News | Heritage Matters

The final reports for the British Academy / Mistra Urban Futures project Whose Heritage Matters are now available for free download.

The central question for Whose Heritage Matters was whether, and if so how, cultural heritage could be mobilised to support more sustainable and just urban futures in Cape Town and Kisumu. Our aim was to critically explore what international targets and agendas for cultural heritage and sustainable development mean in the context of entrenched and everyday urban challenges.

Read more about Whose Heritage Matters? Final Reports

Heritage is not only our identity: It is also our politics, our complex histories, and our memories. Heritage shapes the way we live, eat, pray, raise our children and interact with each other. Cultural heritage can bring people together, but it can also be used to keep people apart — as the rise of the right wing all over the world is worryingly demonstrating.

By Naomi Roux, Rike Sitas and Maurietta Stewart

Read more about Braai, the beloved country: The impossible burden of heritage

Professor Beth Perry, Professorial Fellow Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield and Dr Rike Stiatas, Researcher at the University of Cape Town discuss how festivals can transform cities by making space for overlooked people and cultures in an article for The Conversation published on 15 August 2019.

Read more about Festivals can transform cities by making space for overlooked people and cultures

“As cities in the global South urbanise at rapid rates and cities in the North face their own challenges, it is timely to think and experiment with new ways of thinking and acting in the cultural heritage and urban development sphere” says Mistra Urban Futures’ Beth Perry, Laura Ager and Rike Sitas in an article recently published by the International Journal of Herita

Read more about New paper on festivals as integrative sites for sustainable urban development published by the International Journal of Heritage Studies

New project announced from British Academy Sustainable Development Programme.

Read more about Whose Heritage Matters?

Festivals are international cultural practices, taking plural forms and expressions across the world. They offer an empirical lens to enrich our understanding about how tangible and intangible cultural heritage combine, collide, conflict and cohere. Festivals are a spatially and temporally bounded public sphere, a break from normality that surfaces and reveals understandings of and approaches to culture and heritage in very different contexts.

Read more about New Festivals Report Published

The New Urban Agenda, signed in Quito Ecuador in 2016, calls for a broad and holistic understanding of the strategies and approaches needed to develop more sustainable urban transformations.

Read more about Cultural Heritage and the Just City

Whose Heritage Matters? Final Reports

Braai, the beloved country: The impossible burden of heritage

Festivals can transform cities by making space for overlooked people and cultures

New paper on festivals as integrative sites for sustainable urban development published by the International Journal of Heritage Studies

Whose Heritage Matters?

New Festivals Report Published

Cultural Heritage and the Just City