Speaker
Description
This paper's contribution is ‘critical heritage urbanism’ that connects urban and heritage phenomena in addressing emerging urban issues of the Anthropocene. I reframed climate change as a cultural phenomenon and delved into the dynamics of water streams, wastewater flows, and treated water flows within the municipal climate heritage context in Izmir, while also exploring the path to establishing a climate heritage nexus on an international scale. By investigating these interactions at both local and global levels, the research had knowledge contribution to intricate complexities inherent climate change and urban cultural heritage nexus in Mediterranean context.
Three important developments have theoretically reevaluated our understanding of heritage, urbanism, climate change: critical heritage studies, critical urban theory, and historical climatology, each of which rethinks and retheorizes these three concepts separately. This research represents my experiment in integrating these three fields within the Mediterranean Region, specifically Turkey's Aegean region, and focuses on down to the urban context of Izmir's central districts watersheds amidst the challenges presented by climate change.
I delved into the intricate relationship between climate change and urban cultural heritage. I explored how these entities intersect and influence each other in theory, policy and practice within an urban context. The terminology "climate change and heritage nexus" was used to refer these entities complex relation. I critically focused on the (mis)uses of incorporating heritage into climate action in Izmir’s heritage urbanism. Heritage urbanism issued and considered as a tool for integrating the heritage actions to climate actions. Through systematic scientific examination of (mis)uses heritage for climate action, including instances of idealization and instrumentalization, I aim to deepen our understanding of the multifaceted relationship between climate change and heritage nexus in Izmir. More precisely, I explored the nexus between urban cultural heritage and anthropogenic climate change in Izmir's central districts' waterbodies by examining the (mis)uses of heritage urbanism for infrastructural projects.
I connected existing heritage theories to practical climate-heritage actions. I analyzed an institution to theorize the climate heritage nexus by looking the heritage urbanism projects in relation to climate heritage action strategies. I explored the (mis)uses of heritage in metropolitan municipal projects that aims to adapt urban watershed landscapes and their communities to mitigate the risks of climate change such as water scarcity, water pollution, food insecurity, sea level rise, heat waves and energy poverty. That made water a unifying theme for my research, encompassing not only natural water but also treated water and wastewater. Water is heritage that makes it the major themes in urban planning, heritage management and climate action. This is especially the case in densely populated coastal Mediterranean cities, where water brings life, but also problems in the form of floods and water shortages.
I connect the concepts from recent academic research on climate-heritage nexus with current municipal climate actions. This supported me not only to criticize the current heritage-oriented climate responses but more importantly it also made me highlight some of the complex realities and ground truths, and to raise heritage concerns for future practice. Critically exploring the potential of heritage to activate climate action in specific metropolitan context, a Mediterranean metropolitan area facing with climate risks and severe water pollution, I showed wide range of Izmir Metropolitan Municipality’s responses. Izmir is a metropolitan city located in the Mediterranean Basin, a multi-country region subject to climate risks and vulnerabilities.
With these finding (mis)uses of heritage for climate action re-categorized by five: Impact of climate change on cultural heritage; solutions in heritage for climate action; cultural heritage as a resource for climate action; cultural heritage as an instrument for climate action; heritage is a process in climate action.
References
Brenner, Neil, and Christian Schmid. “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban?” City 19, no. 2–3 (May 4, 2015): 151–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1014712.
Carey, Mark. “Beyond Weather: The Culture and Politics of Climate History.” In The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, edited by Andrew C. Isenberg. Oxford Handbooks. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Harrison, Rodney. “Beyond ‘Natural’ and ‘Cultural’ Heritage: Toward an Ontological Politics of Heritage in the Age of Anthropocene.” Heritage & Society 8, no. 1 (May 2015): 24–42. https://doi.org/10.1179/2159032X15Z.00000000036.
Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices. London: UCL Press, 2020.
Mark Carey. “Climate and History: A Critical Review of Historical Climatology and Climate Change Historiography.” WIREs Climate Change 3, no. 3 (May 2012): 233–49. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.171.
| Keywords | critical heritage studies; critical urban theory; historical climatology |
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