Co.Co.War - Community Toolkit. Understanding the (Dis)Value

The Co.Co.War Community Toolkit, developed as one of the main outcomes of the PRIN 2022 project Co.Co.War – Dissonant Heritage and War. Conservation and Communication of a Difficult Legacy, is conceived as a methodological and operational infrastructure designed to support engagement with communities in contexts of dissonant, contested, or traumatic heritage. It is intended for researchers, professionals, and practitioners working at the intersection of architectural heritage, memory, and conflict. Rather than proposing prescriptive solutions, best practices, or normative participatory models, the Toolkit offers a critically framed repertoire of tools aimed at facilitating dialogue, observation, mapping, and interaction with communities, while explicitly addressing the epistemological, ethical, and relational challenges inherent in working with difficult heritage. The Toolkit is grounded in the assumption that dissonance is not only embedded within material heritage itself, but is also continuously produced and sustained through perceptions, memories, silences, power relations, and forms of mediation that shape how heritage is accepted, rejected, negotiated, contested, or avoided. For this reason, it is deliberately conceived as a flexible and modular system: tools are not intended to be applied exhaustively or indiscriminately, but rather to be selected, combined, adapted, or excluded according to specific research objectives, contextual conditions, and identified sensitivities. Each tool embodies particular assumptions regarding agency, exposure, participation, and interpretation, and actively contributes to shaping both the forms of knowledge produced and the relationships established with communities. The Toolkit is therefore organized into six categories — Interviews, Observation, Mapping, Group Activities, Community-Led Tools, and Creative Tools — each corresponding to a distinct mode of interaction and analytical intention. These tools should not be understood as neutral instruments for data extraction, but as relational devices requiring critical awareness, reflexivity, and methodological control. For this reason, the Community Toolkit operates in direct interdependence with the Community Process Diagram, which regulates when and how tools are activated within a sequenced, reflexive, and ethically calibrated engagement process. Within this framework, the data, narratives, and responses generated through the Toolkit do not function as isolated outputs; rather, they constitute foundational inputs that interface directly with the Community Process Diagram and with other project phases — including archival analysis, spatial assessment, and policy review — in order to inform heritage conservation or transformation strategies that are not only technically sound, but also culturally coherent and scientifically accountable, as they are grounded in the lived experiences, value systems, and relational dynamics of the communities involved.