The Department of Architecture, Land and Environmental Sciences of Neapolis University Pafos is a Research Partner in the project HOMEE– “Heritage Opportunities/threats within Mega-Events in Europe: Changing environments, new challenges and possible solutions for preservation in mega-events embedded in heritage-rich European cities”, funded under a JPI Cultural Heritage- Heritage in Changing Environments call. The Project Leader is the Politecnico di Milano – Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (Italy) and the other Research Partners are the University of Hull – Culture, Place and Policy Institute (UK) and the International Cultural Center (Poland). The project’s fifteen Associate Partners include governmental bodies, cultural organisations and academic institutions all over Europe.
The HOMEE project conducted five in-depth retrospective case studies (Genoa 2004 ECoC, Milan EXPO 2015, Wrocław 2016 ECoC, Hull UK City of Culture 2017 and Pafos 2017 ECoC), and studied the Matera 2019 ECoC as it unfolded, in order to understand the issues involved in introducing mega-events to the historic urban fabrics of European cities. It brought together leading research centres working in the fields of cultural heritage preservation and mega-event planning, and collaborated with key institutions and policy officers who have already had or will have direct responsibility for planning and implementing mega-events in Europe. Its final outcome is the generation of guidance and policy recommendations (the HOMEE Charter) to support heritage preservation policy and mega-event planning in future host-cities in Europe, to assist multiple actors when bidding for, planning and hosting mega-events in sensitive historic contexts in the future.
The three-year-long project is funded by the European Union through the JPI Cultural Heritage- Heritage in Changing Environments call with a total amount of 552,497.92 EUR. It started in 2018 and produced the Charter for Mega-events in Heritage-rich Cities in 2021. Since then, the Charter has been widely presented in a number of events, endorsed by organisations such as Europa Nostra, the European Voice of Civil Society Committed to Cultural Heritage and the Organization of World Heritage Cities (OWHC). In 2022, the HOMEE Research Project was one of the recipients of the European Heritage Awards / Europa Nostra Awards in the Research category. More information can be found here.
Researchers: Dr. Julia Georgi, Dr. Evanthia Dova, Ms. Angeliki Sivitanidou, Dr. Natia Anastasi
