This work package is concerned with trans-disciplinary inheritance and disinheritance processes in urban settings. It aims to explore how different actors, such as museums and urban planning departments, ‘curate’ the city’s past, present and future, in terms of defining, preserving and mediating urban heritage in a broad sense. This entails negotiation in conflicts over aesthetic regimes, intervention in planning, as well as proactive measures in order to understand, develop and conceptualize the urban heritage landscape.
‘Curating the city’ can be understood as a productive approach of creating platforms where discussions on diverging narratives of the past can lead towards a shared and progressive future. In institutional contexts, this position of mediating between different positions of power can often lead to false neutrality, while criticality can be reduced in favor of presenting productive and tangible outputs. These research projects try to reflect on these issues in a critical way, by pointing out to the ways in which urban curating can also become an act of exclusion or oppression. The researches are concerned with developing a mapping model that addresses complex urban issues of the past, present and future (Moniek Driesse); critically addressing the agency of design and heritage as processes of producing, curating and extracting value in historical urban landscapes (Mela Zuljevic); focusing on how memory is mobilized to give substance to different kinds of 'performances of belonging' in order to stake claims about 'who gets to belong' in the city (Vittoria Caradonna); correlating tourism phenomenon growth with an eruption of the short-term rental market to propose a new method of this process’s quantitative valorization (Łukasz Bugalski). The variety of our perspectives mirrors the multiple dynamics at play today in all European cities facing new and old challenges related to mobility, environmental issues and place-making.

Reconnecting the dots
MoniekDriesse

The research aims to develop a mapping model that incorporates the imaginary agency in mapping the urban past, in the present, for a future of collective care. It focuses on the inclusion of heritage structures that reach into the urban past as well as the future, exploring the largescale mnemonic dynamics that condition understandings of life in the city. Geographer Gunnar Olsson has extensively explored how cartographical reasoning both enables and conditions people to think about the abstract world of invisible human relations, in much the same way as they are able to study physical places by using maps and mapping — and the other way around. An operationalization of Olsson’s concept “cartographic reasoning” (Olsson 2007) into an analytical tool, enables a discussion of how knowledge about the urban past, present and future is produced between heritage practitioners and urban planners. Furthermore, the production of urban knowledge in creative practices is being explored, in order to understand the imaginary agency that can bridge barriers between these three paradigms. In conducted case studies of a heritage institution in Gothenburg, an art biennial and several artist-in-residency programmes across Europe, the research has mobilized author’s design research background to map out possible epistemological bridges. This approach allows to investigate the relation between cultural memory and environmental justice and to re-link urban decision-making processes, the research that is supposed to guide it and the people that ultimately live the reality it influences.

Transition landscape atlas
MelaZuljevic

The research project is interested in critically addressing the agency of design and heritage as processes of producing, curating and extracting value in historical urban landscapes. In particular, the research is focused on the uses of the past in the process of designing the future of industrial heritage sites in urban settings. The study starts from the notion of a ‘transition landscape’ as a framework for examining the ways in which the process of transitioning from one value system to another is materialized and historicized in the environment. This is reached by engaging with the approach of cognitive mapping (Jameson 1991) and the understanding of landscape as a technology of territory (Adams 2017). The project looks at specific case studies related to the heritage-making and spatial transformation of post-industrial urban landscapes, primarily in the context of Genk (BE). As part of the fieldwork, the researcher has collaborated with different actors in Genk on design projects concerning the past and future of road infrastructures and the post-mining landscape. By making a ‘Transition Landscape Atlas’, the research entails different design and collaborative methods, in particular mapping, history-telling and video-making. 

‘Purity is a Myth’: performing belonging through memory
VittoriaCaradonna

The research focuses on how memory is mobilized to give substance to various 'performances of belonging'. In the context of permanent high voltage identity politics, the concept of belonging takes a new form: a continuous performance that uses memory to stake claims about 'who gets to belong' in the city. The project looks at this phenomenon across different cultural organizations operating in the city of Amsterdam: a major ethnographic museum caught in the process of reckoning with its colonial past; a grassroots archive focusing on the legacies of colonialism and on anti-racism activism; and a boat tour bridging Amsterdam's history of migration with the current challenges faced by the city's 'newcomers'. This study aims to produce an in-depth analysis of the continuities and fractures in the Dutch memoryscape that actively create the ‘difficulty speaking’ (Stoler 2010) of the ties that connect today’s expressions of conditional belonging and citizenship to the ‘European colonial relation’ (Hesse 2000). The analysis of these processes has involved the ‘close reading’ of the Dutch cultural archive and of the official discourses around the themes of integration, inclusion, memory and identity. During the fieldwork phase of the project, many exhibitions were repeatedly visited, talks, conferences and various events attended and museum staff and external collaborators, scholars, activists involved in the projects interviewed. Now, in the final stages of the project, the wealth of gathered data is going to be finally elaborated. 

The threat of overtourism to historic cities
ŁukaszBugalski

The research (see pp. 27-29 ) focuses on the tension between urban conservation practice and an impact of the rapid growth of the tourism phenomenon on everyday life of common citizens. Such an obvious correlation between the city’s past, present and future is in the very center of the idea of “curating the city” work package. It is also bringing a question about our responsibility – as widely understood heritage workers – for ongoing (over)touristification of European historic cities.

Conclusion

Each research project gathered in the second work package has been developing its own vocabulary to unpack the subtext implied in the notion of ‘curating’, by looking at how the lived experiences of citizens are shaped by processes that involve the heritagization of the urban and the coexistence of different types of memory-work. The different approaches and methods employed could provide a template for future research in the field of heritage studies and beyond, aimed to question the frameworks of urban decision-making, spatial interventions and active citizenship.

References

Adams, R.E. 2017, Landscapes of Post-history, in Wall, E. & Waterman T. (eds .) Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays, New York: Routledge.

Hesse, B. ( ed.) 2000, Un/settled multiculturalisms: diasporas, entanglements, “transruptions”, London: Zed Books.

Jameson, F. 1991, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press.

Olsson, G. 2007, Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stoler, A. L. 2010, Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule, Berkley: University of California Press.