[Archport] 10th Cambridge Heritage Seminar The Future of Historic Cities: Challenges, Contradictions, Continuities

[msabreu@utad.pt]

10th Cambridge Heritage Seminar
The Future of Historic Cities: Challenges, Contradictions, Continuities
Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK
18-19 April 2009

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, or any further enquiries and  
registrations to Shadia Taha at st446@cam.ac.uk. Proposals should be  
sent in PDF or Word format and should include full contact  
information and a brief academic biography. Deadline for proposals is  
1 October 2008; acceptance will follow shortly afterwards.  http:// 
www.arch.cam.ac.uk/heritageseminar.

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Mila Simões de Abreu
Departamento de Geologia - Unidade de Arqueologia
Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro
Apartado 1013
5000-911 Vila Real (Portugal)

Ph: +351 259 350186   Fx: +351 259350480
e-mail: msabreu@utad.pt (mailto:msabreu@utad.pt)

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