Heritage in Depopulated European Areas

The project deals with the decline of the European periphery resulting in the loss of intangible culture, abandonment and the degradation of buildings and landscapes, and people who struggle to give meaning to their lives in depopulated areas. The primary goal of the project is to explore how fragile local communities resist the consequences of demographic change. The basic theoretical point of departure is that individual and collective remembering of the past is inevitably complex and involves a process of conciliation, remembrance, and oblivion-ghosts of the past inevitably impact present day values. We will explore how depopulated communities and actors make sense of new realities and power structures in terms of policy, regulation and economic resources, and how these influence both actions and interactions. We will also focus on the stimuli of repurposing processes and the ensuing effects, consequences and potential of abandoned heritage. The main themes of the research will be the relationship between demographic trends and intangible cultural heritage in regions threatened by depopulation, with special emphasis on its sustainability. In recent decades, the tendencies of the global and international community and national and local initiatives have increasingly shifted from an exclusive interest in traditional ecological knowledge, folklore, oral tradition, language, etc. to an interest in safeguarding the so-called intangible cultural heritage. For intangible cultural heritage, its emphasis on bearers in the form of local or regional communities, intergenerational transmission and the link to the location are absolutely crucial; depopulation is naturally a much more risky factor for them than for natural or material heritage. The aim of the research is to provide an emic perspective of the local population, identifying the circumstances that, in some of the locations, lead to improvements in demographical stability. The potential value of the project is a change in the behaviour of local, regional and national stakeholders in relation to the threats of depopulation upon cultural heritage. The main desired change is that these stakeholders take into account local voices, those of local actors in depopulated communities. The stakeholders should communicate with local communities and other interested parties in preparing territorially specific cultural policies in order to face the threat of depopulation. The involvement of academia and different associated partners in the project will guarantee that the project will have an important societal influence on these depopulated European areas, the Hradec Kr\álov\é region in the Czech Republic, the Shetland Islands and Kaunas in Lithuania.