RE:MUSE - Religious Meanings and Musealisation with community-led heritage labs

RE:MUSE explores how the regeneration of religiously rooted common spaces can promote inclusion, social interaction, and territorial sustainability across Mediterranean contexts. Building on few pilot initiatives (Heritage Labs), the project extends to diverse cities where sacred architecture and heritage objects remain embedded in the urban fabric, but are increasingly underused, dislocated, or contested.

RE:MUSE understands common spaces not only as physical environments but as social and symbolic infrastructures that support everyday encounters, community resilience, and local identity. Religious heritage - such as chapels, convents, shrines, processional routes, and ritual artefacts - offers a unique and underexplored opportunity to revalue these spaces as inclusive, safe, and aesthetically rich arenas for civic life.

RE:MUSE establishes Community Heritage Labs in each pilot site, where local residents, designers, cultural practitioners, and policy-makers collaboratively reimagine disused or fragmented religious spaces. The project tests site-specific strategies (reversible musealisation, hybrid rituals, participatory design, and memory mapping) to reactivate these spaces as vibrant, multifunctional commons that balance heritage conservation with contemporary use. By doing so, RE:MUSE contributes to a better understanding of how built heritage, spatial design, and aesthetic character influence human behaviour, especially social cohesion, recognition, civic participation, inclusion, and resilience. It proposes practical, community-led methods to regenerate symbolic and material heritage without erasing its lived, contested, or spiritual dimensions.

Finally, the project provides a transnational, transferable model for rethinking common spaces in line with NEB values, while supporting local development pathways grounded in culture, memory, and shared identity.