UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

Heritage Changes

2023-09-05

Cornelius Holtorf has been organizing (since before the pandemic!) and chaired a Roundtable Dialogue at the ICOMOS Scientific Symposium “Heritage Changes” during the ICOMOS General Assembly 2023 held in Sydney, Australia addressing the question “What does it mean to manage heritage for the future? How will heritage (have to) change”?  (4-8 September 2023).

The organisers of the symposium had framed the theme HERITAGE CHANGES like this:

The GA2023 theme seeks to examine the tumultuous changes taking place in the first years of the 2020s. Climate emergencies, conflict, COVID-19, lockdowns, closed borders, virtual meetings, and the Black Lives Matter movement have profoundly altered the ways in which the world is experienced. What has been the role of heritage in these events? What is changing in the field of heritage and what needs to change? What does heritage change – for example, in civil society, the environment, the economy, and in politics? And, in what ways is heritage a force for change and integral to creating a sustainable future?

During the roundtable we discussed among the panel and with an audience of 150+ how heritage changes and how heritage needs to change, whether or not the future can be decolonised, what the possibility of societal discontinuities and extinction might mean for managing heritage, and whether heritage holds liabilities for achieving sustainable development.

The participants included

  • Cornelius Holtorf (Chair)   UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures, Linnaeus University, Sweden
  • Vanicka Arora   University of Stirling, UK
  • Gabriel Caballero  Focal Point, ICOMOS SDG Working Group
  • Kate Clark   Public Value Consulting, Australia
  • Carolyn Hill  University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand
  • William Megarry   Focal Point, ICOMOS Climate Change & Heritage Working Group

 

 

PhD on heritage in urban planning

2023-04-21

Ulrika Söderström, PhD student in Archaeology at Linnaeus University and associated researcher at the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures, held on 21 April 2023 the final seminar (slutseminarium) ahead of her disputation expected to be held in the autumn. The seminar opponent was Björn Nilsson, Head of the Department of Cultural History at the University Museum of Bergen, Norway. 

Ulrika’s research is about archaeological heritage as a resource in socially sustainable urban development for the future. Her Doctoral research is supervised by Anders Högberg, with Cornelius Holtorf having responsibility as the internal examiner. Even Gustav Wollentz, another affiliated researcher of the UNESCO Chair, participated in the seminar.

Seminar opponent Björn Nilsson pointed among others to the relevance to Ulrika’s research of Johan Asplund’s work Theories about futures (Teorier om framtider, 1979), which was published in collaboration with the Swedish Committee for Future-Oriented Research.

All change please!

2021-06-09

Cornelius Holtorf presented a paper on “All change please: cultural heritage and sustainability,” for a virtual conference on International collaboration in a digital era – Fostering innovative minds for the future as part of the Swedish-Japanese co-project MIRAI 2.0 (9 June 2021). One of the aims of this initiative is to strengthen collaboration between Swedish and Japanese universities.

In his talk for ca 40 attendees, Holtorf emphasised the significance of culture and cultural heritage for sustainability and innovation.  The other contributions in the Sustainability section were from the natural sciences or dealt with policy and technology concerning the natural world. The other sections of the conference were about Ageing, Artificial Intelligence, Materials Science, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

It is time for the humanities (and the field of culture) to enter larger contexts of discussion about important issues!

Cultural heritage and the European Green Deal

2021-04-15

Cornelius Holtorf was interviewed by Sorina Buzatu for youris.com, an independent non-profit media agency promoting European innovation via TV media and the web. Her article is about cultural heritage and sustainability in the context of the European Green Deal, in which the words “heritage”, “art”, “culture” and “landscape” do not appear.

The article, published on 15 April 2021, discusses to what extent cultural heritage challenges or contributes to a sustainable future (read it here or here). Holtorf is quoted asking 

“What kind of cultural heritage will be needed in the next 20 to 30 years in order to make the life better? What can we do today about the heritage to maximise its benefit for the future? In some cases, that entails preservations, while in others, it demands us to choose some heritage more than others, or to create new heritage over time.”