The overriding aim of HERILAND is the empowerment of a new generation of academics, policy makers, practitioners, professionals and entrepreneurs. This new generation must devise and guide transdisciplinary, cross-sectoral and mainstreamed planning and design strategies for regenerating European heritage and landscape, foster social inclusiveness, and create socially, economically and environmentally sustainable future landscapes. HERILAND will achieve this by defining, evaluating and anchoring a new, pan-European research and training standard along these lines.
HERILAND sets itself six specific objectives: 1/ to conceive and operationalise a transferable research design with which to investigate at a multi-national level how heritage should be managed and planned in the context of contemporary spatial and societal transformations and related sustainable development goals; 2/ to develop a skill set with innovative analytical concepts, methods and tools, implementing and evaluating them in practice; 3/ to provide researchers and practitioners of spatial heritage planning with an innovative and diverse set of concepts, techniques and skills for promoting and supporting co-creative approaches; 4/ to establish a new European Eerly Stage Researcher (ESR)-training standard in the transdisciplinary area of heritage and spatial planning, based on a solid consortium of key public and private players in this field and embodied in a ‘HERILAND College for Heritage Planning’, which will teach ESRs how to investigate and use heritage approaches and skills, and achieve innovation through practice-based research; 5/ to offer ‘on the job’ training of scientific and complementary professional skills, expose the students to multiple audiences (also in dissemination) and raise students’ future job opportunities; 6/ To guarantee sustainability of the HERILAND College as a European-wide platform for collaborative research and training along the lines set out by HERILAND.