Cultural heritage research and demonstration has been carried out at national, European and international level covering not only technical aspects and interventions in movable, immovable heritage and archaeology, but also the management of digital aspects of cultural heritage knowledge, socio-economic and policy aspects.

Within the European Framework Programmes, cultural heritage has been taken into account in numerous of their programmes (EESD, IST, CRAFT, Policies, INCO-MED, etc.), most recently in FP5 and FP6. Within the FP7 (2007-2013), cultural heritage has also been considered as a priority by the EU Commission in themes such as “Environment”, “Nanomaterials”, “Processes and ICT”, “Information and Communication Technologies” or “Socio-Economic Sciences and the Humanities”.

Parallel to the FP, the ECTP (initiated in 2004) reflects the response of the construction sector to the demands of the European society, acting as an umbrella of the research initiatives in Europe, and creating a better synergy between European and national industries, between the public and the private efforts with all relevant stakeholders. This initiative expects to raise the sector to a higher world beating the level of performance.

In this sense, the challenge of the ECTP is to demonstrate to the EU Commission, the construction stakeholders and the citizens the importance and impact of the construction research in order to transform the industry and society from resources based into knowledge based. One of the seven focus areas established within this platform is that of cultural heritage (FACH).

FACH was launched in October 2004 with the aim of establishing a vision for 2030, a Strategic Research Agenda and an Action Plan for developing and integrating it into the ECTP and to provide inputs to the FP7 and future European research programmes. The challenge of FACH is to achieve that cultural heritage research is considered as an important topic in European research i.e. in FP7 and future research programmes, having a good position in the ECTP.

The global objective of FACH is to promote the research in new sustainable and preventive strategies, concepts, methodologies and techniques for conservation and restoration of the cultural heritage in order to improve the quality of life of citizens and the attractiveness of Europe, particularly its cities, buildings and landscapes.

FACH is divided into 6 Working Groups (vertical blocks) and 6 Horizontal Issues (horizontal blocks), as showed in the folloing figure:

The content of these Working Groups and Horizontal Issues aims to consider the refurbishment, rehabilitation and maintenance of the built heritage, as well as its relation with movable heritage.