UNESCO

2018 was the European Year of Cultural Heritage (EYCH). Given its slogan “Our heritage: where the past meets the future” Anders Högberg and I argued last February that the cultural heritage sector is badly prepared for the future and should start assessing the needs for heritage of the future and develop strategies for meeting them.

Now, one year later, we can read in Culture Action Europe’s principles and actions for a forward-looking legacy of the European Year of Cultural Heritage that among the gaps that have been identified during the EYCH is

Last week Cornelius Holtorf met up with some fellow future archaeologists from the art project “Centre for Documentation of the Future” in Berlin!

Looking back at a future vision of Hamburg (part of the Walhalla II project):

We just discovered that there is a blog called “Heritage Futures” run by Ian Baxter and David Gill. They seem to focus on a wide range of heritage management issues, often to do with tourism issues. Take a look!

The UNESCO Chair at Linnaeus University invites applications for a Post-doctoral Fellowship (2 years full-time) in Heritage Futures. Apply by 5 April 2019. International applicants welcome.

More information here.

“Om vi inte kan bevara samlingarna på ett bra sätt så har vi ingenting att visa i framtiden”. — Så presenteras Riksrevisionens nya utredning Bevara samlingarna.

Problemet är dock att framtida generationer kanske inte alls kommer att uppskatta vad vi lämnar efter oss, och dessutom är vårt problem att samlingar ofta snarare är för stora än för små…

Vi vill göra vårt bästa för att bidra med gedigen framtidskompetens!

Cornelius Holtorf presented a talk entitled “Lessons for the Preservation of Records, Knowledge and Memory (RK&M) from Heritage Futures” at a Workshop on Information, Data and Knowledge Management of the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) attended by some 70 international specialists at the OECD, Paris (23 January 2019).

He suggested, among others, to explore two issues deriving from a perspective interpreting nuclear waste as cultural heritage:

1. How do we manage futures that in significant ways differ from the present and cannot be sufficiently predicted or controlled by us? What does it mean to allow for construction, change and renewal in the context of RK&M?
2. How do we manage future controversies among stakeholders as an asset for RK&M? What does it take to retain or regain relevance as a result of conflicts related to radioactive waste management?

He also recommended for the Working Group on the Preservation of RK&M across Generations at the Nuclear Energy Agency to keep reaching out, both intellectually and in society: broad collaborations addressing cross-sectoral challenges benefit everybody and attract broad support, not the least in the context of the global Agenda 2030.

Even Claudio Pescatore attended the Paris Workshop.

The Call is out for ICOMOS members (in particular emerging professionals) to participate in our planned meeting on “Thinking and planning the future in heritage management”, Amsterdam, 11-14 June 2019.

How do we perceive the future? Which future do heritage professionals work for? What heritage will be needed in the future (and how do we know)? How can we build capacity in future thinking among heritage professionals worldwide?

Information and Memory for Future Decision Making

Claudio Pescatore, affiliated researcher at Linnaeus University and associated with our UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures, completed a vision and discussion document on preserving information and memory over centuries and millennia in the context of sustainable development and the future human environment, available here.

The document will provide a basis for discussion at a workshop to be held in Stockholm, 21-23 May 2019, on understanding and improving practices for preserving information and memory of projects that may entail long-term legacies for land use and the future human environment. Pescatore’s document will help starting a broad-based reflection in Sweden and elsewhere on how to aid future generations maintain or regain awareness of some of the most relevant environmental legacies that they will inherit – notably nuclear waste. 

Stephen Stead of the University of Southampton in the UK believes that archaeological data may be useful to the future and has been inspired by our work.

Here is a short clip about his vision for the future, offering a motivation for current practitioners to engage in a process of thinking about integrating access to existing archaeological documentation into a strategy for engaging with the future.