Cultural H.ID.RA.N.T.

Cultural H.ID.RA.N.T. is about commoning and citizens’ empowerment, focusing on water as the connecting point between heritage and community, physical and intangible actions, symbolic values and emerging vocations, sustainable uses of resources and resilient urban development. Funded under the fifth UIA call, the initiative set out to reintroduce a Roman Hadrian aqueduct into city life, restoring it to serve Chalandri through its original function: providing water.

This aqueduct forms the pivotal element in a wider strategy to conserve and cultivate local cultural capital and establish stronger connections in the community at large. The Roman Hadrian Aqueduct is actually many things: infrastructure, a historical monument, and a source of water. Its rediscovery is intertwined with the possibility to recover several pocket public spaces, start a public debate on sustainability and urban wellbeing, collect memories, open new city-branding opportunities, and more. The adaptive reuse of the ancient infrastructure, and its urban and societal implications, pulls together diverse dimensions, bringing history back to contemporary life in a proactive and generative way.

Even if the water in the aqueduct is not potable according to contemporary standards, it can be used for gardens and other non-drinking purposes, integrating and optimising water services in the area. Because of this, the project has implemented a new system of water distribution, operating with pipes in a portion of the city, and tank trucks and reservoirs to distribute the water across the whole municipality. The infrastructural and technical components of this new service are accompanied by a local “water community”, responsible for water management. Key to fostering direct and proactive citizen participation, the water community was designed and implemented as the primary tool for the organisation, management and distribution of water through the new service.

The building of four new public and green spaces is designed to contribute to unveiling the aqueduct and making it accessible to a wider audience through improved urban design. Work on memories, identities and intangible heritage is also a key part of the process, with the activation of the ArcHalandri digital archive revealing previously hidden, yet deeply rooted, collective knowledge. This knowledge is then shared  and combined with the new values guiding the project, both in its physical manifestations and its deeper meanings.

Finally, Cultural H.ID.RA.N.T. provides an unprecedented opportunity for the Athens Metropolitan area and West Attica region to scale up a pilot. In fact, the Hadrian aqueduct route crosses a wider territory, with eight more municipalities potentially interested in making use of the aqueduct’s water. The experience so far could be reproduced and transferred to other municipalities, and has already become a platform for intermunicipal dialogues about water and water commons. It is already helping strengthen relationships across the metropolitan area, encouraging new alliances, cooperation, mutual understanding and learning between municipalities, local and regional authorities, and the central government.