Heritage and Community. Two Experiences of Heritage Education, a Research to Create a Sense of Community Belonging

The article describes two projects for the enhancement of urban cultural heritage in Italy, including a UNESCO site, based on a participatory research process that has made it possible to overcome the obstacles to access to cultural heritage through heritage education. In particular, the strategy adopted was to trigger a process of co-construction of knowledge based on mixed method research. Starting from cooperative work between a team with different skills and communities. Practitioners and academic researchers investigated and developed useful tools to collect autobiographical content, on the basis of which research was then carried out in the historical, artistic and visual fields for the participatory creation of tools for the fruition and interpretation of heritage.