What’s the connection between heritage and the future? How can heritage help us think about the future better? And can people working in public policy use this to think about what matters, and how to look after it?
These questions are at the heart of our new MSc programme, starting later this year. I think they're important and more relevant than ever: if there was ever a time that asked us to look again at the way we think about the long-term and what matters to us, it's now. Connecting heritage and the future gives us a way of doing that.
But what does that look like, in practice? Over the next 7 weeks I'll be sharing things that we're drawing on as we fine-tune our teaching materials, discussing some concrete examples of where heritage and future thinking connect, and raising some of the questions that we'll get stuck into in the Autumn.
In newsletters to come we’ll look at futures and foresight methods, ways of thinking about change and how things happen, the links we're making with other disciplines like sociology, and science and technology studies, and how this all connects with the work of policy teams. Below, as an introduction, a few short stories about heritage and the future, grounded in recent events.
Welcome! I'm Richard Sandford, programme lead for the MSc Heritage Evidence, Foresight and Policy, based in the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage at The Bartlett. This is newsletter 1 in a series of 8, giving a flavour of what the programme’s about. Questions? Feedback? Drop me a line.
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When people think of heritage, they often start with material things - buildings, monuments, artefacts. Heritage is much more than this, of course. But suppose we stuck with material heritage, what new things are we getting ready to pass on to the future?
Probiotic surface. Credit: Richard Beckett
A fantastic (and RIBA-award-winning) project from The Bartlett’s Richard Beckett responds to the challenge of realigning our relationship with the microbial world by developing "a kind of immune system for buildings: a living microbial layer which can limit the persistence and spread of harmful microbes but which also allows for the presence of good microbes in buildings." The project explores how embedding different bacteria in building materials can manage the local microbiome, limiting the spread of harmful pathogens like MRSA through careful placement of this hybrid, living material within the airflow of a building. This "probiotic architecture" might (they hope) counter our post-COVID fear of the microbial world.
This is amazing! And the tiles are beautiful. It's such an interesting project to think about as heritage, too. What sort of relationship would you have with a house (bigger than you) that actively intervenes in you and your household's microbiomes (smaller than you)? Would it be a bit like living inside Siri, having a house look after you? Would you care more about it and the tiny non-humans whose labour you benefit from? So would houses and workplaces built on probiotic lines be things we want to protect?
If they were, though, how would they age? As the tiles break down over tens or hundreds of years, would they present a biosecurity risk, interacting with the surrounding microbial landscape in unpredictable ways? Perhaps they could help, digesting the material at the end of its life. In any case, if this kind of material became widely used, existing assumptions about how to maintain and protect buildings would need re-examining. There's a challenge for policymakers, understanding how this kind of building would interact with existing building stock.
The appearance of this kind of innovation can glue us to the present, stuck in the now with the sheer brilliance of it. Thinking about heritage concerns—maintenance, care, the value something holds in people's lives—is one way to bring the long-term back into view.
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I said above that heritage is more than material. It's not just the artefacts that culture produces, but the languages, arts, social practices that are the context and means of their creation. On the UNESCO list of 'intangible heritage', for example, you can find camel racing, competitive grass mowing, the martial art of silat, and musical techniques from Malawi, Belgium, Greece, Mauritius and Ireland. Ritual and ceremony feature heavily: the ways we recognise and interact with the sacred are a central part of heritage. How do new forms of spirituality come into being?
Singapore hawker culture is on the list. Still from the film Civic Life: Tiong Bahru. Credit: British Council Singapore
Charlotte Ward and David Voas describe the rise of what they call 'conspirituality', a combination of New Age spiritual beliefs with conspiracy thinking. Jake Angeli, the famous 'QAnon Shaman' who featured in images from the recent US Capitol riots, is one example of what Susannah Crockford calls "the cross-pollination of far-right politics and New Age spirituality". Yoga and wellness have become fertile ground for anti-vaccine and QAnon disinformation in a trend some call ‘pastel QAnon’.
Wake up sheeple. Credit: Instagram/@oryaelice
New Age thinking and yoga already have a complex relationship with heritage, reflecting an appropriation and reframing of a variety of different cultures' practices and beliefs. Much conspiracy thinking depends on a sense of grievance and being under attack, and symbols of an imagined heritage are often marshalled as totems of what is threatened. Ward and Voas explore this in more depth, but both New Age and conspiratorial thinking endorse a rejection of mainstream ideas about evidence and participation in public life in favour of an awakening into awareness of what's 'really going on'. Asprem and Dyrendal suggest that this combination of esoteric insight and opposition to mainstream discourse has, itself, a rich history.
Is this emerging way of seeing the world cultural heritage? Would we protect it, or should we better protect the religious and spiritual heritages that have been exploited to create it? Thinking of this conspirituality as heritage at least allows us to see it as something that is valued by a community, a way of seeing things that is important to some people for making sense of the world. And that will make it easier to understand its origins and counter its influence.
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Heritage is an active intervention in the future, taking steps in the present to ensure that people in the future have some understanding of what was valued in the present. On the programme, we're working to make this aspect of heritage more visible. Andrew Simm offers an example of how this might work, making the case for a Museum of Rapid Transition:
Museums matter because they challenge our lack of belief in the possibility of change. In fact, they graphically demonstrate its inevitability. Museums give the lie to the myth of permanence. They are filled with objects and documents that show how change happens, including the possibility of rapid transitions, whether in response to cultural, political or environmental factors, or war, technology or demography…One hope as a result of this discussion is that we might somehow establish a Museum of Rapid Transition.
This is a great idea, and an important argument for understanding the future through heritage. In spirit it seems close to Surbiton's Museum of Futures than Dubai's Museum of the Future. What all three of these seem to assume, along with any other use of a present-day institution (such as Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry of the Future), is that the idea of the institution will remain unchanged while society changes around it. These museums are for us now, in the present, to think about the future: will they be collected themselves in a hundred years' time, examples of how a previous society tried to understand the changes that were coming? Or are they the beginning of a change in what museums are for?
Photomechanical print of Svartisen, Nordland, Norway, ca. 1890-1900. Credit: The Library Of Congress
All these examples illustrate some sort of connection between heritage and the future. What none of them do, of course, is offer a description of what that future might actually look like. That's something that we can turn to the fields of foresight and futures studies to provide—which we'll look at next time.
Links
In a logical extension of museums' efforts to collect pandemic heritage, the UK government is collecting mutations of the coronavirus: besides the immediate medical benefit, the skills needed for maintaining this archive would support future work with microbial heritages ❡ Cultivating Hybrid Futures in Ancient Seed DNA: Wafaa Bilal saves high-resolution 3D-scans of the 2,700 year-old Winged Bull of Nineveh, destroyed by ISIS in 2015, inside the DNA of heirloom Iraqi wheat seeds ❡ For Sale: Souvenirs of Capitalism's Failures: mementos from Enron and other actors in the 2008 financial crash ❡ GOOGOL COUNTER - A Huge Electronic Counter That Wont Turn Off In My Lifetime: in the comments, imagined reactions from future civilisations.
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Thanks for reading! If you're interested in the programme, there's more information on how to apply here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/heritage/study/heritage-evidence-foresight-and-policy-msc.
© 2021 UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage