Planning, Heritage and the Everyday Life

Date: April 28th- May 6th, 2013
Held at: Gothenburg University
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden

Eight students from the University of Birzeit (including me) visited the University of Gothenburg for one intensive week to discuss issues related to practices of heritage conservation and urban planning. The workshop consisted of lectures, focused-group discussions, guided study visits in the city of Gothenburg, presentations by participants.

The workshop focused on discussing the intertwined relations between heritage, everyday life and planning. With heritage becoming a broad public concern that includes memory, identity, nature, traditions and everyday life practices; specific attention is given to the ways heritage issues are tackled in professional heritage practices, and discussed against the competing ideologies of conservation and modernization. The workshop's point of departure was to see heritage as cultural practices that constitute and are constituted by memories, emotions, experiences, relations and meanings. In this way, any perception that see heritage as thing, object, or spatial element divorced from its sociopolitical and cultural contexts, was disregarded. Instead, spatial relations were discussed as outcomes, and also constituents of these cultural practices. Spatialities were also seen as productive forcesin the sense that they trigger and contain memories as well as carry meaning and invoke sensory of engagement. Certainly, this understanding of heritage has been handled as a separate sector. Its valuation also focused on certain buildings, monuments and spatial elements that represent defined periods of history, class, nation, or ideology. In addition, professional heritage practices are often carried out as technical interventions designed by culture elite that include heritage specialists, historians and archeologists. It seems that heritage practices are ideologically steered by conservation: ideas of passing specific physical heritage to future generations. Rather than seeing heritage conservation as a hinder for urbanization and modernization, heritage can be seen as a resource for city branding and marketing. The criticisms of the reification of heritage and the objectification of memories have called for a broader understanding of the intertwined relations between tangible and intangible aspects of heritage.

In the workshop, the participants carried out cultural analyses of the current official proposal to extend two metro stations in the historic areas of Haga Church and Korsvaegen. The current studies as well as the public debates were looked at in order to generate some discussions on how professional heritage practices in Gothenburg take into consideration the local views and opinions and how these practices engage with the critical questions of inclusion, memory, identity, meaning, needs and sense of place.