Co-curating the City: Universities and urban heritage past and future

By Dean Sully

Co-curating the City explores the role of universities in the construction and mobilisation of heritage discourses in urban development and regeneration processes, with a focus on six case study sites: University of Gothenburg (Sweden), UCL East (London), University of Lund (Sweden). Roma Tre university (Rome), American University of Beirut, and Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil.

The aim of the book is to expand the field of critical heritage studies in the urban domain, by examining the role of institutional actors both in the construction of urban heritage discourses and in how those discourses influence urban planning decisions or become instrumentalised as mechanisms for urban regeneration. It proposes that universities engage in these processes in a number of ways: as producers of urban knowledge that is mobilised to intervene in planning processes; as producers of heritage practices that are implemented in development contexts in the urban realm; and as developers engaged in campus construction projects that both reference heritage discourses as a mechanism for promoting support and approval by planners and the public, and capitalise on heritage assets as a resource.

The book highlights the participatory processes through which universities are positioning themselves as significant institutions in the development of urban heritage narratives. The case studies investigate how universities, as mixed communities of interest dispersed across buildings and urban sites, engage in strategies of engagement with local people and neighbourhoods, and ask how this may be contributing to a re-shaping of ideas, narratives, and lived experience of urban heritage in which universities have a distinctive agency. The authors cross disciplinary and cultural boundaries, and bridge academia and practice.

Praise for Co-curating the City

'Co-curating the City could prove a valuable read for any academic or practitioner interested to engage in a critical reflexive process on the multifaceted role of universities in producing transformative knowledge, challenging hegemony, and leading more participatory heritage and city-making practices.'
Built Heritage

• Language: English
• Publisher: UCL Press
• Release date: May 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781800081857

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Melhuish, C et al. (eds). 2022. Co-curating the City: Universities and urban heritage past and future. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/9781800081826

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/9781800081826

Contents

List of figures

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Clare Melhuish, Henric Benesch, Ingrid Martins Holmberg and Dean Sully

I. Critical perspectives

1 The evolving role of universities in framing critical urban heritage discourse in regeneration contexts

Clare Melhuish

2 Universities curating change at heritage places in urban spaces

Dean Sully

3 Historic urban buildings in the university curriculum: the re-evaluation of Haga, Gothenburg, as urban heritage

Ingrid Martins Holmberg

4 Deferred heritage: digital renderings of sites of future knowledge production

Adam Brown

II. Sites and historical contexts, past and future

Part 1: University of Gothenburg and UCL East (London)

5 From dispersed multi-site to cluster and campus: understanding the material infrastructure of University of Gothenburg as urban heritage

Claes Caldenby

6 The dis-, mis- and re-membering of design education: understanding design education as urban heritage

Henric Benesch

7 London’s mega event heritage and the development of UCL East

Jonathan Gardner

8 Building back better? Hysterical materialism and the role of the university in post-pandemic heritage making: the case of East London

Phil Cohen

Part 2: Elsewhere: Lund, Rome, Beirut and São Paulo

9 Big Science and urban morphogenesis: the case of Lund University

Mattias Kärrholm and Albena Yaneva

10 The university as regeneration strategy in an urban heritage context: the case of Roma Tre

Ola Wetterberg and Maria Nyström

11 Heritage from a neighbourhood perspective: reflections from the American University of Beirut

Cynthia Myntti and Mona El Hallak

12 From Red São Paulo to Brazilian neofascism: urban, political and cultural heritage in the making of a public university

Pedro Fiori Arantes

Postscript: a collective reflection by the contributors

Index

List of figures

List of Contributors

Clare Melhuish is Principal Research Fellow in the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment at UCL and Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory, where she has been working on the role of university spatial development projects in urban regeneration and the production of cosmopolitan urbanism and imaginaries in the UK and abroad. She is a coordinator of the Curating the City research cluster in the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies. Her background lies in architectural history and criticism, anthropology, and cultural geography, drawing on ethnographic and visual research methods to interpret and understand architecture and the built environment as social and cultural setting.

Henric Benesch is an architect, educator and researcher with a PhD in Design, based in Gothenburg, Sweden, with a particular interest in critical spatial practice, situated knowledge production, and critical heritage. He currently works as a Senior Lecturer in Design at The Academy of Art and Design, since 2013 as research cocoordinator of the research cluster Curating the city at the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies, and since 2019, as Deputy Dean at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, all within University of Gothenburg.

Ingrid Martins Holmberg is a senior lecturer and researcher in the Department of Conservation at University of Gothenburg. Since 2013, she is research co-coordinator of the research cluster Curating the City, at the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies, University of Gothenburg and UCL, London.

Her current research interests concern: participatory planning in heritage management; history of landscapes and built environments; Rome’s historical places and the official heritage institutions; everyday ethics of maintenance and repair; uses of the past in urban transformations.

Dean Sully is Associate Professor in Conservation at UCL, Institute of Archaeology where he coordinates the MSc in Conservation for Archaeology and Museums, as well as co-coordinator for the Curating the City research cluster within the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies (CCHS). He studied conservation and gained his PhD at UCL and has worked as a practising conservator for the National Heritage Board (Singapore), The Museum of London, The British Museum, and Monmouthshire District Council Museum’s Service.

Adam Brown is Senior Lecturer in Photography at LSBU, and is a member of LSBU’s Centre for the Study of the Networked Image. He formerly led the BA(Hons) Photography and Media Arts at UCA Maidstone, and taught on the Bachelor of New Media Arts at James Cook University, Townsville, Australia. He has published work on the politics of the networked architectural image in the journals Philosophy of Photography, the Journal of Media Practice, E-Tropic and Leonardo Electronic Almanac as well contributing to the volume On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation (2013).

Claes Caldenby is Professor Emeritus, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Architectural Theory and Methods, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg. Claes Caldenby has an interest in the history of ideas of architecture but also in its wider social and cultural context. His ambition is that his research should be relevant and readable to practising architects as well as to a broader public, not only to the research community. His field of research has been mainly twentieth-century architecture, starting with studies of Soviet 1920s architecture and later on focusing on Swedish post-war architecture, including both building design and urban design.

Phil Cohen is Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies UCL 2018–9, Professor Emeritus at the University of East London, and a Research Fellow at the Young Foundation. He is the founder/research director of the LivingMaps Network and the editor-in-chief of its online journal Livingmaps Review. His ethnographic fieldwork and publications over the last 35 years have dealt with issues of racism and multiculturalism, public safety and danger, the role of the cultural economy in urban regeneration, and popular participation in planning, with a focus on East London and more recently the impact of the London 2012 Olympics.

Jonathan Gardner is an archaeologist and heritage researcher based at Edinburgh College of Art. He has a strong interest in how the materials of the past influence the worlds of the present. He is currently investigating the creative potential of ‘waste landscapes’ – places literally constructed from trash, industrial by-products and rubble. The research that informs his contribution in this volume was undertaken during his PhD at the UCL Institute of Archaeology between 2012 and 2016. Previously, he worked as a commercial archaeologist on construction sites in London, including on the Stratford site of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Mattias Kärrholm is a Professor in Architectural Theory at Lund University, Sweden. His research deals with territoriality, public space, building types, space and culture, and everyday life. He has written the book Retailising Space (2012), and edited the books Urban Squares (2015) and, together with Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Urban Walls (2018).

Albena Yaneva is Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of several books, including Crafting History: Archiving and the quest for architectural legacy (Cornell University Press, 2020) and The New Architecture of Science: Learning from graphene (World Scientific Publishing, 2020), co-authored with Sir Kostya S. Novoselov. Her work has been translated into nine different languages. Yaneva is the recipient of the RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding Research.

Ola Wetterberg is Professor and Chair in Conservation of Built Heritage and Director of the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies, engaged in the development of cross disciplinary and cross professional education and research. Ola conducts research in religious heritage, urban development and history and theory of conservation.

Maria Nyström holds a PhD in Conservation from University of Gothenburg. Her thesis Managing Ecclesiastical Heritage – Transformation of Discourses, Roles and Policy in Sweden deals with the contemporary management of religious heritage. Her research interests include urban heritage and development, and professional roles and expertise within the heritage field.

Cynthia Myntti currently holds a visiting faculty position at New York University Abu Dhabi and is conducting life history research in Beirut. She received her PhD in anthropology from the LSE (1983), an MPH from Johns Hopkins University (1986), and an M Arch from Yale (2004). From 2007–16 she served as the founding director of the AUB Neighborhood Initiative, which encourages research and outreach by faculty and students in the Ras Beirut area of the city.

Mona El Hallak is a Beirut-based architect and heritage preservation activist, and Director of the AUB Neighbourhood Initiative since 2017. She is a graduate of the American University of Beirut (AUB) and Syracuse University – Florence Program. She led several heritage preservation campaigns in Beirut and is a member of ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites), and APSAD (Association pour la Protection des Sites et Anciens Demeures au Liban). In 2013, she received the Ordre National du Mérite au grade de Chevalier from the President of the French Republic.

Pedro Fiori Arantes is an architect and associate professor in contemporary art, architecture and cities at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp). From 2013–21, he was the Vice Provost for Planning, and coordinator of the Public Projects Office at Unifesp. During this time, he oversaw the implementation of Unifesp’s Zona Leste Campus and its Instituto das Cidades. His most recent book, The Rent of Form: Architecture and labor in the digital age, was published by Minnesota University Press in 2019. His areas of interest include architecture, public policy, culture, cities and politics, and he is a long-standing member of Usina, a non-profit organisation that provides technical assistance to popular movements in housing and urban reform.

Acknowledgements

This book grew out of a series of workshops and activities organised by Curating the City urban heritage research cluster in the UCL/University of Gothenburg Centre for Critical Heritage Studies launched in 2016 with funding from the University of Gothenburg. We are indebted to this six-year programme, and the stimulating interaction with our colleagues between Gothenburg and London, for enabling us to develop our research interests, networks and outputs, including this volume. We would like to thank all the contributing authors for their patience and commitment to the process of realising this publication, particularly in view of the disruption to everyone’s lives brought by the COVID-19 pandemic; and also Clemency Gibbs, for invaluable last-minute editorial assistance during the manuscript submission process.

We also acknowledge the support of:

UCL Urban Laboratory, which funded Clare Melhuish’s original research and outputs on universities as actors in urban development (2013–6), among which parts and early versions of Chapter 1 of this volume were developed and presented in the report case studies in University-led Urban Regeneration (UCL Urban Laboratory, 2015), the conference ‘Universities: space, place and community’ organised by the Research Group on University History, Manchester University 13 September 2017, and the journal National Identities 22: 4 (2020), pp. 423–40 (special issue ‘Architecture, Nation, Difference’, ed. Samir Pandya; www.tandfonline.com); University of Gothenburg Department of Conservation and UCL Global Engagement Cities Partnerships Programme Rome hub, which co-funded workshops in Rome (Conflicting Heritage in the Timeline: Representations, Misrepresentations and Ways Forward, hosted by Roma Tre University) and London (Evaluating the impact of university development on urban areas, hosted by UCL Urban Laboratory), 2017; and Unifesp (Federal University of São Paulo) which co-funded with UCL Urban Laboratory a research visit by Clare Melhuish to São Paulo in November 2019.

Introduction

Clare Melhuish, Henric Benesch, Ingrid Martins Holmberg and Dean Sully

A transdisciplinary approach to critical heritage

The aim of this book is to expand the field of critical heritage studies in the urban domain, by examining the role of civic institutions – in this case urban universities – in the construction of urban heritage discourses, and in the influence those discourses have on urban planning decisions or how they become instrumentalised as mechanisms for urban change and regeneration (Pendlebury and Porfyriou, 2017). It proposes that universities engage in these processes in a number of ways: as institutional producers of academic urban knowledge, through research, teaching and curriculum design, which directly shapes heritage and planning expertise in development contexts; as producers of ‘heritage practices’ that are implemented in heritage management and development contexts in the urban realm; and as ‘developers engaged in campus construction’ projects that both reference heritage discourses as a mechanism for promoting support and approval by planners and the public, and capitalise on heritage assets as a resource.

The book presents multiple examples of universities engaging with participatory processes that position them as significant institutions in the development of urban heritage narratives, while also, through its collection of contributions by academics from different institutions, demonstrating the critical role that universities have as observers and critics of the processes in which they are implicated. The case studies included in the volume investigate how many universities, as mixed and heterogenous communities of interest dispersed across urban sites in diverse city contexts, are adopting strategies of engagement with local people and city neighbourhoods linked to conceptualisations of shared urban heritage, and ask how these are contributing to a re-shaping of ideas, narratives and lived experience of urban heritage that are distinctively linked to university input, as well as to the re-shaping of universities themselves and their own institutional heritage, embedded in evolving urban contexts. The contributions cross disciplinary and cultural boundaries, and bridge academia and practice.

The collection was born out of an Anglo-Swedish research collaboration, Curating the City, a research cluster within the UCL–University of Gothenburg Centre for Critical Heritage Studies, and a corresponding focus on two specific case study sites: University of Gothenburg’s Näckrosen Campus (Gothenburg) and UCL East (London), both under development at the time the collaboration was initiated in 2016, with funding from the University of Gothenburg. This initial focus allowed us to examine questions of scale, vision, pedagogical intent and heritage context within a directly comparative framework through two transdisciplinary workshops hosted in London and Gothenburg, which drew together a wide range of speakers from different disciplinary backgrounds and practices, including most of the contributors to this volume. We subsequently expanded the scope of the investigation beyond the core cities, to include university developments in Lund, Rome, Beirut and São Paolo, in order to demonstrate the circulation of ideas and practices linking universities, heritage and urban policy and development within an extended geographical and socio-political framework.

Curating the City was formed to develop transdisciplinary, academic research perspectives on our future cities that, through engagement with participatory practice, can help to transform the regulated places that characterise our urban centres into spaces open to a multitude of co-existing initiatives, ranging from bottom-up to institutional, and allowing for a temporally rich and heterogeneous fabric of urban material and social life. Within this framing, it takes a view, counter to the prevailing status quo, of heritage conservation and management as innovation rather than as a regulatory constraint on the development of our cities, and calls for a rethinking and reconsideration of the inbuilt tension between innovative systems and restrictive institutions. It recognises creative activities as being key to challenging and un-making the ways in which certain places, such as heritage places, have become legitimised sites for permissible behaviour, and argues that a reformulation of established heritage practice can support the relevant and resilient development of historic cities. Furthermore, it recognises universities as laboratories of creative, critical and experimental thought and practice that depends on effective translation across academic boundaries into the world beyond, through partnerships, collaborations, participation and the formation of new generations of professionals, in order to make a contribution to such processes of resilient development, healthy change and urban wellbeing.

Led by researchers from UCL Urban Laboratory and Institute of Archaeology (Melhuish and Sully), and University of Gothenburg Academy of Design and Craft and Department of Conservation (Benesch and Holmberg), Curating the City’s transdisciplinary research lens is a triangulation between the overlapping research fields of architecture, urban studies, conservation, craft, design, literature, cultural studies, planning and archaeology, supported by the educational platforms at University of Gothenburg and UCL. The idea of curating and the curatorial in relation to the urban condition as heritage has established the overall framework for the research agenda from 2016–21, enabling cross-cutting and experimental perspectives on urban heritage in a globalised, post-industrial and postcolonial world, ranging across a number themes – including a critical inquiry into the relationship between universities as actors in discourses around urban heritage, both as producers of knowledge and as civic institutions and developers in urban neighbourhoods. The transdisciplinary collaborative participatory process of assembly (selecting, organising and presenting) is presented as a valid response to uncertainty and defunct ideas of deterministic management of outcomes.

The university theme was shaped in part through an initial process of mapping the common interests of the cluster leaders, which became layered in the problems faced by universities today, resulting largely from the marketisation and internationalisation of higher education. At UCL, Clare Melhuish and Dean Sully were involved in curriculum and spatial planning dimensions of UCL East’s development plans, and Melhuish had previously undertaken research on universities as actors in urban regeneration for UCL Urban Laboratory, which linked to the major development projects underway at UCL and University of Gothenburg. In addition, both University of Gothenburg researchers, Ingrid Martins Holmberg and Henric Benesch, had previously worked in the role of the university as knowledge broker in relation to the city. There was a shared interest in understanding universities not only as mechanisms within larger financial, political and regional systems, but as actual sites entangled in all sorts of temporalities, materialities and socialities. The consolidation of research interests within the cluster opened up the possibility of critical discussion detached from actual projects.

The university as urban heritage, or more so a critical take on university heritage beyond the somewhat canonical lament with regard to the decline of universities, emerged as an important but also somewhat forgotten question to pick up. The transdisciplinary setting of the centre offered a real possibility to address this question, not only from one, but multiple disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. In fact, this particular unruliness is something that we have always embraced. Moreover, it is something that we recognise as being not only welcome among many scholars and practitioners across our field who have grown weary of their institutional and disciplinary confinements, but also quite urgent since the question that we address does not sit within one discipline alone and demands a more holistic approach.

Many urban universities are engaged in processes of expanding and opening their physical and institutional borders to facilitate greater engagement with the cities in which they are situated, for a variety of reasons that are described in University and community-led urban regeneration (Melhuish, 2016) and chapter 1 of this volume (Melhuish). University cities in turn are home to increasingly mixed, multicultural populations striving to redefine identities and cultural heritage in the context of shifting physical locations. We set out to produce a volume from our transdisciplinary conversations and analyses that would provide insights, grounded in comparative case studies, into how local and global bodies of knowledge, embodied in different but interconnected university and urban communities and initiatives, intersect to shape new understandings of urban heritage as a framework for diverse urban lives. Structured by critical understandings of co-curated, decolonising heritage, it examines the local, diasporic and global dimensions of heritage-making through the lens of the university as urban institution and university development implicated in urban and social renewal, exploring how universities and citizens participate in a shared urban heritage.

The two workshops organised by Curating the City in 2016 and 2017 utilised the prism of ‘curating’ to assemble research and researchers to address the affordance of urban heritage as a resource at the crossroads of different lived experiences and expert knowledges (inhabitants, stakeholders, practices, subject-matters, audiences and/or conceptualisations). The research theme, ‘Universities, heritage institutions and communities shaping postcolonial urban heritage narratives and lived experience for the future’, was developed via two site-based, invitation-only workshops focused on the two university campus development initiatives led by UCL and University of Gothenburg, which have actively sought to engage with local people and neighbourhoods, and participate in a re-shaping of ideas, narratives and lived experience of urban heritage for the future. The workshops explored how universities, as mixed communities of interest dispersed across urban sites, were re-evaluating and re-constructing their institutional identities and heritage in the context of place-based spatial development, and at the same time, through their interventions, participating in shaping the heritage of local populations in contrasting cosmopolitan city contexts. They further considered the close parallels between universities and museums (such as London’s Victoria and Albert East) as civic institutions engaged in the development of new urban imaginaries in postcolonial cities through collaborative processes of co-production with local populations.

The disciplinary structures of universities, and the way they are actualised, spatialised, socialised and economised (see chapters 3, 5, 6, 9 and 12), can be thought of as strategies of entanglement and/or disentanglement in relation to other sites and contexts of knowledge production that have profound implications for the urban contexts and histories in which they are embedded. This poses some fundamental questions – what kind of place is the university?; where is it?; and who is it for?; or perhaps, where is it for? – that emphasise the situated, multimodal and intersectional character of knowledge production, and engages with the university as host as well as neighbour and guest. It addresses the little-explored role of universities in urban neighbourhoods in co-constructing ideas and practices of heritage as a fusion of places/things, memories/narratives, local knowledge/global expertise.

Building understanding from comparative case studies

The chapters generated by the workshop discussions address a series of key and cross-cutting questions, starting in London and Gothenburg, and spreading out across Lund, Rome, Beirut and São Paulo, drawing in the work and insights of our international collaborators across those sites and conditions. How does the university define its own heritage, and how is that played out both within the site of the university institution itself, and within the wider urban location in which it is embedded; how are the traces of the city embedded, in turn, in the university? What does heritage mean to urban dwellers in adjacent neighbourhoods, and how is it defined in different city/university contexts and embodied in the layers of the city through time, and through processes of urban development? How can universities work in collaboration