Within the European city, the historic housing stock often comprises a compact, densely built-up area close to city centres. Due to its urbanistic and architectural qualities as well as the key socio-economic function it plays in the city’s housing market, this stock plays a considerable and important role in the identity of the European city. Although often formally recognised as such in planning policy, historic housing nevertheless is a tangible and intangible heritage, and for many communities is central to urban living. However, market pressure and climate adaptation and mitigation strategies proposed by city and national government threatens this cultural heritage. Long-term under-investment and disrepair of this housing has meant that making this stock more carbon neutral costly and technically challenging, and where such action has been taken - usually based in individual buildings - risks triggering commodification, gentrification and displacement pressures. As a consequence, demolition of this cultural heritage is a real risk face by European cities. The main intention of this project is to identify and evaluate how historic housing viewed as a valued element of cultural heritage can contribute to urban climate action, identifying both opportunities and good practices as well as social, economic and policy barriers. Our focus is on using existing formal and informal knowledge of this cultural heritage, including everyday practices of residents as well as strategies for climate adaptation and mitigation. Using a transnational approach, transdisciplinary expertise and local stakeholder insights, the project provides an analysis of the role of different actor constellations, regulations, and ownership structures of the housing stock in cities within four different urban contexts - Marseille, Vienna, Prague, and Glasgow – to create a toolkit (methodology) that comprises pan-European strategies and practices that assist in scaling up local strategies and practices for climate change mitigation for historic housing stock.

This project grows out of a collaboration within the ANR-DFG project DYNTRAN: Dynamics of Transmission: Families, Authority and Knowledge in the Early Modern Middle East (15th-17th Centuries). During that project, a subgroup of individuals discussed interest in continuing a partnership centered around transformations occurring within pre-modern rural Egypt, an issue of upmost importance at the current moment. Indeed, the state of research on natural and human spaces in Egypt has reached a threshold where reflection cannot progress without pooling together disciplines and periods (late Middle Ages, i.e. Mamluk, with the early modern, i.e. Ottoman). Archaeologists have become sensitive to the natural and human context of the settlements they study but face an absence of data for the Islamic period, especially after the twelth century. Historians, and especially medievalists, must deal with the limited corpus of available sources and move beyond traditionally Cairo-centric history in order to open the field of research to rural and environmental studies. The environmental history of Egypt in the pre-modern period is a newly emerging field. Most extant work has primarily focused on Egypt’s agricultural history, especially its economic relevance for ruling regimes. Less research has explored the rural environment of Egypt within its ecological context or with regards to the impact of changing demography. The pre-modern hydraulic system is beginning to be better understood, but its evolution over centuries and its impact on human geography remains to be clarified. Furthermore, while land use has been considered in light of farming and food production, we know far less about the nature of land ownership and its evolution during the six centuries under scrutiny. Thus, it is important to widen the scope of study beyond the cultivator or the village, by exploring the interplay between the urban and rural as well as intra-village relationships. Large geographic stretches of Egypt remain nearly unstudied in both periods, especially the Western Desert and the Middle Nile Valley. Finally, there is a gap in the historical record regarding demographic settlement patterns, and how these patterns were driven by ecological factors and catastrophes – like the plague and regime direction. In addressing these issues, this project proposes to bring together textual historians and archaeologists to build the foundations for perennial, interdisciplinary collaborations. Furthermore, the development of a GIS survey project will allow for a better visualization of the transformations happening within Egypt as regards land and water use, demography, and ecology; the GIS will remain an invaluable resource for later scholars. With a variety of sources and a multidisciplinary approach, the proposed project will further the discussion on the changes occurring within Egyptian agriculture, its countryside and peasantry, and its ecology during the periods discussed.

PredicMo considers preaching as a common element of the three Abrahamic religions. Preaching has, however, been understudied in a connected perspective. This project aims to establish a common "grammar" of preaching, understood as a set of principles, rules, strategies and models, together with their variations. While Judaism refutes its universal vocation, Islam and Christianity have placed preaching at the heart of their doctrine. As the driving force of 'making people believe', preaching is understood as a device (dispositif Foucault) embodied by the presence of an individual or a group in a territory in order to constitute or consolidate a community of believers. Adopting a Weberian perspective, the programme focuses on preaching, whose objective is to convince and which develops in a context of religious crisis, and not only on the cure of souls. Preaching as an internal and external constitutive device of faith experiences has been constantly reshaped since the end of the 19th century. PredicMo focuses on its contemporary reinventions and redefinitions. PredicMo will renew the study of preaching through original transversal hypotheses. In order to do so, it has chosen the Middle East as a privileged observatory, a space of elaboration and circulation, constantly connected with international dynamics. The seven territories concerned by our survey (Egypt, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq) have all experienced this large-scale phenomenon with varying temporalities, actors and dynamics. The project first argues that preaching is a common matrix for the three Abrahamic religions. By analysing preaching in the light of its lexicon (S1), its cartography (S2) and its staging (S3), the programme's first objective is to propose a common ‘grammar’ of preaching. Its second objective is to elaborate a solid and innovative reflexive methodology allowing a religious, temporal and geographical decompartmentalization (A1). Not limiting itself by focusing on a specific country, PredicMo will analyse influences, emulations, competition in preaching discourses and spatial strategies using several case studies. Finally, preachers have played a decisive role in the (re)configuration of the religious and political environments of the Middle East since the late 19th century, but no archival corpus is devoted to them. Our third objective is therefore to build a catalogue and a corpus of indexed preaching archives (A2). Supported by IREMAM, Ifpo and EFR, PredicMo will gather an international and interdisciplinary team to cross-analyse new visual, sound and written sources, developing digital tools to make them accessible to a large public. The team consists of specialists of Islam, Judaism and Christianity with a long experience in Middle Eastern fieldwork, as well as various actors of preaching. The people in charge of the three institutions, and the scientific subprojects will guarantee the good governance of the programme (A5). In partnership with the Mucem, a data collection-survey will focus on the material conditions of preaching. Besides its theoretical contributions, publications and scientific promotion (A4), PredicMo will deliver an online dictionary of the vocabulary of preaching (A1), an indexed catalogue of the sources of preaching and a mapping of the trajectories of preachers (A2). The collaboration with the Mucem will make possible the integration of some of the items of the survey-collection into the museum collection and the creation of an itinerant exhibition (A3). Reflecting the team’s approach, two web-documentaries as well as several video and audio clips will be produced and made accessible to a large audience: academics, students, and the general public.

Many memory institutions across Europe contain holdings connected with its colonial past which for many years has been a focus of contestation from both communities of origin, ethnic minorities and civil society at large. At the same time challenging questions are being asked by professionals in the field as to what to do with this problematic cultural heritage, from returning items when appropriate, to rewriting the historical context surrounding them in a more critical and inclusive way. This project aims to identify key instances of colonial audio-visual heritage across the three archives involved, draw a common map of shared racialised representations connected with their respective imperial contexts, identify problematic visualisation and language and open up a dialogue between the archives and a variety of users, including archivists, researchers, filmmakers, and grassroots organisations. The digitised colonial audio-visual heritage is provided by three national archives: The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the French Institut national de l'audiovisuel and Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, UK. All these archives have a rich collection of original film and sound, some of it produced at the height of empire, ranging from ethnographers' footage for 'educational' purposes to more direct propaganda films to bolster colonial ideologies. We will explore how archival material created in a ‘colonial mindset’ can be re-appropriated and re-interpreted critically to become an effective source for the 'decolonization of the mind' and the basis for a future inclusive society. The overall outcome of PICCH is to engender a polyvocality that can be incorporated into the archive itself providing new ways to enter and explore the past via a contemporary interpretative frame. To this effect advanced technologies will be used to study how to bridge archival and contemporary languages, and to support transnational exploration of multiple archives via a single interactive user interface.

The ECOMED project (Economies of the Mediterranean at the end of the Middle Ages, 1350-1500) brings together some 41 researchers from Spain, France, Italy and Greece, all of whom are specialized in the study of the Mediterranean worlds and are particularly interested in questions related to interculturality and the interconnection between different societies. It starts from the observation that there is a divergence between historiographies concerning Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, the former being based on a body of research on climate, the effects of the plague and the economic situation, which is still largely lacking for the Mediterranean area. The project considers the Mediterranean area as a unique space where the questions are posed in the same way. The heterogeneity of the documentary regime of the Byzantine, Muslim and Christian worlds has given rise to very different historiographies, although the problems encountered are similar: the presence and recurrence of the plague, the multiplication of famines and famines in a climate that had become unstable and tended to be wetter and colder at the beginning of the "Little Ice Age", the political instability manifested by incessant and devastating wars and state recompositions constitute facts that are common to the entire basin. The relevance of a divergence in the 15th century between the South and the North must be examined, as must the differences between East and West, while all the evidence also points to practices favouring interculturality between the Muslim and Christian worlds. The ECOMED project will study the environmental challenges encountered on both sides of the sea; agricultural and artisanal production; the use and circulation of raw materials and merchandises; the institutions and conflicts structuring the period and the area; and social mobility and growth.