Cultural Heritage Education In The Everyday Landscape

This book summarizes work being undertaken within the School Activates Resources—stitching the lost heritage of the suburbs (ScAR) project, which addressed cultural heritage in a broad sense, as a system of values identified by the populations and in constant evolution. This tangible and intangible heritage fuels the promotion of intergenerational and intercultural dialogue and represents an opportunity for resilient social and territorial development. The book ponders the experience gained and the points of view of the different disciplines involved, examines issues such as children and youth participation in civil life or education in cultural heritage and landscape, and presents real-world experiences of heritage education in everyday landscape in difficult contexts and/or concerning poorly recognized and valued cultural heritage.

Heritage and landscape education is crucial to training young people in active and responsible citizenship, protection of the public assets, appreciation of the cultural diversity and intergenerational dialogue. Therefore, it cannot be limited to sporadic experiences and on outstanding heritage and contexts but must be transdisciplinary, inclusive and practicable everywhere. This book relates the research and action project “Scuola Attiva Risorse” (ScAR), winner of the Polisocial Award that recognizes research for social purposes at the Politecnico di Milano. The text describes an experimental and innovative action delivered within the fragile context of the urban peripheries. This participatory process involved schools, universities, cultural institutions, administrations and private actors in interpreting and enhancing the “hidden” cultural heritage in Milan’s fringe neighbourhoods.

A collection of seventeen essays examining the field of American cultural landscapes past and present. The role of J. B. Jackson and his influence on the field is a explored in many of them.

This book studies how people negotiate difficult heritage within their everyday lives, focusing on memory, belonging, and identity. The starting point for the examination is that temporalities lie at the core of understanding this negotiation and that the connection between temporalities and difficult heritage remains poorly understood and theorized in previous research. In order to fully explore the temporalities of difficult heritage, the book investigates places in which the incident of violence originated within different time periods. It examines one example of modern violence (Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina), one example of where the associated incident occurred during medieval times (the Gazimestan monument in Kosovo), and one example of prehistoric violence (Sandby borg in Sweden). The book presents new theoretical perspectives andprovides suggestions for developing sites of difficult heritage, and will thus be relevant for academic researchers, students, and heritage professionals.

Cultural heritage is increasingly recognized for its contributions to the transition to climate action, and heritage education can play an important role in developing climate adaptation competencies. These can foster positive dialogs surrounding climate change, shift attitudes and inspire actions. However, achieving these goals requires bridging the gap between policy, practice and local capacity building, as well as integrating a multi- and transdisciplinary approach into traditional higher education curricula and models. Bringing together knowledge, practice and experiences from different disciplinary silos, this book provides a wide set of innovative teaching and learning methods, tools and pedagogical models that can be adapted to heritage education in order to address climate issues. Organized into four parts, Heritage Education for Climate Action covers a wide array of international experiences, real-life cases and practices, focusing on heritage and resilience building, vulnerability and risk assessment, climate change adaptation, mitigation and policymaking. This book is therefore a source of suggestions and ideas for scholars, educators and professionals who want to develop future climate leadership and contribute to the transition of heritage education toward sustainable development and climate action.

Heritage, as an area of research and learning, often deals with difficult historical questions, due to the strong emotions and political commitments that are often at stake. In this, it poses particular challenges for teachers, museum educators and the publics they serve. Guided by a shared focus on these “sensitive pasts,” the contributors to this volume draw on new theoretical and empirical research to provide valuable insights into heritage pedagogy. Together they demonstrate the potential of heritage as a historical-educational domain that transcends myopic patriotism, parochialism and simplistic relativism, helping to enhance critical and sophisticated historical thinking.

One of our deepest needs is for a sense of identity and belonging. A common feature in this is human attachment to landscape and how we find identity in landscape and place. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a remarkable flowering of interest in, and understanding of, cultural landscapes. With these came a challenge to the 1960s and 1970s concept of heritage concentrating on great monuments and archaeological locations, famous architectural ensembles, or historic sites with connections to the rich and famous. Managing Cultural Landscapes explores the latest thought in landscape and place by: airing critical discussion of key issues in cultural landscapes through accessible accounts of how the concept of cultural landscape applies in diverse contexts across the globe and is inextricably tied to notions of living history where landscape itself is a rich social history record widening the notion that landscape only involves rural settings to embrace historic urban landscapes/townscapes examining critical issues of identity, maintenance of traditional skills and knowledge bases in the face of globalization, and new technologies fostering international debate with interdisciplinary appeal to provide a critical text for academics, students, practitioners, and informed community organizations discussing how the cultural landscape concept can be a useful management tool relative to current issues and challenges. With contributions from an international group of authors, Managing Cultural Landscapes provides an examination of the management of heritage values of cultural landscapes from Australia, Japan, China, USA, Canada, Thailand, Indonesia, Pacific Islands, India and the Philippines; it reviews critically the factors behind the removal of Dresden and its cultural landscape from World Heritage listing and gives an overview of Historic Urban Landscape thinking.

The idea that the heritage of nature is fundamentally cultural is provocative to many, but it is becoming increasingly accepted in the context of heritage preservation. It is argued here that a person’s perspective on natural vs. cultural heritage as a contested patrimony is, to some extent, governed by one’s intellectual and geographical position. In discourses influenced by the natural sciences culture is a heritage of nature, whereas in those deriving from the humanities and social sciences, nature is defined socio-culturally. There is also, however, a geographical dimension to how one looks at the nature culture relation. From at least the time of Aristotle, the North has been identified with a cultural heritage thought to derive from the northern natural environment. It was no longer culture, as represented by the architectural monuments of the South, but the natural landscape that provided the measure for both natural and cultural heritage, as the natural landscape and its ecosystems were put in focus. This essay provides a contemporary picture of the long-standing contestation between natural and cultural heritage that provided the basis for the northern perspective taken in these essays. This book was previously published as a special issue of The International Journal of Heritage Studies.