UNESCO

This week, Ulrika Söderström and Cornelius Holtorf attend the national SDG 11-week organised by FORMAS, the Swedish research council for sustainable development.

Sustainable Development Goal 11 is about Sustainable Cities and Communities. Within this goal, Target 11.4 aims to “strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage”. 

In one session (on 20 October), National Architect Helena Bjarnegård discussed the significance of urban planning by reminding us that a building may stand for a hundred years but an urban environment may survive for as much as a millennium. This is where heritage futures become important – how do we plan the cultural heritage for hundreds of years into the future?

Johan Joelsson and Jonatan Jacobsson published a beautiful book of illustrated essays entitled “Message in a bottle to the future: how we preserve our traces for 100,000 years“.

Surprisingly many of the texts and images engage with cultural and natural heritage that is directly relevant to heritage futures. There are essays about the Memory of Mankind, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the use of DNA Storage to preserve digital data, the remains of the city of Pripyat near Chernobyl, the destroyed Kiruna Town Hall which recently had to give way to the city’s mining operations,  and – not the least – the question of long-term memory of repositories of nuclear waste (which includes interviews with Anders and Cornelius).

Annalisa Bolin and Cornelius Holtorf co-organized (with V. Arora and Q. Ma) a session on “Reconstructing Reconstruction: Examining Meanings, Uses, and Policies” at the 5^th Bi-Annual Meeting of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (26-30 August 2020), featuring among others the papers

• Cornelius Holtorf “Reconstructing Heritage Processes”
• Annalisa Bolin “Old Heritage in the New Rwanda: Development, Progress, and Genocide Materiality”

Sarah May co-organized (with E. Kryder-Reid) a session on “Toxic Heritage“ at the 5^th Bi-Annual Meeting of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (26-30 August 2020), attracting ca 35 participants and featuring among others the papers

• Sarah May “Containment and Control: Toxic Heritage and liminal legacies”
• Cornelius Holtorf “The Future Heritage of Toxic Waste”

Cornelius Holtorf took part in a UN75 Dialogue informing future priorities for the United Nations on the occasion of its 75th Anniversary, held at the 5^th Bi-Annual Meeting of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (27 August 2020).

Anders Högberg and Cornelius Holtorf took part in the Kick-Off Meeting of the Expert Groups under the Working Party on Information, Data and Knowledge Management at the Nuclear Energy Agency, OECD (15 September 2020)

Anders Högberg and Cornelius Holtorf took part in the Kick-Off Meeting of the Expert Group on Awareness Preservation after Repository Closure under the Working Party on Information, Data and Knowledge Management at the Nuclear Energy Agency, OECD (16 September 2020)

Cornelius Holtorf participated in a one-day expert workshop on “Cultural Heritage and Climate Change: New Challenges and Perspectives for Research“, organised jointly by the European Commission’s Joint Programming Initiatives on Cultural Heritage and on Climate (17 September 2020).

Cornelius Holtorf participated in a Webinar on Integrating Heritage into the SDGs ‘Inclusive, Safe, Resilient and Sustainable Cities (SDG11) organised by the ICOMOS SDGs Working Group (24 September 2020).

I have been reading a wonderful study by Dolly Jørgensen on Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age (MIT Press, 2019). The book traces historical connections between emotions and conservation, in other words (as the subtitle has it) “histories of longing and belonging”. 

Here is an extract from her concluding chapter:

I would posit that the same applies for cultural heritage at large. Conservation of cultural heritage is motivated and driven by emotions and a sense of longing for what the heritage represents. In that sense, saving the heritage at the same time means to save ourselves…

Cornelius Holtorf and Anders Högberg (among others) are going to work in a new project funded by Kamprad Family Foundation 2020-2021.

The project is entitled “Post-Pandemic Tourism Development: Navigating Uncertainty in the Visitor Economy” and seeks to study how stakeholders in the visitor economy in and around Kalmar make sense of the uncertainty induced by the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. We will engage stakeholders in the visitor economy in a forward-looking process to open horizons that envision the present crisis as a chance to work towards a more sustainable future.

In 2012, the European Foresight Platform, a network building program supported by the European Commission,organized in Brussels, Belgium, a one-day workshop with a total of 13 participants on The Future of Cultural Heritage.

The aim of this gathering was to identify trends and drivers of change that may impact upon cultural heritage in Europe, in order to support strategic thinking in the heritage sector concerning the creation, management, preservation, promotion, use and funding of cultural heritage in the coming decades.

The resulting report contains an outline of a number of relevant trends and developments in society, technology, economy, ecology and politics and a discussion of their potential significance and relevant implications for cultural heritage. Interesting!