Promoting Underground Cultural Heritage through Sustainable Practices: A Design Thinking and Audience Development Approach

Abstract

This paper examines two sustainability practices in complex and uncertain processes such as the case of the promotion of the underground built heritage (UBH). Convinced that the sustainability of a UBH valorisation project is only guaranteed by its survival over time, the authors argue that the decision-making process must be bottom-up, i.e., promoted and developed by the actors of the territory—communities and stakeholders—who share a strategic objective. They assume that they have already defined the value of the asset to be enhanced through heritage interpretation. At this point, two practices are proposed. The first is aimed at enhancing the UBH for the territory itself and involves the application of design thinking; the second, in the interest of the economic agents, is aimed at promoting the territory externally—promoting sustainable tourism—through the application of audience development. The work is a theoretical proposal and has not yet been tested in the field. The authors reserve the right to test it in a subsequent case study.