Other Projects
An overview and archive of projects undertaken by The Great Spa Towns of Europe Association, its component towns and partner organisations.
Links to download reports or find out more are provided.
INTERSPACE
The INTERSPACE (Inter-Spa Town Celebration of European Heritage) project was an international youth engagement project, funded by the European Union through the CERV Town Twinning Programme.
It engaged young people living across The Great Spa Towns of Europe – the current residents and future custodians – to discover their own and each others’ spa heritage.
INTERSPACE aimed to use active youth participation and education to instil a sense of belonging and custodianship of and through shared European cultural heritage.
Online workshops and trips to other spa towns were led by external facilitators Socionaut, a Czech-based interdisciplinary practice with expertise in co-design. The young citizens work in a manner that exemplifies European cooperation, in the same way spa culture has connected nations in the past.
The project gave the reins to the young people to shape a Youth Forum, bringing the next generation into decision-making about the management of the towns they live in. The Youth Forum is ongoing; it will be involved in future General Assemblies and an annual budget has been ringfenced to implement their ideas.
The participants were aged between 12-15 years – the group least often engaged with. INTERSPACE recognised the value of their ideas and sparked their enthusiasm for protecting irreplaceable cultural traditions.
The European Spa as a Transnational Public Space and Social Metaphor
The European Spa as a Transnational Public Space and Social Metaphor (2019-2022) is part of the HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) funding initiative of the European Union devoted to the topic Public Spaces: Culture and Integration in Europe.
The project investigates how the European spa, with its characteristic institutions such as the Kurpark, sanatorium, grand hotel and casino, developed into a transnational public space and functioned as a stage for the negotiation of political, social and cultural issues of European relevance.
The project explored the tensions between the medicalisation of the spas versus the role of entertainment, sociability and consumption. It also analysed the influence of the welfare state, public health discourses and new ideologies on the perception of bodies and body politics in the spas and resorts.
In literature, taking the waters and visiting a spa town are common themes. This stems from the nature of spa towns as meeting places, where people of different nationalities, religions and classes cross paths.
Consequently, the spa in literature is often used as a social metaphor in a more general sense, as ‘paradise on earth’, a model of the perfect society or a hideaway from the impositions of everyday life.
European Thermal Heritage Day 2020
On Friday 16 October 2020, the third European Thermal Heritage Day was held under the theme “Thermal Architecture”.
Organised by the European Historic Thermal Towns Association (EHTTA), network carrier of the European Route of Historic Thermal Towns, the event – initially foreseen to be held in Baden Baden (Germany) – took place in the form of an online conference.
The online conference was round up by a Digital Walking Tour through “Thermal Architecture” in Baden-Baden, accessible below and on EHTTA’s YouTube channel.
