AT FORT

The overall objective of At Fort is to facilitate the adaptive re-use of fortified heritage sites by exploring solutions for successful approaches and methods to deal with pre-selected enabling conditions and creating better frameworks for their exploitation. These sites represent significant cultural values for the regions involved (as it is for many other regions in Europe), while at the same time they are challenging factors of regional sustainable economic development.

Lead Partner the New Dutch Waterline came together with 10 partners from both Western European and Central European countries in project „Atelier European Fortresses – Powering Local Sustainable Development” (hereafter AT FORT) with the view to enhance the preservation, maintenance and operation of the European fortified heritage sites. European fortified heritage sites (the old historical sites dated from the 16th to 20th century) representing a huge cultural value of Europe, have also an economic potential that needs to be valorified. These sites are of precious value for the European cultural identity, but in the same time they are vulnerable, demanding continuous action and investment from civil society, the heritage sector, and above all, from public authorities.

The activities to be carried out during the project lifetime are grouped in three main components:

  1. Management and Coordination, including Financial management: the activities carried out under this component are the responsibility of the Lead Partner which coordinated the day-to-day overall project implementation, by setting up a Project Management Team which includes a Project and Financial manager and a Thematic Expert. Regular tasks carried out by the Project Management Team include: day-to-day administration; submitting progress reports (based on reports and control confirmations collected from partners); daily contacts with partners; overseeing delivery of outputs and assist partners with their questions. At the partner level, the partners are also setting up their own partner-level management team responsible for carrying out smoothly the individual project activities and submitting their reports and control confirmations to the Lead Partner.
  2. Communication and dissemination: the activities related to this component are carried out jointly by the Hungarian partner, Fort Monostor, assisted by the Lithuanian partner, the Municipality of Kaunas, both under the coordination of the Lead Partner. Communication and dissemination activities strive for ensuring a proper: internal communication among, and continuous update of information for project partners, and external dissemination targeting stakeholders, professionals, decision- and policy-makers beyond the partnership. The project will benefit of a logo, website, several events will be oganized in different partner locations, press conferences will be organized and press releases published, as well as brochures, newsletters and articles.
  3. Exchange of experiences: this represents the core component of the project related to the conetent and to the exchange of experience. The activities to be carried out under this component are as follows: self analysis (reflecting the status quo and results achieved in each region), identification of good practices, good practice transfer visits (Ateliers), each partner visits each partner exploring possibilities of transfers of identified good practices, setting up of a toolkit (which is a collection of good strategies for the sustainable exploitation of fortified heritage sites), setting up implementation plans for each partner region, describing the future actions planned to ensure that benefits of the exchange are not lost and formulating policy recommendations targeted to the local, regional and EU level.

Based on the project activities, the results aimed to be achieved are: self-analysis reports; good practices identified to be transferred between the partners, workshops, seminars and roundtables; transfer visits/ateliers (intensified partner visits), implementation plans, regional and European policy recommendation papers.