Every valorisation project has a beginning, and it often starts with a dream, a gut feeling that an underground heritage site can be valorised. Sometimes, through this dream, the full potential of this heritage site is foreseen to stimulate regeneration and revitalisation processes. Even through this dream, one thinks of the value it can represent for the community, and its potential as an economic and social resource to create new values for citizens, travellers, and tourists to drive them to better appreciate the significance of the site.  

This initial phase is often the brainchild of an individual or a small group of persons who have this long-term vision for the site, the aim, and the will to enhance it but has no knowledge of how to do so. Therefore, it is important to build a clear picture and vision of what this underground heritage site valorisation process is about and what it is trying to achieve, outlining the extent and scope of the idea/process as some tools and approaches may not be applicable to very small projects. 

The most important outcome of this initial phase is to build a clearly defined brief made up of process (practice) info and affected stakeholders. This phase is the very first step in the whole process of developing the project. The produced vision is a vague one without details and research, resulting from a small team’s work.  These will gradually be identified in the subsequent phases, but for now we will focus on the main vision, a quasi-entrepreneurial view of this project and where it can be developed in the long term. 

In the preliminary phase, we are asking some very generic but pertinent questions that help the initiators of a valorisation project to frame their thoughts to be able to make their vision ambitious enough to attract different stakeholders in the next phases. Each site will have its own realities, characteristics, and challenges. This phase does not go into detail about these individual aspects but builds a preliminary vision for the valorisation strategy.

In the start-up phase of this new social practice (e.g., Living Lab initiative, CLLD, …) there are several important questions to consider. These include whether the change processes will challenge dominant institutions, the need to establish positive relationships with promoters, and the importance of a structured and dynamic stakeholder activation. 

It is also necessary to identify critical problems in UBH conservation and regeneration, define goals, structure the approach, outline essential planning actions, agree the rules of participation and search for experts to assist with regeneration. Defining operational steps for both top-down and bottom-up planning approaches is crucial, as is ensuring that vision and strategies are clearly defined. Breaking down strategies into long-term, medium-term, and short-term objectives can also help improve UBH. Another primary step is making the knowledge base freely available among the stakeholders, supporting the community empowerment, and activating co-creation processes. 

Thanks to a shared knowledge in this phase the ‘solution space’ (e.g., the conceptual space where to find possible solutions) takes form, supporting the “Why?” and “How?” questions. 

This phase’s goal is stimulating the community's potential ability for change, through processes of co-creation, co-development, or co-design, as well as define options based on data, technology, and sustainability. Lastly, developing a communication strategy is necessary to ensure effective collaboration and success.

The operational phase deals with bringing together all the insights and scenarios obtained in the start-up phase and translate them in transition experiments. Once agreed on the solution space, the transition arena can structure a list of strategic options, which are assessed, supplemented if need be and finally shortlisted the most promising ones. 

These options are checked and implemented in a normalised way, by including resources, activities, and responsibilities. In this stage, processes of co-creation, co-development, or co-design help to better define options based on data, technology, and sustainability, as well as to develop a collective construction of meaning for UBH valorisation. Community/Arena makes a realistic choice, which could be one of the alternatives or a mix of two or more, retaining elements of each option. Then, the choice is operationalised by developing plans (implementation, communication, contingency, financial, etc…) and the experiment performed. 

By giving explicit attention to the operationalisation of the strategic option, the Arena prepares and enables the community to execute it. Nonetheless, often the demarcation between detailing the plans and working according to them is fluid and sometimes iterations are required. Finally, the experimentation brings the community in action and aims at realising strategic objectives and supporting community change. This implementation is thus a matter of accurate agile management with a dynamic two-way exchange of information with stakeholders about activities progress and lessons learned.

In this phase, the process activates a continuous reflective learning cycle between small experiments (learning-by-doing) and long-term strategic visions and goals (doing-by-learning). The acquired knowledge, then, empowers the local community, which is stimulated to develop long-term strategic visions and goals (doing-by-learning), as well as helps global heritage community transition. 

The heritage is interpreted by an activated local community, which continuously interacts with external experts in a collective learning approach. The participants develop local storytelling, video, publications, and educational material for the community, with the scope of supporting a development of community sense of belonging and provide a positive attitude towards partnership. Both overall strategy and single experiment are monitored, and their performance is also measured in terms of social and behavioural impacts. 

This Phase develops indicators, checks responsibilities according to previous assignments and plans, and tests the assumptions underlying the strategic choices, to reflect on the process to date. This can include looking at the data and seeing what changes the action produced. Finally, this phase supports global heritage community transition by focusing on collective learning at the community level, innovation actions carried out by local groups, and story-based interpretation of the site’s significance.

The BB1 aims at defining the identity of the promoter, as well as exploring and defining the scope of UBH valorization. To that scope the promoter overviews the strategic opportunities and uncertainties: content-wise and process-wise; strategy models, helping to express ambitions or a vision and mission statement. 

An initial knowledge base is defined. Archaeologists, planners, and all other invited experts produce a knowledge base of the heritage site, including historical, ecological, regulatory, and legal frameworks, as well as social and economic analysis, as well as recovering local tradition, habits, and storytelling. Then, outside-in (scenarios) are developed to see global trends and map potential strategic positions of a possible future. 

The BB1 aims at supporting the organization of a team with the right spirit and competencies, on how to create a highly committed and involved "Transition Team", with experts/planners/facilitators as catalysts who support strategy making by aiding and encouraging communities and stakeholders to think strategically. Only after it is possible to formulate the team's shared ambitions. Ambition could be preserving a heritage, developing a creative hub, developing a new tourist attraction, restoring a place, or simply empowering a community, as part of a collective process of construction of meanings, visions, answers, and solutions. Finally, it deals with how to increase inspiration, energy and feeling of urgency. 

The BB2 aims at mapping and recruiting stakeholders and target groups, both public and private. It supports you in searching for community leaders, visionary, and the so-called frontrunners (pioneers, niche players). It brings together the most important stakeholders and builds mutual trust, preventing information asymmetry, sharing responsibilities, and creating commitment. Then, it defines a preliminary potential partnership and identifies groups to empower. At this stage, it develops inside-out scenarios: determine the strategic options of the potential partnership based on stakeholders’ strengths and constraints. 

Stakeholders and target groups will be key in carrying out the local community assessment and the UBH site-specific assessment as well as the entire planning and design process. At this stage, it is necessary to provide a comprehensive picture of the UBH and community, with capabilities, competencies, values, business models, and potential for change. The Transition team activates key stakeholders for developing sustainability visions of heritage management. To that scope, the BB2 asks for selecting the appropriate Business model, by using a Business Canvas or other alternative approach, and to establish a relationship between expert-led and community-led approaches. It suggests linking to and comparing international organizations approaches, such as HUL.

The Transition practice is initially developed by a promoting team with a facilitator/moderator, which defines the initial general goals, structure the approach, and finds an agreement with stakeholders about the rules of participation. Critical factors are mapping and selecting stakeholders and their roles, organizing enthusiasm and buy-in for the project, assessing the quality of stakeholders input about both analysis and visions, communicating with non-participants about and during the process, and finally ensuring that agreed procedures are observed by all involved stakeholders. 

Goals must be positive, collectively chosen by the community or niche, following a process of problem structuring. In this BB3, the team must create a protected environment (the niche), relatively safe and free, possibly without any power hierarchy, able to guarantee transparency, develop trust and reciprocity, and stimulate the development of creative, innovative ideas. It must structure the legal framework and the organizational context, and organize a transition agenda in a Transition Area, with the public sector must be deeply inside the process, as part of the social practice at the same level of the other stakeholders. 

This Arena is expected to provide a protected breeding ground for new ideas and policy options. Finally, the Arena will promote a relationship with (parts of) the global heritage community, public bodies, and non-participating organisations. The scope is promoting processes of changing social relations, which involve challenging, altering, or replacing the dominant institutions in the specific initiative. These bottom-up local initiatives aim at moving different levels of government to the dialogue, and to foster self-organisation through new types of interaction and cycles of learning and action. Finally, they activate transformative social innovations.

The BB4 aims at making the knowledge base freely available among the stakeholders, supporting the community empowerment process. The new knowledge at the local level will activate processes of co-creation. Everyone collects data on the issue, case-studies, planning approaches, design and research approaches, technologies, co-creation tools.

Data is uploaded in a publicly accessible online platform (U4V platform www.u4v.org). Participants can also take notes and record observations about how their lives are affected by the issue. The knowledge is analyzed and discussed amongst the community, areas for action and change are identified and a collective awareness from data is built. This stage can include activities such as data visualization and be supported by people from professional science or academia. The scope is to actively engage all stakeholders on an equal footing in all phases of development, encouraging creativity in problem-solving and social innovation.  The Arena structures the ‘solution space’ (e.g., the conceptual space where to find possible solutions). It supports the “Why?” and “How?” questions, through a strategic thinking process. Then, strategic options based on the local community’s values and competencies are defined and discussed. 

The goal is developing strategies for UBH valorisation, through processes of co-creation, co-development, or co-design, as well as define options based on data, technology, and sustainability, as well as developing a collective construction of meaning for the options. Fundamentals are stimulating the community's potential ability for change. This will stimulate local narratives (BB8) and support interviews and the presentation of external similar initiatives.

The BB5 aims at developing multiple strategic options, by bringing together the outside-in and inside-out perspective. To that scope the management should organise teams for analysing the needs of the project. The technologies will be classified based on the functionalities, and typologies – the toolkit will provide functioning principles and examples – both general and specific. 

An additional support for better structuring options is creating connections between external and local experts (also online or through webinars) and improving technological competencies and skills at local level. The options are finally short-listed and the most strategic ones (according to the solution space) prioritised.

In the BB6, the Arena compares the options, developing their basic structures and exploring their strengths and constraints. A new statement of significance is agreed, and alternative strategies are modeled and analyzed, with insight into when to switch to them. A detailed business plan is designed for the selected option, also through small pilot projects. 

For goals already decided, the scope is to make realistic choices from the different strategic options.  A detailed business case is drafted, also for explaining consequences of the initiative for people, resources, structures, and systems. For social innovation, the strategy supports local community experiments, built on agile development and rapid prototyping of ideas, concepts, products, services, and processes in a highly decentralised and user-centric manner.

In BB7, the chosen strategy is implemented by drafting the plans (management, conservation, communication plans), and defining tools for involving identified targets (e.g., Social Enterprise, Different Media Platforms), as well as surveys and various feedback cycles developed among different stakeholders and organizations, opening space for long-term oriented innovation.

The experiment generates new insights about UBH and its context, community long-term goals and visions, and conflicts of interest. These insights help to revise original decisions and find compromises. Result of the experimentation is the co-creation of new values, based on self-confrontation and learning, such as the modification of structural links, and the self-understanding of stakeholders in terms of identity, strategic capacities, individual and collective interests, and their preferred strategies and tactics.

The BB8 provides tools for activating continuous reflective learning cycles between small experiments (learning-by-doing) and long-term strategic visions and goals (doing-by-learning). Experiment participants reflect on the process to date and consider what worked well and what could be improved. This can include looking at the data and seeing what changes the action produced. This requires the participants to restructure earlier stages, or to review previous phases to modify or reorient the process. 

The participants develop local storytelling, video, publications, and educational material for the community, with the scope of supporting a development of community sense of belonging and provide a positive attitude towards partnership. It is primary to organise collective events for a reflection on the initiatives, experiments and actions undertaken with a short-term horizon. In addition, the BB8 monitors the advancement of both overall strategy and single experiment, by considering long-term objectives, intermediate objectives, trends and developments.  It develops indicators, checks responsibilities according to previous assignments and plans, and tests the assumptions underlying the strategic choices. 

It must be borne in mind that this is an ongoing process. It supports global heritage community transition by focusing on collective learning at the community level, innovation actions carried out by local groups, and story-based interpretation of the site’s significance.