TRACK 6: URBAN CULTURES AND LIVED HERITAGE

Transformative power of culture and heritage; Risks and threats on cultural landscapes

Chairs:

• Evangelia Athanassiou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
• Zeynep Gunay, Istanbul Technical University (ITU)
• Anita Martinelli, Politecnico di Milano - DAStU Department
• Tihomir Viderman BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg

This track explores how cultural landscapes take shape through people’s search a sense of connection and presence in unsettled urban space. As societies perceive their foundations as increasingly unsettled, and commit to envisioning paths to fairer futures, urban cultures and heritage conceptually address and practically open possibilities for disrupting unjust urban development.

Urban cultures foster moments where people engage with the unknown and unpredictable, enhancing the capacity to challenge social constraints through improvisation, creativity, and action. Heritage links present struggles to ideas of the past, reflecting how collective memories and aspirations are shaped through the tension between local identities and planetary urbanization. Planetary urbanization drives processes like touristification, gentrification, and commodification of space, alongside global and local forces like climate change, environmental crises, and conflicts. Together, these pressures erode urban heritage and cultural landscapes, creating vulnerabilities that require innovative protection and enhancement strategies.

This track puts culture and heritage into dialogue, viewing heritage not as an abstract quality of objects or places, but as an outcome of diverse, often contested social relations through which groups interpret the past to give meaning to the present and future. Heritage is not a static condition but a lived process, constantly redefined through urban cultures. By situating this lived heritage in spaces of everyday life, and urban cultures in the morphologies of objects and places, this track asks how daily negotiated rhythms of urban development—whether accelerated, paused, disruptive, or stabilizing—shape transformative paths and actions.

We invite contributions that explore challenges posed to historic places and everyday urban spaces as multicultural and emerging heritage sites. Adopting a broad view of urban cultures and lived heritage as dynamic and interconnected processes, this track highlights their roles in shaping urban transformations and invites discussions on how they influence social structures and spatial development.

Keywords: urban cultures, heritage as process, lived heritage, everyday, cultural landscapes, unsettled urban space