After two and a half years of work, August 2014 saw the close of the Her4Dev (Heritage for Development) project or “Investing in people to protect and manage historic centres”. The project was funded by the EU in the framework of the ENPI programme and was led by the Centre for Cultural Heritage Preservation in Bethlehem, with the participation of the Palestinian NGO Riwaq, the Jordanian organization CulTech and RehabiMed, with the collaboration of the councils of Bethlehem and Ramallah in Palestine, and of Salt in Jordan.
The project’s objectives were very ambitious and have been exceeded. Firstly, it aimed to train local teams of professionals in rehabilitation and urban regeneration in the three towns involved. Training took the form of real cases in Catalonia and the south of France. The professionals enrolled drew up a registry of the heritage resources and values of the historic centres of each city and analysed the possibilities of enhancing them with the involvement of the authorities and local residents, generating protective planning legislation and a management plan for each. To complement these activities, all the information and documentation collected has been published in the form of three rehabilitation manuals with splendid contents and graphic image. The Management Plan for Bethlehem responds to the UNESCO mandate, as the city was recently declared World Heritage.
At the presentation of the results and closure on 7 August at the Centre for Peace in Bethlehem, attended by 150 people, the Project’s director, Nada Atrash, summarised the interventions carried out and presented the rehabilitation manuals published for the three cities, and the respective mayors expressed their commitment to implementing these actions to preserve the historic centres of their cities. The project was closed by the EU representative in Palestine, John Gatt-Rutter, and the Director General for Heritage on behalf of the Minister for Tourism and Heritage, Hamdan Taha, who praised the quality of the results and highlighted the importance of this type of project to strengthen the identity and protect the heritage of the Palestinian people.
Manual for Bethlehem
Manual for Salt
Photographs of the Her4Dev (Heritage for Development