About the INHERIT project
The overall vision of INHERIT is to develop and demonstrate next-generation solutions to improve historic buildings’ energy and resource consumption, climate resilience, accessibility, and inclusiveness. The project will provide 11 services for the management of such buildings, driven by information and communication technologies (ICTs), and associated with social and behavioural practices.
8 European cultural heritage sites, located in Croatia, France, Greece, Latvia, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and Türkiye, will serve as testbeds for the solutions. The variety of locations and buildings will help verify the scalability and exploitation of INHERIT’s results in different socioeconomic, cultural, and political contexts.
INHERIT’s ambition is to have a strong social impact too: the project will create a capacity-building programme for cultural heritage operators and stakeholders, including citizens.
We deal with five key challenges
Sustainability, inclusiveness, and stakeholder engagement
Making built heritage inclusive and socially sustainable is complex and may raise objections from conservation authorities. Stakeholder engagement is crucial to identify renovation and management pathways for historic buildings.
Energy and resource-efficiency
Buildings need targeted policies for energy efficiency and integration of renewable energies. Adaptive reuse of historic buildings can be a driver for the circular economy, but decision-makers lack knowledge of the environmental benefits and tools. A better understanding of the opportunities for the reuse of building materials and of the potential for energy efficiency is necessary.
Climate change resilience
Climate change is harming our cultural heritage. Greater awareness is needed about the vulnerability of heritage buildings and the increasing threats posed by climate change to European heritage. Mapping the risks at a regional and local level is fundamental to get an overview of how historic buildings have been and will be affected.
Smartification and data exchange
To meet the management and renovation needs of cultural heritage sites, communications between different stakeholders, decision-making, and monitoring must be facilitated. Best practices, data and results need to be easily sharable across cities and countries.
Digital technology use for cultural heritage buildings management
To maximise and optimise the management of cultural heritage buildings, new technologies can come to the rescue. A systematic methodology, accompanied by information and communication technologies (ICTs) will improve data collection and sharing, preservation and monitoring of the buildings, as well as their design and renovation.
We use an integrated methodology
INHERIT uses an integrated methodology based on the reciprocal interaction among ‘social’, ‘scientific’, and ‘technological’ processes.
Social layer
Approaches from social sciences and humanities contribute to the project’s ambition to produce research evidence and ‘real world’ impact. INHERIT will use a multi-stakeholder approach to identify interests and to enable innovation partnerships. A co-creation process will be developed, based on social labs and multi-stakeholder forums, to identify issues and challenges of 8 pilots’ renovation plans and to extract their social value based on the citizens’ feedback.
Scientific layer
Through a digitally based technical inspection, INHERIT will set up a European common approach to achieve a balance between sustainable building performance and heritage values preservation.
The INHERIT Assessment & Monitoring Framework will evaluate the cultural heritage sites across 4 key pillars:
- Energy performance & indoor environmental quality
- Resource efficiency, circularity, and life cycle cost
- Resilience to climate and human-made hazards
- Accessibility, inclusiveness, openness and socioeconomic sustainability.
The INHERIT Hub will follow a design to include affordable and viable solutions to renovate heritage buildings cost-effectively and comprehensively.
The scientific layer will be complemented by AI-based algorithms, big data analytics, Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods, and robustness analysis frameworks.
Technological layer
INHERIT will use existing technological solutions and tools to provide 11 innovative services in 4 key areas:
- Data collection and sharing
- Design and renovation
- Monitoring, operation, and management
- Preservation and maintenance
INHERIT will combine models and algorithms with Heritage Building Information Models (H-BIM), Digital Twins, Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR) technologies, and Data Space connectors. A Smartification & Data Exchange Platform, and a wide range of decision support services will be provided too.
We come from all over Europe
INHERIT’s consortium gathers 18 partners from 13 European countries, involved in the project at various levels, covering the social, technological, and scientific layer, as well as the communication, dissemination and exploitation activities.