| Summary: |
For the past ten years the Cambridge Heritage Seminars have brought
together researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to explore the
most pressing issues in heritage studies today.
For its tenth anniversary in 2009, coinciding with the celebration
of the 800th anniversary of the founding of the University of Cambridge,
the Cambridge Heritage Seminar will focus on cultural heritage,
architecture, and the built environment in the context of a rapidly
globalising and modernising world. Taking historic cities as its
departure point, the seminar asks: how can urban cultural landscapes
be preserved and sustained, challenged as they are by development,
legislation, and commodification—and what are the reasons
for and outcomes of such preservation?
As scholars such as Patrick Wright, David Lowenthal, and Laurajane
Smith argue, the emergence of a heritage consciousness in modernity
has depended on a complex, changing relationship not just to what
the built heritage is, but how it is valued: what a community reads
into the heritage and what they hope to gain from it. Aided by legal
protocols that standardise heritage into readymade frameworks of
historical, political and economic value, such processes take place
on numerous interacting levels – the local, the national,
and the international – which rarely operate in harmony. Within
an urban setting, where the built environment (and its ruins) produces
and is produced by a changing relationship to the past, these issues
are highlighted in an immediate and unavoidable way. With this awareness,
the Seminar hopes to explore the challenges, contradictions, and
complexities that arise in the contemporary analysis of the historic
city.
The Seminar will follow three broad themes with associated case
studies, for which proposals for papers are solicited:
- Challenges: What are the most salient challenges
and problems faced by historic cities and how are these currently
being articulated? Within these articulations, how are changing
values and attitudes toward the past weighed against the needs
of the present?
- Contradictions: On an urban scale, when and
how does conservation cause harm, and does development intrinsically
threaten the ‘authenticity’ of a place? Is the desire
to maintain a historic site the very process that ends up altering
and even destroying it? Can neglect amount to preservation? Are
claims to the ‘uniqueness’ of a historic city ever
meaningful, and how do they function on rhetorical and political
levels?
- Continuities: In the efforts to address these
contradictions, how can the needs of historic cities be reconciled
to continued growth, development, and modernisation? In what ways
can sustainability of the urban historic environment be articulated,
and to what effect? Is adaptive re-use an end or a means to an
end? What opportunities exist for dialogue between researchers
and policymakers that enables movement forward?
- Workshop: In addition, each day will end with
a workshop dedicated to Cambridge and other historic cities as
in-depth case studies to use of the insights that emerge from
the other sessions. This workshop will primarily be generated
from delegates and participants.
Proposals are welcomed from all members of the research, policy
and practitioner communities. Please send 500-word paper proposals
to Afroditi Chatzoglou at ac513@cam.ac.uk.
Proposals should be sent in PDF or Word format and should include
full contact information and a brief academic biography. General
enquiries and registration requests should be sent to Shadia Taha
at st446@cam.ac.uk Deadline
for proposals is 15 November 2008; acceptance will follow
shortly afterwards.
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