What is the relationship between young people and the history, places and cultural heritage of the city they live in today? Do they feel that this heritage belongs to them too?
These are particularly important questions at a time when engaging younger generations in discovering and valuing cultural heritage requires new languages, new tools and new forms of participation. Modern technologies can help bring history closer to young people and make it more engaging, but the challenge goes beyond simply transmitting knowledge: it is about a sense of belonging, inclusion, active citizenship and the opportunity for young people to make a concrete contribution to the cultural and civic life of their communities.
We decided to meet Angela Gentile, Councillor for Youth Policies of the Municipality of Portici, the city where EDU lab, the Italian partner of the Civic Heritage Quest project, operates. We wanted to share with her the objectives and what we aim to develop through the project, but above all to engage in a broader discussion with her: what role institutions can play in making cultural heritage a living, accessible and meaningful experience for younger generations.
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How would you describe the relationship between young people and the cultural heritage of their city today? Do young people feel that the history and heritage of the place where they live belong to them?
I believe we are lucky in Portici. We live in a city where cultural heritage is not something distant or confined to a museum: it is part of the urban fabric, our identity and our everyday lives. Everything tells the story of how important the city has been in the history of our country. But how much of this do our young people perceive as their own heritage? It is not enough for a young person to know that a particular building or monument is important. They need to understand that this history also speaks to them. Heritage should not be perceived as something that belongs to the past, but as a tool through which young people can understand the present and imagine the future of their city.
Do you think traditional methods of transmitting a city’s cultural heritage are still effective for young people, or do we need to experiment with new, more engaging approaches?
Traditional methods should absolutely not be abandoned. A guided tour, a book, a lesson or a museum continue to have enormous value. But we need to complement these tools with new languages. We need to move from “come and see” to “come and experience, tell and transform”. How? By imagining experiences in which young people themselves can step into history through innovative tools and approaches designed for young people and with young people. The challenge is to create a dialogue between memory and the present: not simply to preserve heritage, but to make it alive again. This could help recover a creative dimension and could also open up new employment opportunities.
What role can the new technologies, storytelling and interactive experiences proposed by the Civic Heritage Quest project play in helping young people discover and experience the places where they live?
A very important one, especially because they can shorten the distance between a young person and a place. A digital map, a video, an interactive challenge can bring to light a story that we may pass every day without knowing it. But there is an aspect that I consider even more important: we must allow young people to be protagonists. A young person who creates a video about their city, interviews an older person, reconstructs a memory or tells the story of a monument through social media is doing more than producing content: they are building a relationship with their territory. Technology, therefore, can act as a bridge between the past and the present.
The Civic Heritage Quest project encourages young people to discover the history of the place where they live. Do you think this can help them develop a stronger sense of belonging and responsibility towards their community?
Absolutely! I believe that knowing the history of the place where we live means, first and foremost, understanding better who we are and where we come from. A territory is not simply a physical space: it is made up of people, memories, traditions, transformations and stories that continue to shape our present. For young people, rediscovering this history can be a way of feeling part of something bigger. When we understand the value of a place, we are also more likely to take care of it. Knowledge can therefore become responsibility: knowing our territory, its symbolic places, the people who built it and the difficulties it has experienced can transform simply living in a city into a desire to contribute to improving it.
In your view, what is the relationship between cultural heritage and active citizenship? Can knowing and understanding the past influence the way young people participate in the present?
The relationship is very close. Cultural heritage should not be considered merely something to preserve, but a resource through which to build citizenship. Active citizenship begins when a person stops seeing themselves as simply a recipient of decisions and understands that they can contribute to making, discussing and shaping them. Cultural heritage can be an extraordinary starting point for this process: taking care of a heritage site, participating in a cultural project, telling the story of one’s territory or helping to promote a place already means exercising a concrete form of citizenship.
What can local institutions do to move from simply offering young people opportunities to participate to genuinely involving them in shaping the cultural and civic life of their city?
In my view, this is the most important challenge. Providing services for young people is not enough; we need to create opportunities and the conditions for young people to express their potential to the fullest. This means moving from a logic in which institutions organise activities for young people to one in which activities are designed with young people. This requires listening, continuity and, above all, trust. I am thinking, for example, of co-design processes. We need to build a different relationship between institutions and younger generations: less distance, more listening; fewer top-down initiatives; more shared planning; fewer young people simply seen as recipients of policies; more young people recognised as protagonists of their community.
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The words of Councillor Gentile bring the theme of cultural heritage to a dimension that goes beyond the preservation of the past. Heritage is truly alive when it connects with the people who inhabit a territory, when it sparks curiosity, creates a sense of belonging and can become an opportunity for participation, especially for younger generations.
This is the perspective from which Civic Heritage Quest was born: to experiment with a different way of encountering heritage, in which young people are not simply spectators of a story that has already been told, but can explore it, question it, discover what belongs to their past and build their own relationship with the places around them.
We will return to Councillor Gentile with the results of the project, after giving young people in the local area the opportunity to validate them and express their own views, putting into practice the participation and youth leadership that are at the heart of our vision and that the Councillor herself hopes to see.