The University of Bologna, was founded in 1088 and is considered to be the oldest university in Western Europe. Nowadays, it still remains one of the most important institutions of higher education across Europe with around 85.000 enrolled students, 11 Schools, 33 research departments, 3000 academics and 3000 administrative staff. University of Bologna is a comprehensive Higher Education Institution located in the Emilia-Romagna region, in the centre-north of Italy.
It is located in 5 Campuses, the main one being in the city of Bologna and 4 additional campuses are located in the Romagna region, in the city of Forlì, Cesena, Rimini and Ravenna. University of Bologna is today the most internationalised of all Italian universities.
The number of foreign students regularly enrolled is around 6000, while another 2000 arrive every year on international mobility programmes such as LLP/Erasmus, Overseas and Erasmus Mundus Action II. The number of students of the University of Bologna who go abroad on exchange programmes or on study grants is more than 2,000.
The academic offer of the University of Bologna is composed by around 100 Undergraduate programmes, more than 100 Master programmes, 25 of which are completely taught in English or in another foreign language, and more than 90 Doctoral Programmes.

The Department for the Cultural Heritage combines wide-ranging skills, disciplines and branches of knowledge that have a common bearing on knowledge, conservation and fostering of the cultural heritage. The scope of ‘cultural heritage’ includes objects, monuments, works of art, books, archives and artefacts of archaeological and historical interest but also the traditions, cultures, human rights and the environment. It implies then the need for a multidisciplinary approach in which the social and humanistic knowledge are linked to the technical-scientific ones, in order to critically interpret the complex and changing status of a problematical and interlocked heritage, a necessary challenge of contemporaneity. The Department promotes research and higher education on cultural heritage, with the aim of creating highly specialized professionals.

The Department of Cultural Heritage’s LABIRINTO Lab carries out research and training activities, launching projects for an integrated knowledge of local cultural and natural heritage, both to implement innovative solutions for making territories safe, and to trigger a common educational development of institutions, companies, and citizens in taking care of natural and cultural milieu to build a new mindful sense of citizenship.
Potential collaboration between the Department’s Lab and UN-Habitat can be carried out in the main field of research of LABIRINTO Lab: the design of projects concerning the relationships between residents and local authorities mediated by a living sense of heritage, as a common ground to rethink and implement a new conception of informed and responsible citizenship, not confined to national boundaries and identities. This field of research appears so necessary nowadays in view of the radical changes and disruptions the current global pandemic is causing, while at the same time opening up opportunities to revise the evident faults of our model of development.

• Resilience
• Reconstruction
• Planning and Design
• Housing
• Environment
• Economy
• Climate Change

• Informal Urbanism
• Climate Change
• Urban Regeneration
• Gender
• Urban Form