Locus of Underwater Cultural Heritage (UCH) in Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP): A Data-Driven, Place-Based and Participatory Planning Perspective

During the last decade, the rising interest in the marine world has enriched the planning discourse with issues such as the protection, preservation, sustainable and resilient exploitation of marine resources. At the European level, Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) has come to the forefront in this respect, as part of the EU blue growth strategy and a powerful tool for facilitating the transition from traditional maritime sectoral approaches to an integrated, place-based, data-driven, participatory and multi-dimensional new maritime planning rationale. Among the maritime resources concerned, Underwater Cultural Heritage (UCH) gains ground as a valuable asset in pursuing developmental objectives of coastal/insular communities. Towards this end, MSP endeavours need to successfully incorporate UCH management and compromise UCH-related uses with other sectoral ones in the sea. Along these lines, this paper aims at highlighting the context of sustainable and resilient UCH management within the MSP realm by innovatively integrating the conceptual framework for its understanding and the key methodological steps for its implementation. The aforementioned context is parallelized to current UCH management reality in order to explore UCH handling within MSP in practice; and illuminate successful UCH management in MSP approaches in selected countries/regions at the EU level.