BEZALEL ACADEMY OF ARTS AND DESIGN

Their core work

Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design is Israel's oldest and most prominent art and design school, based in Jerusalem. In the H2020 context, the academy contributes design thinking, spatial analysis, and creative methodologies to European research consortia working on heritage, landscape, and urban transformation. Their practical value lies in bridging artistic and spatial disciplines with policy-relevant questions about how communities relate to their built and cultural environment. They bring a non-European, Mediterranean perspective to debates that are often dominated by Western European institutions.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Their early H2020 engagement (HERILAND, starting 2019) centred on broad conceptual questions: landscape as heritage, democratic access to heritage, and the social effects of shifting demographies and digital change on cultural landscapes. By 2021, with CONSIDER, the focus became more applied and urban: industrial heritage sites as concrete assets for city regeneration, with an emphasis on governance models and sustainable management practice. The trajectory moves from theoretical framing of heritage in landscape toward practical urban policy tools — suggesting the academy is positioning itself as a partner where design expertise meets urban governance.

Bezalel is moving from conceptual heritage research toward applied urban heritage management, making them an increasingly relevant partner for projects at the intersection of cultural policy, city planning, and community governance.

How they like to work

Bezalel has participated exclusively as a consortium partner — never as coordinator — across both H2020 projects, suggesting they prefer or are positioned as specialist contributors rather than project leaders. Their 39 unique partners across 13 countries despite only two projects indicates involvement in large, geographically diverse consortia, which is consistent with MSCA-RISE and MSCA-ITN schemes that inherently require broad international networks. This profile makes them a reliable specialist node rather than a coordinating hub.

With 39 unique consortium partners across 13 countries from just two projects, Bezalel operates within large, internationally distributed research networks. Their Israeli base adds geographic and cultural diversity that is relatively rare in H2020 heritage consortia, which tend to be dominated by EU institutions.

What sets them apart

Bezalel is one of very few Middle Eastern art and design institutions active in H2020 heritage research, giving consortia both geographic diversity and a genuinely distinct cultural perspective on European heritage questions. As Israel's leading design school, they bring visual, spatial, and material culture expertise that humanities or social science departments at European universities typically cannot replicate. For consortium builders, adding Bezalel signals interdisciplinary credibility and extends the geographic footprint of the network beyond the EU.

Highlights from their portfolio

• HERILAND
  The largest of the two projects by budget (€527,002) and the most conceptually ambitious, addressing cultural heritage governance across European landscapes through a co-creation lens — a strong thematic fit for design-led institutions.
• CONSIDER
  Tackles the timely challenge of repurposing industrial heritage for urban development, a policy-relevant topic across post-industrial European cities, with Bezalel contributing design and spatial thinking to the governance framework.