PALIMPSEST takes inspiration from the original meaning of the Greek word παλίμψηστος (palimpsestos, ‘again’ + ‘scrape’), which describes the process of the writing practices over papyrus: existing text was scraped and washed off, the surface re-smoothed, and the new literary material written on the saved material. PALIMPSEST adopts this re-writing perspective and grounds it on a living heritage approach. PALIMPSEST envisages regenerating the lost “sustainability wisdom” underlying the production of heritage landscapes through the activation of co-creation processes involving creative actors, technical stakeholders and civic society. Here architecture, design and art practices will dialogue with place-specific needs and broad systemic challenges to imagine new scenarios and experiment with innovative practices connecting human actions, landscape heritage and sustainability objectives. Such experiments will envision novel Landscape Scenarios aiming at producing dedicated Landscape Services, inspired by the generation of beneficial outcomes on ecosystem functions, which the creative contribution of CCIs will empower. Human practices will arise as relevant agents of a new sustainable palimpsest process. PALIMPSEST will integrate the aforementioned Landscape Services in environmental-sensitive solutions with sustainable finance infrastructures to support the sharing and circulating of positive externalities at different levels among the landscape service actors and communities. PALIMPSEST revolves around three pilots with strong cultural identities and relevant environmental problems: Lodz (PL), a UNESCO city of films fighting the highest air pollution levels in Europe; Milan fringes (IT), traditional agricultural landscapes struggling with unsustainable water use; Jerez de la Frontera (ES), an Andalusian wine landscape and vernacular site challenged by renewable energy production facilities.

The discussion on values is now as pertinent as ever. The vision of VAST is to bring (moral) values to the forefront in the field of advanced digitisation. VAST seeks to study European values across space and time and to exploit the digitised tangible and intangible cultural assets associated with values, in order to support and empower cultural heritage institutions and practitioners, promoting this way Europe’s cultural heritage. Emphasis will be placed in those values considered fundamental for European Union and a unifying axis for all member states, forming sustainable communities and enabling citizens to live well together, such as freedom, democracy, equality, tolerance, dialogue, human dignity, and the rule of law. By providing advanced modelling, methods, techniques and digital tools, VAST will study how the meaning of specific values has been expressed through different narratives and user experiences. We aim to track these values in different mediums across space and time. We will study (1) values in ancient Greek tragedies and how they are appropriated by contemporary theatrical plays and audiences, (2) values in works of seventeenth-century natural philosophy and how they are received by experts in science museums and museum visitors and (3) values in folktales across countries and time periods, through a cross cultural perspective and how these values are received by storytelling experts in fairytale museums and museum visitors. VAST will create a collaborative platform to assist scholars, researchers, artists, museums and educators to curate, re-use and re-purpose this material, re-visiting moral values in the context of modern society. We will combine a storytelling platform with crowdsourcing, by providing a storytelling application that will allow the users to create their own stories and remix the content together with pre-selected tags of values, supporting the continuous consolidation of assets.