's not a closed network it's a very open
and also stay tuned on our website that is underground for value.au
because we have a lot of calls also for
virtual mission grants and many other type of missions that you can do also on site and having
experiences that i must confess are unique because underground is is something very unique and to
close about underground we went a few months ago to have our meeting in paris the island of paris
and in greece and the cyclists where we have a case study is a case study about the old white marble
quarries of paris there were the quarries were the best quality of white marble of the
ancient time were carved and we visited one of these tunnels
and we went down in these tunnels and the end the last room was totally covered of graffiti with the
signature of people coming from germany from england from france from italy from the 17th
century to the end of 18th century and it was so exciting imaging that 200 years after them we
went there in the last room before the the vein of the white marble the marvelous white marble of
paris was exhausted so a wonderful experience what you shared with us now what you experienced
during this project i think yeah you have now visited a lot of different places a lot of
underground treasures what you saw and not you but also the team who is in this project cost action
and i think that you really yeah have done a very good work and of course now you shared
the also the thing for other people who want to be integrated in the project that is not a closed
one that it's open for people who are interested in underground underground projects in underground
treasures because i think in every country there are so many underground treasures it is i think
a topic where we could talk more and more about it and what would be your next explorations or
where would you like to know more about different underground values is it a specific site you have
in mind or do you say i now know a lot about these underground treasures i want to go in a
different direction we never know enough about underground treasures i always love exploring if
i go on vacation somewhere i always search for some underground place to visit also if it's only
old industrial area also a bunker somewhere for example we have all previous is the soviet union
a lot of places with bunkers with the tunnels also they are very interesting but it's clear
for me most exciting places are the places of the antiquity those places they have a thousand years
of age where you find our origins old origins we are old people europeans are very old population
and that's the most exciting for me absolutely and i love stories so i listen stories i love
people tell me the story so when i go on this site also the let's say the anthropological experience
is very important i love listening their narratives about when they were young about this place how
they lived it if they visited or not or so that is something that excites me but if i have to say
i want to go to that specific site at the moment i couldn't say because we have so many sites on
the map now and i wouldn't say this is better and the others are not so exciting i will go to visit
as much as possible great so and for the project the next project a possibility to
to go to would be martha for the training course and i think are the others also planned yet or
not yet and now we are deciding about the next meeting we have two options i don't want to
uh announce one but two options one is from old age place very very old the other one is
let's say very very new is about this tunneling for controlling cities and for escaping
in a secret way from the big city so these are the let's say the options but it's not decided
and i cannot tell you much more but i can tell you that the final conference will be in brussels
we will present the the final handbook with the best that we have produced and we are going to
invite peon institutions international institutions and trying to take the momentum creating position
papers in order to to help them to to go further in the sustainability challenge at least yeah and
as you're now mentioning again eu and european projects and programs are you already working
on new project is it for you worth it going through this whole process to to get all these
researchers and interdisciplinaries together to have them the fundings for implementing new ones
now it's true that we are discussing about participating to a new call but i'm all in
time very focused in finalizing this cost action i must confess is is very important to give the
right timing to a good finalization of all this work we have so many outcomes to
to care about so i'm i don't feel at the moment ready for starting a the preparation of a new
proposal it takes one year more or less of preparing a good project we would like we start discussing
we are waiting for the right program something that is close to what we are doing
and then the only things that i have really i'm sure of is the network i have a lot of
wonderful people committed so we will organize for sure a wonderful network
i don't know at the moment what type of proposal will be thank you for your time into talking with
me about all these different aspects of underground for value and that you are ahead of it and you
get together all the different interests because i think this is also not very easy to really have
all these interdisciplinary groups and all these interests bringing to a point where you say okay
this is our road where we should go to and that people should kind of follow or also to find new
ways like you said before because it's not just to follow the way what you said in your proposal
it's also sometimes on the way you just see okay maybe it's better to take the other road and that
you're also flexible in your position and say it's not that we're gonna go for this old thing what
we proposed it's we we take the new one this is also one thing which uh yeah i think it's very
useful to be a leader in in this way i don't see other other ways so it's my way to be leader
in research and as you say the we have no one straight direction we we experiment we see that
there are things they are not running in the proper way we try to adapt ourselves our programs to this
change also to learn from the others and being a network we have a lot of voices
and i think it would be a waste of time not listening all voices
thank you for giving so much room for all these different voices and that now you
summarized all this together in our radio broadcast thank you thank you sabrina
so
ah
so
wow
so
uh