UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

Bye Bye Bryggen!

2026-09-20

I have been listening to a very interesting audiowalk through Bergen’s World Heritage Site of Bryggen and the city’s climate future. The title is Bye Bye Bryggen.

The audioguide was produced by Umami Productions and they describe the task as follows (automated translation of the Norwegian original):

The World Heritage Site of Bryggen is located right by the water in Bergen, Europe’s rainiest city. What will happen to the World Heritage Site in the future is an open question, given that the problems caused by flooding and storm surges will become increasingly severe as the years go by. In Bergen, intensive work is underway to assess the future in order to make informed decisions about how infrastructure needs to change. However, the primary language of climate research is numbers and graphs—and it can be difficult to understand their real implications, even for experts working with future analyses.

To solve the task at hand, Umami wrote two stories based on very different scenarios. They describe the underlying key ideas as follows:

Bye Bye Bryggen is a fictional story about the lives of two siblings. They are born in the early 2020s and experience the great storm that hits Bryggen in 2072. Almost thirty years later, one of the siblings’ grandchildren is given a school assignment: go home and interview your relatives about something that has happened in their lives. Tonje, the granddaughter, has always wondered what really happened during the storm. The only thing she knows is that her grandfather, her mother, and her grandfather’s sister were at Bryggen when the storm struck, where the family had a shop. And that her grandfather and his sister have not spoken to each other since then.

Bye Bye Bryggen is based on the idea that all our decisions—both major political decisions and the small decisions we make in our everyday lives—affect the future. This is what we explore through the story of the siblings. Their private conflict mirrors larger conflicts in the society in which they live. The concept allows you to choose between two different futures. One takes place in a world where major conflicts have been resolved through various forms of agreement. The other is a future in which the conflicts remain unresolved. The idea is that the different versions will stimulate conversations about what kind of future we want, what we are prepared to sacrifice, and which values matter when we are forced to compromise because of climate change.

The project may be called Applied Heritage Futures: set in 2100, it makes audiences think about the role of cultural heritage in managing the relations between present and future societies. This is clearly expressed at the very end of the audioguide when the narrator gives this advice:

“Remember, there are endless possible futures, and whatever future may come, we create it together.”

You can listen to the two versions of the audioguide through The World Heritage of Bryggen at Bergen by downloading the Climaginaries app for free. Highly recommended!

New Film: Dialogues in Learning

2026-09-17

“Given the state of the world today, the many crises that we face …we need to be talking about existential things, if you like. And we need to talk about existential things in ways that become relatable in everyday terms. And heritage gives us the language to do that.” (Nick Shepherd, Aarhus University)

“Over the past two days we’ve very much been focusing on what it means to be a human and be a researcher at the same time. So it’s about bringing our personal experiences into conversations of heritage and climate change. And I think that is something I will definitely take back with me.” (Hana Morel, Historic England).

The workshop Climate, Heritage, and Policy: Dialogues in Learning held 27-29 May 2026 at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden (Kalmar Dialogues) brought together the vast scope and urgency of climate change with ideas and activities that engaged participants in learning and collaborating as their whole human selves. Twenty researchers and practitioners in heritage and climate from across Sweden and from Norway, Denmark, the UK, and France used art, local exploration, the practice of dialogue, and many different conversations with each other to find new ways to talk about what is changing in environments around us and how we are experiencing and taking in these changes – and from all this, what new things we can see to do together next.

In this short film about the workshop, it is possible to see not only what participants did, but hear in their own words how this approach gave them new perspectives and energy for the work they do. Watch here.

This workshop was a project of the UNESCO Chair for Heritage Futures, led by Marcy Rockman with support of Cornelius Holtorf and funding from the Swedish Research Council and developed in collaboration with and moderated by Creative Futures. A full report on this workshop also has been prepared and is available here.

New Report: Dialogues in Learning

How do you learn an environment you don’t know? How do you see and understand change in an environment that you do know? And what do you do with this understanding – how do you act with it and how do you share it?

These questions were the foundation of the workshop Climate, Heritage, and Policy: Dialogues in Learning held 27-29 May 2026 at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden. It recognized that new environments have always challenged us to learn them. Now the many environments in which we live are changing rapidly. These include our physical environments of course, but also our social, cultural, economic, and technological environments. Which raises the question – how are we learning them? Twenty researchers and practitioners in heritage and climate change from across Sweden and from Norway, Denmark, the UK, and France used a framework of learning and dialogue to look beyond what is changing in our many environments to explore how we gather, manage, store, use, and share our experiences of these changes.

This workshop was a project of the UNESCO Chair for Heritage Futures, led by Marcy Rockman with support of Cornelius Holtorf, funding from the Swedish Research Council, and developed in collaboration with and moderated by Creative Futures. A report on this workshop is now complete and shared below.

Key findings include:

  • People matter: personal experience and identity are integral to professional practice and shape questions that are asked and how climate and heritage work are done. 
  • Dialogue and play are underused but high-value tools for both collaboration and public engagement; participants ranked dialogic practice as the single most valuable skill to carry forward. 
  • Collaboration was the most-requested resource (ahead of time or funding), signaling strong appetite for interdisciplinary and cross-institutional partnerships. 
  • Landscape learning proved a useful lens for reframing climate change from a focus on measurements and damage to processes of adaptation and knowledge-building, and policy as a repository of environmental information everyone has a stake in updating. 
  • Cultural heritage is an asset to responses to climate change — the many ways in which cultural heritage is approached, shared, and engaged are essential tools for advancing climate justice, beyond and in addition to what should be protected from climate impacts. 

This Kalmar Dialogues workshop has already catalyzed new collaborations, including a peace-building grant proposal centered on the Struve Geodetic Arc, an invitation to join Sweden’s National Heritage Board climate expert group, and new museum-practice exchanges. This report recommends further developing dialogic skills as part of the program of the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures, and continuing to build a community of practice around the truth & reconciliation and landscape learning frameworks. 

The outcomes of this workshop demonstrate that integrating climate change, cultural heritage, and policy needs more than data — it requires shared frameworks, dialogue, and trust-building across disciplines. This workshop offers an initial, replicable model for this work, with strong participant enthusiasm to extend it further.

The Climate, Heritage, and Policy: Dialogues in Learning Report is available here.

Climate, Heritage, and Policy

2026-05-30

Around 20 specialists in cultural heritage and climate change from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, the UK, and the US attended the workshop on “Climate, Heritage, and Policy: Dialogues in Learning”, organised by Marcy Rockman at Linnaeus University on campus Kalmar (27-30 May 2026). The workshop was supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council.

The workshop related directly to heritage futures, i.e. the role of cultural heritage in managing the relations between present and future societies. Its aim was to develop a framework of learning and dialogue to promote a body of practice that integrates across fields of climate change, archaeology/heritage, and governance practices.

The discussions generally prioritised people over objects, change over preservation, global over national concerns, and the future over the past.

The workshop asked a series of timely questions over the course of the four days. What I have been taking away includes thoughts about the following issues (others will have taken away different thoughts):

  • how are we to discuss climate change in relation to cultural heritage that is deeply problematic?
  • what happens when we recognise that knowledge about climate change is based on social truths?
  • how are we to draw on the potential of cultural heritage to make climate change deeply personal?
  • are there better terms than the homogenising notion of “community” for describing the humans affected by climate change?
  • is unlearning possibly more important than learning?
  • how can we best harness the power of engaging with collaborators as human beings rather than as experts?
  • is climate change necessarily a threat or can it also be considered as an opportunity?
  • who do we want to be and how do we want to live, now and in the future?

Among the ways of working were group work, artistic expression, and fieldwork in Kalmar, involving all the senses.

The creativity and playfulness in methods amounted to what participant called “epistemic disobedience”. It also resulted in much enjoyment among the participants and led to concrete discussions of future collaboration in a number of specific contexts.

Importantly, we had glorious summer weather throughout the workshop and even on the excursion day to Öland on the final day!

The following members of the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures participated in addition to Marcy Rockman and myself: Anders Högberg, Gustav Wollentz.

A more detailed report about the precise aims and results of the workshop is being prepared and will be made available via this blog in due course.

Hopp och kultur

2025-12-09

Idag 9 dec 2025 höll vi en paneldebatt till temat “Att skapa hopp med kulturvetenskap – bortom katastrofen” på Kulturhuset Strömmen inom ramen för Nobelveckan i Kalmar kommun. Med

  • Johan Höglund, professor i engelska litteratur
  • Felicia Stenberg, doktorand i engelska litteratur
  • Ulrika Söderström, forskningssamordnare, Kalmar läns museum
  • Gustav Wollentz, lektor i arkeologi
  • Cornelius Holtorf, professor i arkeologi

Det blev en bra debatt mellan panelen och med publiken. Också en tjuvstart för ett nytt gemensamt projekt 2026 om Hopemaking…

Foto: Mathias Lafolie

Sammanfattning: vi lever i en tid då framtiden ofta framställs som hotfull – klimatkris, krig, oro och kollaps präglar både nyheter och populärkultur. Samtidigt finns ett växande behov av att föreställa sig något annat: att tänka och känna bortom katastrofen.

Kulturvetenskapen kan här spela en avgörande roll. Genom att undersöka våra berättelser, bilder och idéer om framtiden kan den hjälpa oss att odla hopp och handlingskraft i krisernas tid. Det är utgångspunkten för eftermiddagens samtal.

A Heritage Futures Voice at NY Climate Week

2025-09-29

Marcy Rockman, visiting researcher with the UNESCO Chair for Heritage Futures, spoke in a live-stream hosted by the climate action group We Don’t Have Time from Stockholm to NY Climate Week on September 24, 2025.

The event focused on the dismantling of climate change science in the US and what can be done broadly to rebuild trust and craft new paths of action. It began with Marcy describing the sequence of events that brought her to Sweden. She shared some of her experiences as lead for climate change and cultural heritage with the US National Park Service, a role that was dissolved under the first Trump administration, and then how capacity to do her subsequent work at the intersection of climate, heritage, and policy was decimated under the start of the second Trump term. She then noted her connections with the UNESCO Chair and how their successful application to the Swedish Research Council for a visiting researcher grant. She said, “I had to say no to giving a talk in Sweden and this turned into an opportunity to move to Sweden. I’m beyond heartsick at all that is happening in the US now, I also know I’m deeply lucky to be here.”

Maria Bergkvist, deputy director of Klimatklubben was also part of the event. Klimatklubben is an organization working to bring people together across Sweden to talk about climate change and take action together. Klimatklubben has started a new initiative organized around a study published earlier this year that found that a high percentage (greater than 75%) of people around the world want their governments to take more action in response to climate change, but a much smaller percentage talk about climate change with friends and family.

Although they came be part of the panel from different directions, both Marcy and Maria spoke about the power and importance of bringing people together locally and connecting with each other in a place, and that such gatherings and connections are essential to rebuilding trust and relationships. As well, Marcy found it encouraging that We Don’t Have Time and everyone involved considered research in heritage and the social science underlying the work of Klimatklubben to be essential parts of climate science and climate response.

A recording of the full panel is here: https://www.youtube.com/live/BMu36rxDECo

Heritage Futures – origins and significance

2025-01-30

In an interview published by the Association of Critical Heritage Studies, I am talking about origins and significance of ‘heritage futures’, both for me and my work and academically in a more general sense.

Specifically, I am answering the following questions:

  1. What inspired your interest in the concept of “heritage futures,” and how do you see this concept reshaping the field of heritage studies and archaeology?
  2. Your work challenges traditional approaches to heritage by emphasizing its dynamic nature in contemporary society. Could you provide some examples of how this approach has influenced your own research or projects?
  3. In your view, what is the role of archaeology and heritage studies in addressing global issues such as climate change, sustainability, and cultural identity? 

Climate action for living heritage

2024-12-08

Cornelius Holtorf was among a team of international experts contributing to a UNESCO Guidance note on climate action for living heritage, passed recently at the 19th Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in Asunción, Paraguay, 2 to 7 December 2024.

Among others, the Note refers to the significance of futures thinking in stating that

“The network of UNESCO Chairs and accredited non-governmental organizations should also be engaged in promoting research and education objectives, and in advocating for research programmes as a source of funding. Specific priorities for research might address:

  • (…)
  • engagement with the new fields of artificial intelligence and futures thinking;”

Gradually, heritage futures makes its way into UNESCO thinking regarding major challenges ahead…

Climate Heritage Breakthrough

2024-09-28

Congrats to the Climate Heritage Network has achieved a major breakthrough by securing a total of $ 1.5 million in private funding for a series of initiatives.

Most notably, the “Imagining Low Carbon, Just, Climate Resilient Futures through Culture and Heritage” Project” will address two complementary problems. While contemporary climate planning suffers from a pervasive failure to help people imagine plausible ways of living that are not wedded to the carbon economy and the systems that support it, cultural heritage practice is not sufficiently attentive to address the climate change crisis at a large enough scale. By increasing culture-based climate action, transforming climate policy via cultural heritage, and supporting a range of partner communities, funding from the Mellon Foundation will address both issues at once.

The new funding for this and a number of additional smaller projects, means that the Climate Heritage Network is not only able to scale-up its activities but also continues to extend its agenda towards finding new roles for cultural heritage in the context of the climate change crisis. It is a good example why cultural futures can make us hopeful!

The UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures is a sustaining member of the Climate Heritage Network.

Futures Activism

2024-07-26

I was among the very many passengers on the 200-or-so cancelled flights whose journeys and plans got interrupted by climate activists who had gotten onto the runways of Frankfurt Airport yesterday.

It meant for me four hours of queuing until I got rebooked as well as a full additional day of travelling to a new destination and a long train journey from there (as Kalmar is remote and the cancelled flight goes only twice a week). They also lost my baggage along the way, including the German bread, the cheese, and some fish, all of which will likely be unedible when I will eventually receive them. On top, there is subsequent office work at home to try and reclaim my extra costs from the airline or my travel insurance.

Despite all this, I still wasn’t hit extremely hard I’d say, but only because I was travelling without small children, during my holidays, and because of tough EU regulation protecting travellers’ rights (which made the airline and airport supply us with essentials, including a hotel and food). But this act of activism by activists certainly did add stress and affected my immediate future. Was it worth it, for them?

For some reason, two TV crews (Welt TV live and ZDF) chose me for interview while queuing, asking what I made of the climate activists’ action. This led to discussion with a fellow queuer on his way (or not) to London. Whereas I can understand, and even sympathise with the activists’ cause and their hope—and expectation—to be vindicated by distant future generations, I also insist on the fact that Germany is a state ruled by law. It is not a state where citizen activists decide themselves what is right or wrong for others to do, either now or in the future, including when and how to travel.

There are many worthwhile causes of primary and even of existential significance for present and future generations. There are people championing causes as diverse as world peace and global sustainability, gender equality and equal opportunities, global justice replacing the neoliberal economy, anti-racism and decolonialization, and a whole lot more…

But is it all worth risking our hard-won democratic system of representative and law-based governance? Is a kind of climate dictatorship legitimated by activists (resorting to methods of minor terrorism?) really such a great prospect – or would this risk precisely what makes citizens believe in their joint society and trust in state and government? Are we from now on all supposed to be disrupting the lives of others for the particular existential causes we believe in?

As for me, for example, I am quite perplexed by the fact that very many citizens seem to be more concerned by future climate change than by the mid-term prospect of a global war or other military conflicts in our own world region. But that does not make me try to halt physically, say, the massive current weapon exports to war areas like Ukraine – or disrupt the lives of the very many people supporting this.

In a strong democracy like Germany political activism should be done by voting or other dedicated mechanisms including demonstrations, legal cases, petitions, publications, etc. Europe is not the Wild West where the guys with the biggest guns call the shots.

All this was on my mind precisely because the activists had chosen the day before the opening of the Olympic Games in Paris for their action – but had they ever reflected on the meaning of the Olympics? The Resolution of the 2024 Games is entitled “Building a peaceful and better world through sport and the Olympic ideal.”

In sum, I hope the activists (probably feeling quite chuffed about the immediate impact of their action) will be persecuted and convicted by the courts and that some or all of all the extra costs can be recovered as a result.

For a better future!