This open access book identifies various forms of heritage destruction and analyses their causes. It proposes strategies for avoiding and solving conflicts, based on integrating heritage into the ...2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It reflects on the identity-building role of heritage, on multidimensional conflicts and the destruction of heritage, and considers conflict-solving strategies and future perspectives. Furthermore, it engages theoretically and practically with the concepts of responsibility, reconciliation and sustainability, relating mainly to four Sustainable Development Goals, i.e. SDGs 4 (education), 11 (e.g. World Heritage), 13 (climate action) and 17 (partnerships for the goals). More than 160 countries have inscribed properties on the UNESCO World Heritage list since the World Heritage Convention came into force. Improvements in the implementation of the Convention, such as the Global Strategy for a Representative, Balanced and Credible World Heritage List, have occurred, but other conflicts have not been solved. The book advocates for a balanced distribution of properties and more effective strategies to represent the global diversity of cultural and natural heritage. Furthermore it highlights the importance of heritage in identity building.
This open access book focuses on the management of transboundary UNESCO World Heritage sites in the Africa region. It highlights the region as a model of best practices on cross-border collaboration ...in view of enforcing the conservation of the site, engaging with local communities, and fighting against (in some cases) extremist groups inhabiting these sites. It also addresses the role of the World Heritage Convention in promoting transboundary cooperation and offers both an analysis and a list of priorities for improving the effective management of transboundary properties in sub-Saharan Africa defined. This book presents chapters from experts, site managers, technical and financial partners, academics, and representatives of the private sector from 20 African countries and 15 institutions involved in African heritage management. It provides an opportunity to share current and planned initiatives at the transboundary sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, including the Maloti-Drakensberg Park (South Africa, Lesotho), W-Arly-Pendjari Complex (Benin, Burkina Faso, Niger), Sangha Trinational (Cameroon, Congo, Central African Republic), and Mosi-oa-Tunya / Victoria Falls (Zambia, Zimbabwe). The publication further discusses African sites that could eventually be proposed for extension or nomination to the UNESCO World Heritage List in collaboration with the local and indigenous communities. This book is suitable for heritage specialists and readers interested in cross-border collaborations.
This book is made up of contributions dealing with heritage stones from different countries around the world. The stones are described, as well as their use in vernacular and contemporaneous ...architecture. Heritage stones are those stones that have special significance in human culture. Examples include some very important stones that have been either neglected because they are no longer extracted, or stones that have great significance in commercial terms but knowledge of their national and/or international heritage has not been well documented. In this collection of articles, we have tried to spread awareness of architectural heritage around the world, the natural stones that have been used in its construction, and the need to preserve historical quarries that once provided the source of such stones. Historical quarries are linked to regional culture and tradition. Because of the specific technical and aesthetical characteristics of heritage stones, which have lasted for centuries, these historical quarries should be preserved to be able to use the stones for the proper restoration of monuments and historical buildings to avoid negative actions that can be observed in many places in the restoration of buildings, which are some times part of World Heritage sites. The final intention of this book is to continuosly grow the interest on this fascinating subject of heritage stones.
The title of the Series «Sapere l’Europa, sapere d’Europa» voices the desire to investigate facets of the process of European integration without disregarding its most weighty, however controversial ...and bureaucratic, aspects, yet looking beyond them. The main intent is thus to make room for vision, feelings, imagination. In this fourth volume, Cultural Heritage. Scenarios 2015-2017, the different profiles of the CH, tangible and intangible, are undoubtedly presented in an international and interdisciplinary perspective. Yet, as the constant reference to the Faro Convention proves, “practices, knowledge and collective traditions” – be they nested or not in the humus of Venice and the Veneto Region – still distinctively taste of Europe.
Heritage work has had a uniquely wide currency in Africa's politics. Secure within the pages of books, encoded in legal statutes, encased in glass display cases and enacted in the panoply of court ...ritual, the artefacts produced by the heritage domain have become a resource for government administration, a library for traditionalists and a marketable source of value for cultural entrepreneurs. The Politics of Heritage in Africa draws together disparate fields of study - history, archaeology, linguistics, the performing arts and cinema - to show how the lifeways of the past were made into capital, a store of authentic knowledge that political and cultural entrepreneurs could draw from. This book shows African heritage to be a mode of political organisation, a means by which the relics of the past are shored up, reconstructed and revalued as commodities, as tradition, as morality or as patrimony.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN in 2015 have influenced the actions of international and intergovernmental organisations and governments around the world, and have dictated ...priorities for international aid spending. Culture, including heritage, is often presented as fundamental to addressing the SDGs: since 2010, the United Nations has adopted no fewer than five major policy recommendations that assert its importance as a driver and enabler of development. Yet, heritage is marginalized from the Sustainable Development Goals. Rethinking Heritage for Sustainable Development constitutes a substantial and original assessment of whether and how heritage has contributed to three key dimensions of sustainable development (namely poverty reduction, gender equality and environmental sustainability) within the context of its marginalisation from the Sustainable Development Goals and from previous international development agendas. Sophia Labadi adopts a novel, inclusive, large-scale and systematic approach, providing the first comprehensive history of the international approaches on culture (including heritage) for development, from 1970 to the present day. This book is also the first to assess the negative and positive impacts of all the international projects implemented in sub-Saharan Africa by a consortium of UN organisations that aimed to provide evidence for the contribution of heritage for development in time for the negotiation of the SDGs. The book’s conclusions provide recommendations for rethinking heritage for development, while reflecting on the major shortcomings of the selected projects.
Creating and Governing Cultural Heritage in the European Union provides an interdisciplinary examination of the ways in which European cultural heritage is created, communicated, and governed via the ...European Heritage Label scheme. Drawing on ethnographic field research conducted at sites in ten countries that have been awarded with the European Heritage Label, the authors of the book approach heritage as an entangled social, spatial, temporal, discursive, narrative, performative, and embodied process. Recognising that heritage is inherently political and used by diverse actors as a tool for re-imagining communities, identities, and borders, and for generating notions of inclusion and exclusion in Europe, the book also considers the idea of Europe itself as a narrative. Chapters tackle issues such as multilevel governance of heritage; geopolitics of border-crossings and border-making; participation and non-participation; and embodiment and affective experience of heritage. Creating and Governing Cultural Heritage in the European Union advances heritage studies with an interdisciplinary approach that utilises and combines theories and conceptualizations from critical geopolitics, political studies, EU and European studies, cultural policy research, and cultural studies. As such, the volume will be of interest to scholars and students engaged in the study of heritage, politics, belonging, the EU, ideas and narratives of Europe.
Urban heritage conundrum Urban built environments are spatial and material archives. Streets, buildings, open spaces, or infrastructures are registers of historical negotiations and repositories of ...data. Stories of power, geopolitics, economic systems, labour and culture can be revealed through road names and construction materials, portals and pediments, park benches and chimneys. Embodying our desires, needs, and resources, they condition how we live and interact with each other, and trigger countless reinterpretations and re-appropriations. Most of this dense layering is not immediately legible; it has not been decoded. Rather it is part of a more intuitive, lived sense of “urbanity” that generates contemporary individual and collective senses of identity and belonging. These complex urban palimpsests form the constitutive stages upon, with and against which everyday and extraordinary cultural life is performed.
Reclaiming the Past examines the post-antique history of Argos and how the city's archaeological remains have been perceived and experienced since the late eighteenth century by both local residents ...and foreign visitors to the Greek Peloponnese. The first western visitors to Argos—a city continuously inhabited for six millennia—invariably expected to encounter landscapes described in classical texts—yet what they found fell far short of those expectations. At the same time, local meanings attributed to ancient sites reflected an understanding of the past at odds with the supposed expertise of classically educated outsiders.Jonathan M. Hall details how new views of Argos emerged after the Greek War of Independence (1821–1830) with the adoption of national narratives connecting the newly independent kingdom to its ancient Hellenic past. With rising local antiquarianism at the end of the nineteenth century, new tensions surfaced between conserving the city's archaeological heritage and promoting urban development. By carefully assessing the competing knowledge claims between insiders and outsiders over Argos's rich history, Reclaiming the Past addresses pressing questions about who owns the past.
Diversity of Belonging in Europe analyzes conflicting notions of identity and belonging in contemporary Europe. Addressing the creation, negotiation, and (re) use of diverse spaces and places of ...belonging, the book examines their fascinating complexities in the context of a changing Europe. Taking an innovative interdisciplinary approach, the volume examines renegotiations of belonging played out through cultural encounters with difference and change, in diverse public spaces and contested places. Highlighting the interconnections between social change and culture, heritage, and memory, the chapters analyze multilayered public spaces and the negotiations over culture and belonging that are connected to them. Through analyses of diverse case studies, the editors and authors draw out the significance of the participation or exclusion of differing community, grassroots, and activist groups in such practices and discourses of belonging in relation to the contemporary emergence of identity conflicts and political uses of the past across Europe. They analyze the ways in which people’s sense of belonging is connected to cultural, heritage, and memory practices undertaken in different public spaces, including museums, cultural and community centres, city monuments and built heritage, neglected urban spaces, and online fora. Diversity of Belonging in Europe provides a valuable contribution to the existing bodies of work on identities, migration, public space, memory, and heritage. The book will be of interest to scholars and students with an interest in contested belonging, public spaces, and the role of culture and heritage. Susannah Eckersley is Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University, UK, an Associated Research Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam, Germany, and the Project Leader of en/counter/points – a collaborative European research project on public spaces and belonging funded by HERA. Her expertise is in memory, museums, difficult heritage, migration, identities, and belonging. Claske Vos is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of European Studies at the Humanities Faculty of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her current work focuses on the intersection of EU funding, cultural activism, and enlargement. Her expertise is in European cultural policy, cultural heritage, Southeast Europe, and European identity formation.