Interactive sensory objects for improving access to heritage

In this project we explore how to enhance the experience and understanding of cultural heritage in museums and heritage sites by creating interactive multisensory objects collaboratively with artists, technologists and people with learning disabilities. We focus here on workshops conducted during the first year of a three year project in which people with learning disabilities each constructed a 'sensory box' to represent their experiences of Speke Hall, a heritage site in the UK. The box is developed further in later workshops which explore aspects of physicality and how to appeal to the entire range of senses, making use of Arduino technology and basic sensors to enable an interactive user experience.

Whither sporting heritage : reflections on debates in Victoria about Waverley Park and the Melbourne Cricket Ground

The successful nomination of Waverley Park to the Victorian Historic Register
proved as controversial as the stadium was during its thirty-year existence. The
nomination was accepted primarily on the grounds of the social historical value of the site, rather than its architectural or engineering qualities, but in fact a range of different social histories were in conflict during the registration process. Four of the social histories involved are outlined and their influence on the outcome assessed. Some of the implications for the evaluation of sporting heritage sites emerge therefrom (Hay, R., Lazenby, C., Lewis, N., Haig-Muir, M., Mewett, P., 2001).

Understanding public involvement with Australian heritage : a qualitative study using repertory grid analysis

Attempts to increase public participation in heritage related activities have had mixed success. Tourism to heritage sites remains an overt activity that many engage in, but other heritage related activities, such as nominating objects for formal heritage listing, are much rarer. Through a series of qualitative research activities, we examine the public perceptions of what constitutes "heritage" and "heritage - related" behaviours, in order to examine barriers to greater involvement. The findings are that heritage is important to many people, particularly on a personal level. Although initially uncertain about the validity of their views, our respondents defined heritage broadly, believing it to encompass a wide range of objects, places and experiences. Most respondents were undertaking the type of heritage-related behaviours that heritage managers would encourage, however the respondents did not recognise them as being heritage-related. Barriers to greater involvement include this uncertainty over the definition of heritage and a lack of confidence in their ability to effectively recognise and protect heritage. In addition to feeling uncertain about the heritage significance of their own actions and beliefs, the respondents felt even more uncertain about prescribing things of "national heritage value". This uncertainty stifles discussion and action. The solution appears to lay in celebrations of both individual and national heritage, to foster discussions and understanding of communalities across different cultural groups within the nation.

Role of daylight in preserving identities in heritage context

The narrow alleys and the small neighbourhood squares are the most recognisable urban configuration forms that highlight the fabrics of Old Cairo. Parts of Old Cairo are currently going through major conservation projects. The extent of the success of some of these projects in preserving the identity of the Cairene context is currently under scrutiny and has created a debate among local residents, professionals, and politicians. Preliminary investigation has been conducted to assess the rehabilitation strategy of the selected case of el-Darb el-Asfar in relation to its context. Daylight is an essential contextual ingredient that characterises particular places from its counterparts. The rehabilitation project, using new finishing materials, has led to changes in daylight levels and reflections in the space and hence modify the visual perception and the identity of the place itself. This paper aims to assess the impact of the proposed intervention on the visual perception and the identity of the selected built heritage. Daylight variables in open spaces, a combination of sunlight, skylight and the reflected light from the facades and the ground, are identified. Using TOWNSCOPE, daylight's components are calculated pre and after the implementation of the project. The performance of reflected component is traced by simulating the impact of the original and recently used materials. The paper concludes by suggesting a set of measures to achieve an appropriate daylight performance to achieve a sustainable development in the area and maintain the identity of the old city.

Heritage of war

The Heritage of War is an interdisciplinary study of the ways in which heritage is mobilized in remembering war, and in reconstructing landscapes, political systems and identities after conflict. It examines the deeply contested nature of war heritage in a series of places and contexts, highlighting the modes by which governments, communities, and individuals claim validity for their own experiences of war, and the meanings they attach to them.

From colonizing violence in South America to the United States’ Civil War, the Second World War on three continents, genocide in Rwanda and continuing divisions in Europe and the Middle East, these studies bring us closer to the very processes of heritage production. The Heritage of War uncovers the histories of heritage: it charts the constant social and political construction of heritage sites over time, by a series of different agents, and explores the continuous reworking of meaning into the present.

What are the forces of contingency, agency and political power that produce, define and sustain the heritage of war? How do particular versions of the past and particular identities gain legitimacy, while others are marginalised? In this book contributors explore the active work by which heritage is produced and reproduced in a series of case studies of memorialization, battlefield preservation, tourism development, private remembering and urban reconstruction. These are the acts of making sense of war; they are acts that continue long after violent conflict itself has ended.

Cultural heritage and development in South East Asia

This chapter discusses research undertaken into the developmental role of museums and heritage sites in Thailand and the Greater Mekong Subregion, a geographical area that also includes Cambodia, Laos PDR and Myanmar. It contextualizes an international project, the Lampang Temples Project, to explore the potential role that museums and heritage sites can play in place-based development work, particularly in an Asian context where sacred places are simultaneously valued by local members of the community and as desinations for religious pilgrims and international tourists. The discussion of the Lampang Temples Project is located within an understanding of the international discourse concerning the roles of museums in development, including those contributions to the discourse that have originated in the Asia-Pacific region. It is also situated within an understanding of the roles of international agencies and local governments in the promotion of programmes and infrastructure for the preservation of Buddhist heritage and the relationship of this development strategy with tourism. Furthermore, due to the participatory and observational experience of the authors in the Lampang Temples Project, the chapter also considers the issues involved in applying cross-cultural pedagogies to the management of cultural tourism sites, including UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The results of the Lampang Temples Project support the contention that colaborative training models and pedagogies can be adapted, provided that differing cultural contexts and suppositions are appropriately articulated and integrated. Further, it suggests that this type of collaborative approach to the management of cultural tourism sites has the potential to play an important role in Buddhist heritage development processes.

Recording heritage destruction in Iraq

In October 2012, I began a monthlong visit to Iraq to begin developing a database that documents the destruction of heritage in the country over a crucial nine-year period (2003–2009). This database will enable researchers to more fully understand the extent of the destruction and will help the Iraqi government and international community to prioritize the heritage sites in Iraq that most urgently need protection and restoration. The primary purpose of the database, however, is to examine the extent of the relationship between the recorded destruction of heritage sites and spikes of violence, as documented in existing and reliable measures such as the Iraq Body Count database. Over the next three years, with funding from the Australian Research Council’s Discovery (DECRA) scheme and supported by the Centre for Citizenship and Globalization at Deakin University, our research team of Australians, Americans, and Iraqis will build the database.

Learning to engage with human rights in heritage

Cultural heritage should not be seen merely as a technical matter or from a narrow visitor management point of view but rather as cultural practice—a form of cultural politics dominated by ruling regimes and social groups in which decisions are made about the future of and access to scarce resources. Several scholars have sought to push this approach further by arguing that heritage studies should take on the protection of human rights as a core consideration in the processes of identifying, inscribing, conserving and interpreting cultural heritage. This paper builds on these previous works to explore what the shift to a rights-based management approach in the World Heritage system might mean for various stakeholders in the heritage protection enterprise as they learn to meet this challenge and to find ways to support people’s right to access, enjoy and maintain cultural heritage. Reaffirming the need to maintain a strong relationship between theory and praxis, the paper draws into the discussion heritage practitioners, decision makers in governments and government agencies, scholars and educators. Of these, the principal emphasis in this paper is on educators who are seen to have a fundamentally important role in developing a critical understanding of the cultural heritage concept, how heritage is created, used and misused and how conservation approaches and programs sit within the broader context of community attitudes and aspirations and governmental responsibilities. A distinction is made between teachers in universities and trainers offering short courses more focused on specific employer needs. The paper focuses on World Heritage but refers to both tangible and intangible aspects. It shows how current moves to establish a rights-based approach to the management of World Heritage sites connects with moves elsewhere in global governance, most notably in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

Quo vadis, Delhi? Urban heritage and gender: towards a sustainable urban future

Historic architectural heritage is important to sustainable urban planning policy, particularly in cities that have heritage sites and/or themselves have ancient archaeological value. Delhi is one of the oldest living cities in the world. However, the vision of its planning policy is limited to valuing heritage for itself and for its economic value instead of also exploring the ways in the city’s heritage might contribute to the social organisation and utilisation of the urban public space. Particularly, like most national policy documents on heritage, it ignores the heritage/gender nexus, which has implications for the identity and status of women in Delhi, community development and ecological preservation. But twenty women practioners and scholars of development in Delhi referred to heritage as a challenge as well as opportunity for gender and urban sustainability when asked for their perspectives on the most important sustainability issues in the city. I argue that Delhi’s urban planning strategies must acknowledge the gender/heritage nexus to enable holistic and gender-inclusive urban development for the present and future generations of its citizens, which is an important thrust of the sustainability agenda.

Creating the Iraq cultural property destruction database: calculating a heritage destruction index

Over the past decade there have been constant reports of damage to significant cultural property in several complex (post-)conflict and (post-)revolutionary states. Recent events in Syria, Mali, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Afghanistan and Iraq – as devastating as they have been for people – have also had dramatic consequences for a number of important cultural heritage sites. Despite the severity of these events and global concern, the field of heritage studies has not developed a methodology for cataloguing such heritage destruction in a database. Addressing this paucity in the literature, this article details the methodology developed to produce the Iraq Cultural Property Destruction database, the world’s first database to document the destruction of cultural property in Iraq. This article also documents the calculation of the Heritage Destruction Index – a scale for measuring both the heritage ‘significance’ of a site and the overall level of destruction. Finally, this article also demonstrates the manifold uses of such a database in measuring and monitoring heritage destruction in Iraq. This study therefore sets a significant precedent in heritage studies by providing methods that can be applied to other contexts (past, present and future) to document the destruction of cultural property in complex contexts.

Photosharing on Flickr: intangible heritage and emergent publics

This paper argues that Flickr, a popular ‘photosharing’ website, is facilitating new public engagements with world heritage sites like the Sydney Opera House. Australian heritage institutions (namely libraries and museums) have recently begun to employ Flickr as a site through which to engage communities with their photographic archives and collections. Yet Flickr is more than an ‘online photo album’: it is a social and cultural network generated around personal photographic practices. Members can form ‘groups’: self‐organised communities defined by shared interests in places, photographic genres, or the appraisal of photographs. These groups are public spaces for both visual and textual conversations – complex social negotiations involving personal expression and collective identity. For one group, the common interest is the Sydney Opera House, and their shared visual and textual expressions – representations of this building. This paper argues that such socio‐visual practices themselves constitute an intangible heritage. By drawing on the work of scholars Jose Van Dijck and Nancy Van House, Dawson Munjeri and Michael Warner, the paper proposes that this enactment of intangible heritage is implicated in the broader cultural value of the Sydney Opera House

Lateral spreading and associated slope processes in fractured rock slabs

Landslides of the lateral spreading type, involving brittle geological units overlying ductile terrains, are a common occurrence in the sandstone and limestone plateaux of the northern Apennines of Italy. These instability phenomena can become particularly risky, when historical towns and cultural heritage sites built on the top of them are endangered. Neverthless, the mechanisms controlling the developing of related instabilities, i.e. toppling and rock falls, at the edges of rock plateaux are not fully understood yet. In addition, the groundwater flow path developing at the contact between the more permeable units, i.e. the jointed rock slab, and the relatively impermeable clay-rich units have not been already studied in details, even if they may play a role in this kind of instability processes, acting as eventual predisposing and/or triggering factors. Field survey, Terrestrial Laser Scanner and Close Range Photogrammetry techniques, laboratory tests on the involved materials, hydrogeological monitoring and modelling, displacements evaluation and stability analysis through continuum and discontinuum numerical codes have been performed on the San Leo case study, with the aim to bring further insights for the understanding and the assessment of the slope processes taking place in this geological context. The current research permitted to relate the aquifer behaviour of the rocky slab to slope instability processes. The aquifer hosted in the fractured slab leads to the development of perennial and ephemeral springs at the contact between the two units. The related piping erosion phenomena, together with slope processes in the clay-shales led to the progressive undermining of the slab. The cliff becomes progressively unstable due to undermining and undergoes large-scale landslides due to fall or topple.

What is the Downeast Fisheries Heritage Trail?

The Downeast Fisheries Trail is an educational trail that showcases active and historic fisheries heritage sites, such as fish hatcheries, aquaculture facilities, fishing harbors, clam flats, processing plants and other related public places in an effort to educate residents and visitors about the importance of the region’s maritime heritage and the role of marine resources to the area’s economy.

Making the most of world natural heritage - linking conservation and sustainable regional development?

Today, more than 1000 World Heritage (WH) sites are inscribed on UNESCO’s list, 228 of which are natural and mixed heritage sites. Once focused primarily on conservation, World Natural Heritage (WNH) sites are increasingly seen as promoters of sustainable regional development. Sustainability-oriented regions, it is assumed, are safeguards for conservation and positively influence local conservation goals. Within UNESCO, discussions regarding the integration of sustainable development in official policies have recently gained momentum. In this article, we investigate the extent to which WNH sites trigger sustainability-oriented approaches in surrounding regions, and how such approaches in turn influence the WNH site and its protection. The results of the study are on the one hand based on a global survey with more than 60% of the WNH sites listed in 2011, and on the other hand on a complementary literature research. Furthermore, we analyze the policy framework necessary to support WNH sites in this endeavor. We conclude that a regional approach to WNH management is necessary to ensure that WNH sites support sustainable regional development effectively, but that the core focus of WNH status must remain environmental conservation.

A model of economic management of cultural heritage: the rehabilitation of fort christmas as an interpretation center of defensive architecture of the Mediterranean in Cartagena (Spain)

The Cultural Heritage constitutes a way to generate social identities and play an important role in the development of the Spanish Mediterranean cities that opt to sustainable quality tourism. The reflection on the necessity of intervention on this heritage, in addition to establishing what should be done, brings up the need to define the reasons for taking action, why and what-for. These decisions are essential to establish if its maintenance and recovery are economically sustainable. The Project "Cartagena Port of Cultures", with support from the European Union, is an example of effective instrument for ensuring the sustainability of our built heritage conservation. Its main objective was to enable sustainable development of tourism in Cartagena based on sustainability and seasonality. This was achieved through a process of recovery of heritage resources and their optimum promotion and marketing.