UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

SDG 11 – week in Sweden!

2020-10-20

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?

Managing Heritage in Times of Crisis

2020-10-17

The ICOMOS 6ISCs Joint Meeting “Advancing Risk Management for the Shared Future” was held virtually on 17 October 2020, assembling ca 100 participants from around the world, with more being able to watch the recording afterwards. The aim of the meeting was to develop risk management for cultural heritage.

Cornelius Holtorf contributed with a paper on “The Significance of Managing Heritage Processes in Times of Crisis” in which he argued that risk management strategies should give more attention to managing processes and practices of heritage.

The paper is available as an oral presentation and in written form as part of the meeting’s proceedings.

Message in a bottle to the future?

2020-10-09

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).

Authenticity and Reconstruction

2020-10-05

Authenticity and the reconstruction of cultural heritage are today on the top of the agenda of heritage studies. They reemerged in the aftermath of natural disasters and human conflicts resulting in destructions of cultural heritage, such as the recent military conflicts in Syria.

Can, and, indeed, should, destruction be undone? Does the reconstruction of cultural heritage always lie in the best interests of the local population? How can heritage best contribute to future-making? What is the relationship between the values of a given heritage and the circumstances of its creation or re-creation?

The articles in a new special issue on Authenticity and Reconstruction of the International Journal of Cultural Property, edited by Cornelius Holtorf, explore some of these issues:

The papers are combining current thinking in different disciplines (psychology, architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, and archaeology) with practical examples from around the world. They derive from the pilot workshop of the ICOMOS University Forum, titled “A Contemporary Provocation: Reconstructions as Tools of Future-making“. Held on 13–15 March 2017 at ICOMOS’s international head- quarters in Paris, France, the workshop was co-organized by Cornelius Holtorf (Linnaeus University, Sweden), Loughlin Kealy (University College Dublin, Ireland), Toshiyuki Kono (ICOMOS/Kyushu University, Japan), and Marie-Laure Lavenir (ICOMOS, France). As an event of the ICOMOS University Forum, its aim was to stimulate dialogue between professional heritage consultants and academic heritage experts.

Various activities July – September 2020

2020-10-01

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 5th 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 5th 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 5th 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).