Objectives

1. To mobilise and combine diverse competencies to address key scientific, technical, commercial, managerial, political, cultural, and social challenges that hinder the sustainable use of Underground Built Heritage.
2. To establish a balanced and sustainable framework for protecting, regenerating, and valorising Underground Built Heritage
3. To classify diverse approaches through case studies, testing and adapting the UNESCO “Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL)”, and integrating innovative technologies to enhance knowledge, preservation, and valorisation of UBH.
4. To stimulate collaboration among local communities, academics, and organisations by promoting the assessment of case studies and encouraging the international comparison of Underground Built Heritage sites across diverse economic, social, political, and cultural contexts.
5. To actively engage local communities, promote innovative thinking, and support them in exploring alternative social pathways in an adaptive and forward-looking way 
6. To enhance openness through the website and share research results widely, complemented by presentations at international, regional and local conferences. 
7. To support coordinated efforts for ensuring consistency and clarity of results, made accessible in multiple languages.
8. To foster expertise in cultural planning, strategic spatial planning, and transition studies.
9. To equip planners, decision-makers, heritage promoters, and local development facilitators with new skills by piloting a multidisciplinary training course on Underground Built Heritage. 
10. To harness the potential of Underground Built Heritage to empower local communities by promoting active participation, stimulating bottom-up initiatives such as Living Labs, and ensuring the continuous use, cultural significance, and revitalisation of the underground historic fabric while supporting skills development for residents

We mobilise a wide range of expertise – scientific, technical, commercial, managerial, political, cultural, and social – to address the bottlenecks that hinder the sustainable use of UBH. Through surveys, working group activities, and shared glossaries, the network has built a common vocabulary and a cross-fertilised taxonomy of UBH consistent with UNESCO definitions. This work underpins the development of shared concepts, models, and tools that can be used across countries and disciplines.

We aim to build a coherent framework for the protection, regeneration, and valorisation of UBH that balances conservation needs with social, economic, and ecological functions. This framework is grounded in real case studies and in the Strategic Transition Practice (STP) approach, which integrates planning, community empowerment, and technological innovation. It is designed to support long-term, place-based strategies rather than isolated or sectoral interventions.

We classify and compare different approaches to UBH management by systematically analysing case studies and adapting the UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) to underground contexts. This includes developing new taxonomies and structural/functional classifications of underground spaces and their re-uses and testing them in living labs. Innovative technologies for diagnosis, monitoring, documentation, and communication are integrated into this framework to improve knowledge, preservation, and valorisation.

We foster collaboration among local communities, researchers, professionals, and organisations by organising and supporting case studies in diverse economic, social, political, and cultural settings. Small interdisciplinary teams, often supported by Short-Term Scientific Missions (STSMs), work with local hosts to map stakeholders, identify needs, and co-develop living labs. This process enables international comparison of UBH sites, mutual learning, and the transfer of experiences across countries and contexts.

We actively engage local communities in re-thinking the meaning and use of their underground heritage, encouraging them to explore alternative social and development pathways. Living labs are used as real-world arenas where local actors, experts, and trainees experiment with new ideas, reflect on existing practices, and co-create visions and strategies. Through storytelling, feedback loops, and community discussions, these processes help generate new narratives, forms of governance, and shared responsibilities around UBH.

We increase the openness and visibility of the network by combining online platforms with active participation in regional and local events. The U4V digital platform and multilingual website provide access to information on sites, tools, and results, while standardised presentations and peer-reviewed communication formats ensure coherence and scientific quality. Participation in conferences, public workshops, and webinars at different scales helps bring the discussion on UBH to a wider audience, including non-specialists.

We work to guarantee that concepts, methods, and outputs are consistent and clearly communicated across different languages and contexts. A shared presentation format, internal editorial and peer-review processes, and the translation of key tools (such as the U4V Toolbox and platform interfaces) support this objective. The aim is to make results understandable and usable by local stakeholders, policymakers, and practitioners in their own linguistic and cultural environments.

We strengthen expertise in cultural planning, strategic spatial planning, and transition studies by integrating these perspectives into the UBH methodology. U4V bridges hard sciences, heritage studies, and social sciences to develop approaches capable of dealing with multi-functional landscapes and long-term transitions. This contributes to positioning UBH within broader discourses on sustainable urban and regional transformation.

We help planners, decision-makers, heritage promoters, and local development facilitators with new skills via a multidisciplinary training programme focused on UBH. The four Training Schools (Naples, Murcia, Ayia Napa, Malta), supported by webinars and teamwork on real cases, have tested and refined this training model. The programme has been further consolidated into handbooks, videos, and a MOOC, making the learning offer more accessible and scalable for future users.

We leverage UBH as a catalyst for community empowerment, encouraging active participation, bottom-up initiatives, and long-term care for the underground historic fabric. Living labs and related activities help local actors to experiment with new management models, tourism strategies, and uses of public space, while also opening up opportunities for local skills development in conservation, interpretation, planning, and entrepreneurship. The goal is not to “finish” projects for communities, but to strengthen their capacity to shape their own sustainable futures.