[1]
Session: Heritage and Gentrification in the Time of Co-working and Digital Nomads (P08)
Deadline: April 7, 2023
Chair: Martin Cornejo Presbitero (Technische Universität Berlin)

During the last decade, there has been a shift in the institutional discourses around heritage practices and therefore, in the treatment of historic neighborhoods. International agreements like ‘the Faro convention’ (2005), or the ‘UNESCO recommendation on historic urban landscapes’ (2011) encourage local authorities to recognize, besides the architecture, the intangible values and uses that community give to heritage. Local authorities should further the museological conservation, restoration, and use of monuments and undertake urban rehabilitation projects that enhance the living qualities of a neighborhood. Such projects involve, for example, the renovation of public spaces, infrastructure for alternative transports, and the implementation of the so-called ‘complete streets’ (Streets that incorporate wide sidewalks, cycleways, and space for public transport).

However, in cities like Lisbon, Bali, and Mexico City policies and re-urbanization projects to improve historic neighborhoods have clashed with the possibility of remote work and the rising housing costs in American or European metropolises. Cities that did not use to top the tourism rankings are now listed among the best cities to migrate, do remote work, or do long-term tourism (Internations, 2022; Bloomberg, 2022; Nomad List, 2022). While the ‘commodification of heritage’ (Harvey, 1989; Kipfer and Keil, 2002; Watson, 2009) as a means of attracting investment by local authorities is nothing new, the deployment of new political and legal instruments in the quest to replace local populations with international elites or “expats” has increased significantly during the last decade.

This panel stresses the need to examine the contradictions between the institutional and academic discourse that seeks to strengthen local communities through re-urbanization and the reality, where the policies and projects implemented induce gentrification. To promote interdisciplinary communication about this problem, a structured discussion amongst panelists and attendees will explore examples of top-down or bottom-up initiatives that have either induced or prevailed gentrification. These initiatives can be examples of urban development or housing policies, urban rehabilitation, re-urbanization or architectural projects, social programs, or ephemeral interventions.

Keywords: Heritage Commodification; Urban Development; Historic Neighborhood Gentrification; Housing Policies.

Paper proposals to be submitted here: https://www.vichaminternationalconference2023.com/list-of-panels. Select paper 08. For further questions contact cornejo.presbiterotu-berlin.de.

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[2]
Session: The Slow Reversal of the Future. Heritage Practices of Care, Solidarity and Commons (P26)
Deadline: April 7, 2023
Chair: Niloufar Tajeri (Technische Universität Berlin)

In his critique of neoliberalism, Mark Fisher used the term "slow cancellation of the future" to diagnose culture's inability to comprehend the present. The emergence of the reconstruction of historical buildings and the dominance of historicity in contemporary German building culture, which coincided with the neoliberalisation of urbanism in the 1990s, illustrate Fisher's notion. Inspired by a particular case of reconstruction based on the demolition of a listed department store building in the immigrant-dense district of Berlin-Neukölln, the panel explores the notion of the future from a decolonial perspective and investigates possibilities of a "slow reversal of the future" towards heritage practices of care, solidarity and the commons in the present.

The concept of the future is one of the main promises of neoliberalism. It implies "the new" in everything - new technologies, new buildings, new objects, new developments, and new possibilities. At the same time, the new is the driving force of imperialism and colonial and neo-colonial expansion, behind which lies violence, displacement, and exploitation exercised in the name of progress (Azoulay, 2019). The new is linked to destruction (ibid), and this is also true of neoliberal urbanism: cities have become important sites of destruction and resistance (Brenner et al, 2011). This rationality is referred to as what de Sousa Santos calls the "lazy reason” of Eurocentric thought: the inability to articulate the epistemological complexities of the world and still be considered universal (2014). He suggests that the rationality of the Global North "contracts the present [...] and expands the future" and calls for a reversal: expanding the present so that other rationalities and experiences can be seen and considered, and contracting the future to make it an object of care. As a result, the future would have "no other meaning or direction than that which results from such care" (ibid.).

Whose heritage counts when the future is expanded, and whose heritage emerges when the present is expanded? What and who would we see in urban spaces if the present were expanded? And what are the emerging heritage practices and experiences that would need to be nurtured for a reclaimed, common, non-violent future? Papers from urban, global contexts are welcome.

Keywords: Vulnerable Heritage; Reconstruction; Neoliberal Urbanism; Diasporic Spaces; Decolonial Epistemology.

Paper proposals to be submitted here: https://www.vichaminternationalconference2023.com/list-of-panels. Select paper 26. For further questions contact n.kirn.tajeritu-berlin.

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[3]
Session: Queering Heritage: Performing Soft Politics of Multiple Pasts and Presents (P17)
Deadline: April 7, 2023
Chair: Friederike Landau-Donnelly (Radboud Universiteit), Pablo Santacana López (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)

Queering has been deployed as a conceptual and political term to define the challenging of dominant norms, identities, and institutions (Middleton & Sullivan, 2021). In interdisciplinary memory and heritage studies, queering has been referring to the inclusion of silenced voices related with sexual, gender and relationship dissidence within the “authorized heritage discourse” (Smith, 2006) of heritage narratives and museum collections. Situated within performative accounts of heritage, sketching the transformation from heritage-as-process to heritage-as-performance (Haldrup & Bærenholdt, 2015; Munteán, Plate & Smelik, 2019; Widrich 2014), this panel sets out to conceptualize practices of queering heritage not merely as the inclusion or representation of queer subjects and stories within pre-existent cultural structures of remembrance but as a conceptual aperture to transform socio-spatial relationships with the past (Bryne, 2005; Immonen, 2022; Moolhuijsen, 2020; Steorn, 2012; Zebracki & Leitner 2022).

Based on notions of time and temporality as multiple, the panel invites contributions that engage with queer futurity as potentiality (Engel, 2011; Freeman, 2010; Halberstam, 2005; Muñoz, 2009) to forge new forms of kinship, solidarity, trans-generational and multi-species relationality. Queer(ed) heritage interrupts assumptions of historical certainty, linearity and progress, and instead approaches heritage via contingency, multiplicity, conflict and vulnerability (Landau et al. 2021; Landau-Donnelly, 2023). In addition, related queer concepts such as drag and voguing (Gavaldon & Segade, 2018; Meyer 2010) might advance conversation about intersectional politics, policies and practices of performing heritage for heritage futures. Inspired by notions of soft power (Nye, 2004), which emphasizes the nonviolent yet discursive-symbolical appeal and persuasion, the panel also discusses heritage practices as interwoven with political processes open to contingency, polyphony and vulnerability. To unpack the multiple agencies involved in such soft heritage politics, the panel seeks to stimulate debate between heritage approaches of hauntology (Derrida, 1994; Gordon, 201; Sterling, 2022), i.e. the ghostly dimensions of trauma, suppression and multiplicity lingering in both pasts and presents. From such dialogue, we hope to leverage insights into common, or not-so-common futures of heritage-making that embrace the polyphonic, conflictladen and vulnerable performativity of communities’ histories that are always more complex than their representations. Keywords: Queer heritage; Performativity; Queer Time; Hauntology; Softness

Paper proposals to be submitted here: https://www.vichaminternationalconference2023.com/list-of-panels. Select paper 17. For further questions contact pablo.santacana.lopezuni-weimar.de.