European Legislation and Cultural Heritage - A growing challange for sustainable Cultural Heritage management and use

The European Working Group on EU Directives and Cultural Heritage was born in the spring of 2003 around the common kernel of different working groups related to monument conservation and management, some of them in the framework of Eurocare some just cooperating on voluntary basis. The activity in the field of planned conservation and risk evaluation carried out at extended Europe basis outlined the potential relevant impact due to EU directives on cultural heritage preservation and management. Of course negative impact is not due to the will of legislators but sometimes it is real and may jeopardise the preservation of cultural assets. The number of directives creating problems for the sector are increasing. It is therefore important for the cultural heritage sector to be able to influence the Directives process at an early stage. Only in this manner can we influence and counter negative effect of such directives. It is true that cultural heritage is the responsibility of the individual member nations. But Directives related to other sectors increasingly impact on the management of the European Cultural Heritage. In many cases such Directives have consequences that are in contradiction to the obligations the members countries have as signatories of the Granada Convention . This is the reason for the need to establish some kind of observatory function to monitor the creation and revision of Directives. The meeting in Milan has as focus the needs for such an observatory and how this can be done. Prologue Cultural heritage has always been an interdisciplinary sector, a wide range of application involved from investigation to restoration, conservation, exploitation, education and communication each of them enjoying a different mix of expertises: art history, anthropology, social science, science of materials, chemistry, art, structural engineering, etc and more recently economy and marketing plus more and more high technology from lasers, to ICT and bio-tech. Such an articulated scenario with intrinsic richness of links and relations is potentially generating new skills and professional profiles often as a result of a “crossover” of already existing professional profiles. As a follow up of such a scenario both basic and applied research and educational strategies as to be duly tuned.