IHBC’s Support Officer Carla Pianese reports on the University College London (UCL) Discussion Forum, ‘Heritage and Disasters’, on 9 March, to draw IHBC members’ attention to the work of the university’s Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction (IRDR), which brings together a knowledge and expertise to help reduce the impact of disasters globally by encouraging coordinated and collaborative action.
Carla Pianese and IRDR write:
Reducing the heritage impact of disasters globally presents a colossal challenge that requires coordinated and collaborative action. The UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction (IRDR) brings together the wealth of knowledge and expertise across the university, and through research, teaching, public engagement and knowledge exchange aims to improve the understanding of risk and overcome the barriers to increasing resilience to disasters.
The UCL Institute for Risk and Disasters Reduction (IRDR) held a Panel Discussion on ‘Heritage and Disasters’ at UCL on 9 March 2016. Five panelists from academia and practice engaged in a vibrant and lively discussion on how to protect cultural heritage from disasters such as earthquakes and conflicts. There were 120 registrants from heritage and disaster studies and practice.
Dr.Farnaz Arefian, Enterprise Manager for the IRDS, and founder of ‘Silk Cities’, said: ‘It was exciting to see that most of attendees were from the heritage sector, e.g. museums, heritage studies and NGOs. The attendees enjoyed an interactive and thought-provoking discussion with the panelists’.
The panel included:
- William Brown, National Security Adviser, Arts Council England;
- Sergio Olivero, Head of Energy and Security Research Area at the Istituto Superiore sui Sistemi Territoriali per l’Innovazione (SiTI), Italy;
- Kalliopi Fouseki, Lecturer and course director for the MSc Sustainable Heritage at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage (ISH);
- Jonathan N. Tubb, Keeper (Head), Middle East, The British Museum.
Discussion started with panelists’ opening statements:
- Why the protection of cultural heritage is important and how we can protect and enhance its resilience to disasters? What are the complexities in practice?
- How existing academic discourse and research on heritage and disaster risk reduction can play role in heritage resilience?
- How the public and private sectors can be mobilized to proactively reduce disaster risk to our cultural heritage and enhance successful recovery and/or reconstruction when it is impacted?
Tangible and intangible cultural heritage are symbols and identity holders of a community. Protecting and restoring cultural heritage following a disaster has a significant effect on the local communities and is fundamental to civilization. Innovation and technology can help us to predict, to prevent and therefore to reduce risks, especially for natural hazards.
For example, the British Museum is using 3D mapping technologies for the restoration of culture heritage in the Middle East and has initiated training programs for Iraqi archaeologists. Sergio Olivero elaborated on how SiTi is developing mechanisms based on creating knowledge-based businesses to restore culture heritages and engage with refugees and displaced communities.
Instead of simply giving equipment or sending experts, Sergio Olivero and Jonathan Tubb advocated transferring knowledge to local professionals to build up their competence, because locals know their culture and their heritage better than an outside practitioner.
Kalliopi Fouseki mentioned a ‘bottom up’ approach involving local communities to protect their culture heritage and extending the risk assessment from quantitative to qualitative and subjective.
William Brown suggested an international and cross-sector collaboration of creating a database of artifacts in order to better protect and trace them. Protecting culture heritage is not only the responsibility of public entities, but also attracts the attention of private sectors. Building up an eco-system relying on both private and public entities can create a resilient environment to protect cultural heritage.
In the question and answer session, attendees suggested that social media might be better used in communicating the importance of protecting cultural heritage; the involvement of private collectors in culture heritage protection could be more effective; living culture heritage also needed to be protected, and we could create platforms to facilitate collaborative action in protecting culture heritages.
The future challenges and suggestions were identified as:
- Protecting culture heritage against man-made and natural disasters remain difficult and further work is necessary.
- The need for bringing multidisciplinary experts.
- Future events should focus more on natural hazards for which pre-disaster preparations and risk assessment is possible and related to emergency planning.
- IRDR should plan other similar events to raise awareness on these important issues.
- IRDR to lead on creating an international network, integrating interdisciplinary expertise and engaging with both public and private entities to grasp the opportunities to protect and restore better culture heritage utilizing novel technologies (Kalliopi Fouseki, UCL).
See background and more details
To contact IRDR email: irdr-enquiries@ucl.ac.uk
