UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures

Heritage futures are concerned with the roles of heritage in managing the relations between present and future societies, e.g. through anticipation, planning, and prefiguration.

As we move into the future, the biggest challenge of sustainable heritage management is how to make heritage absorb changes while continuing to provide benefits for human societies. The most important question of conservation is therefore not how much heritage may survive intact into the future, but what historical legacy, which we construct and leave behind, will come to benefit future generations the most.

Animation: What are Heritage Futures and why do they matter?

Cultural heritage reminds us of the past and has present values and uses, but how will future generations benefit from it? – This short animation explains the need for futures thinking among cultural heritage professionals.

Cornelius Holtorf at The World Futures Day, 4 December 2023, UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.

Why are Heritage Futures important?

"You often hear that our heritage is to be preserved for the benefit of future generations. That is why heritage is being cared for and protected. But the heritage we preserve will only benefit future generations if it will meet their needs. That is why it is important to ask: How can we best ensure that future generations will appreciate what we leave behind for them? How do we know that heritage will provide benefits to future generations, given that they will not be living in the same contexts as we do?"

How do the activities of the Chair respond to current challenges in society?

"The concept and practices of heritage as we know them today have developed over the past two hundred years, and are firmly associated with the idea of the modern nation. A nation's people were assumed to share not only a territory and a culture, but also a joint origin and history. In recent decades, a heritage industry has grown that exploits a widespread popularity for edutainment and cultural tourism."

"The UNESCO Chair supports international heritage practitioners in developing professional strategies for the future. How can heritage address the challenges of specific societies, as the idea of unified national identities is no longer unproblematic? How can heritage benefit communities beyond commodification?"

How does the Chair open up new possibilities to address these challenges?

"A UNESCO Chair is funded partly by the home University and partly by external resources. In addition, the UNESCO brand may mean that other parties are a little extra interested in what we do."

"Our foucs is to create awareness and capacity for heritage practitioners around the world, to address for themselves how heritage will benefit the future. We have training courses, organize workshops and conference sessions, and we collaborate with UNESCO and other relevant bodies, as well as publish academic works in this field."

"I want heritage to develop its potential to make positive contributions to the development of society. I hope to contribute to practitioners from different fields and domains collaborating around the idea of 'applied heritage", i.e. where preserving heritage becomes a means, rather than an end."

Describe your background!

"I grew up and read prehistoric archaeology in Germany. At age 25 I moved to Wales to conduct research. Five years later I began my career that included positions at universities in England and Sweden, as well as a couple of years at the Swedish National Heritage Board. I decided early on to develop my own ideas of archaeology and why it mattered in society, and this principle has really served me very well over the years."

How did you become interested in the topic of heritage futures?

"About 20 years ago I read a wonderful book by Gregory Benford entitled Deep time: how humanity communicates across millennia (1999). It blew my mind. It very much inspired how I have come to think about the close links between archaeology and the long-term future. There were chapters on long-term markers for nuclear waste repositories and on space messages. Benford  didn’t claim this to be about archaeology and cultural heritage, but I saw the links immediately, and lectured to students about it already then."

"A few years later I started to collaborate with professor Anders Högberg, who shared my interest in the future. In 2009 and 2011, we put in a couple of applications for research projects on the future agenda and future-thinking in the heritage sector."

"At the same time I started working with the Swedish Nuclear Waste and Fuel Management Company (SKB). They appreciated the expertise we had as archaeologists in the context of repositories of nuclear waste that needed to provide safety for 100,000 years into the future. We have been working with them ever since, focussing specifically on memory and communication across many generations."

"In 2016 I saw a call by the Swedish Research Council inviting candidates to apply for UNESCO Chairs at Swedish Universities. I decided to go for it and proposed a UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures. My application was approved in Sweden in 2016 and then submitted to UNESCO in Paris which approved it in 2017. And renewed it in 2021. Since then, I have done much work in the UNESCO context and published many papers on heritage and the future, usually co-authored with Anders Högberg."

Dr Cornelius Holtorf, Professor of Archaeology and holder of the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University. Director of the Graduate School in Contract Archaeology (GRASCA). 

Dr Emily Hanscam, Researcher at Linnaeus University. Her projects apply techniques from the digital humanities to explore ongoing entanglements between nationalism and archaeological discourse, working towards developing a better critical understanding of the past for negotiating the global future.

Dr Anders Högberg, Professor of Archaeology at Linnaeus University. Special fields of interest are heritage studies and human cognitive evolution. 

Dr Sarah May, Affiliated Researcher at Linnaeus University. She is currently working as an heritage consultant. She is particularly interested in the way children are used in future discourse.

Dr Leila Papoli-Yazdi, Affiliated Researcher at Linnaeus University. She researches the dirty heritage of modern civilization; garbage, waste, and consumption — particularly to develop novel methods towards environmental and social sustainability in the future.

Dr Claudio Pescatore, Affiliated Researcher at Linnaeus University. A nuclear engineer, previously at the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the OECD, special field of interest is the preservation of memory. 

Helena Rydén, Assistant to the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures.

Ulrika Söderström, Ph D student at Linnaeus University, is in the final stages of her doctoral research investigating how futures are created in modern urban planning and development using cultural heritage as a resource and the consequences these practices can have on social sustainability.

Dr Gustav Wollentz, Senior Lecturer at Linnaeus University with a particular focus on critical heritage studies. He is also a consultant for ICCROM (International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property). Former director at NCK, The Nordic Centre of Heritage Learning and Creativity. 

Available (issuu) here

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