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CfP: Book in EU-initiative SOS Climate Waterfront

Linking Research and Innovation on Waterfront through Technology for Excellence of Resilience to face Climate Change

The shrink of bio-diversity, unprecedented climate swings and the raising costs of maintenance are symptoms of a planet struggling with Climate Change. To reestablish a healthy condition, cities seek to develop strategies of adaptation to make the built environment more resilient to face floods, droughts, high tides, tropical hurricanes and urban heat islands effect. Resilient urban environments are able to face the present challenges like sponges are able to absorb without degrade.

The concept of sponge implies porosity, urban waterscapes, sustainable strategy and cultural heritage. It requires a shift in the way cities have been designed in terms of dealing with Green infrastructure; planning with nature; regionalization, infrastructure; transportation; sustainable urban development and circular economy. Sponges take and give, they are passive and active and open a new realm of opportunities. Which urban strategies should be implemented? How solutions to adapt and mitigate will be able to enhance the resilience of cities?

Sustainable open solution on waterfront, facing climate change emerges from interdisciplinary and comparative cases to preserve the setting/world/locality. Recent research that proposes innovative resilience methodologies is also increasingly relevant.

Call for papers

SOS Climate Waterfront invites original high-quality papers presenting current research, accommodating a broad spectrum of approaches ranging from speculative, informal investigations to conventional scientific research, including but not limited to the following topics:

  • Sustainable strategy and Cultural heritage
  • Urban waterscapes
  • Porosity

This is a call for a peer reviewed book. Paper acceptance will be subject to a two-stage reviewing process, consisting of an initial abstract review and a later double-blind peer review of full-length manuscripts. The paper publication will be  subject to review acceptance, compliance with submission deadlines and formatting guidelines.

OS Climate Waterfront Editorial Board

Pedro Ressano Garcia Lusófona University of Humanities and Technologies
Maria Rita Pais Lusófona University of Humanities and Technologies
Claudia Mattogno La Sapienza University of Rome
Tullia Digiacomo La Sapienza University of Rome
Lucyna Nyka Gdansk University of Technology
Justyna Borucka Gdansk University of Technology
Alkmini Paka Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Anastasia Tzaka Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Katarina Larsen KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm
Lina Suleiman KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm

 

Call for Papers as PDF – Details of How to Apply

 

*Photo by Mathias Wichman, Unsplash

What will happen to the Ågesta Nuclear Power Plant?

Our colleague Anna Storm (now professor of technology and social change at Linköping University) has been involved in an intellectual exchange with the state-owned power company Vattenfall about the future of Ågesta Nuclear Power Plant in the context of its decommissioning in the magazine NyTeknik.

In Anna’s first article from 28 July 2022, she displays her consternation by the fact that Sweden’s first nuclear power plant (1963-1974) was already being dismantled, disregarding demands for making this cultural heritage of modern Sweden accessible to a wider audience via the cooperation with musea and heritage scholars. Especially in the case of the iconic control room, Anna objected to the practice of the company.

Five days later, on 02 August, Melker Drottz, the acting head of decommissioning of Ågestaverket from Vattenfall, published a response to Anna in the same magazine. In his eyes, Vattenfall did simply, what they were legally obliged to do. Since the control room, among other facilities, would be an irradiated environment, he objected to Anna’s wishes for creating a cultural venue from this heritage site. Furthermore, he pointed to the various other ways, Vattenfall would contribute to the memory of the Ågesta plant.

One day later, on 03 August, Anna responded by stating that future generations also need the actual sites as witnesses of their cultural history. In her understanding, photographs and oral stories will not be enough.

Photo of Anna Storm
Anna Storm

Here are full citations for this exchange:

Storm, Anna: “Ågestaverket – en unik kärnkraftsanläggning slängd i containrar”, in: NyTeknik, 2022-07-28, https://www.nyteknik.se/opinion/agestaverket-en-unik-karnkraftsanlaggning-slangd-i-containrar-7035908 [2022-08-09].

Drottz, Melker (operativ chef för nedmontering och rivning av Ågestaverket, Vattenfall): Replik “Vi är skyldiga att montera ned Ågestaverket”, in: NyTeknik, 2022-08-02, https://www.nyteknik.se/opinion/vi-ar-skyldiga-att-montera-ned-agestaverket-7035985 [2022-08-09].

Storm, Anna: Slutreplik “Det hade varit möjligt att behålla kontrollrummet från Ågestaverket”, in: NyTeknik, https://www.nyteknik.se/opinion/det-hade-varit-mojligt-att-behalla-kontrollrummet-fran-agestaverket-7036016 [2022-08-09].

Lize-Marié van der Watt and Kati Lindström on Tourism and Heritage in Antarctica

Polar Geography has just released an article from the Creating Cultural Heritage in Antarctica Project (CHAQ) with both Kati Lindström and Lize-Marié van der Watt, the project’s PI, as co-authors. The article “Tourism and heritage in Antarctica: exploring cultural, natural and subliminal experiences” explores the inseparability of natural and cultural features in the tourist appreciation of heritage in Antarctica.
Remains of the first Swedish Antarctic Expedition (1901-1903) at Snow Hill island, Antarctica, documented by Swedish-Argentine research expedition CHAQ 2020. Division researchers Kati Lindström and Dag Avango (also at LTU) took part of the expedition. Photo: Kati Lindström

Abstract

The guidelines on heritage management adopted by the 2018 Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting provide the most recent iteration for an Antarctic tourism sector which had, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, been projected to increase further with various risks and potential impacts requiring careful management. In this paper the role of cultural heritage for tourism prior to the COVID-19 pandemic is examined through three empirical perspectives. First, how the Antarctic cultural heritage is represented through the designation of Historic Sites and Monuments and Site Guidelines for Visitors; then how this is presented through tourism operators’ websites; and, finally, how it is experienced by visitors as narrated in open-source social media information. Each dataset suggests that, while cultural heritage is an important component of an increasingly commodified tourist offering, it is only part of an assemblage of elements which combine to create a subliminal and largely intangible Antarctic experience. In particular, a polarization of the heritage experience between cultural and natural does not appear productive. The paper proposes a more nuanced understanding of heritage tourism in Antarctica which accommodates the notion of a hybrid experience that integrates cultural heritage, the history and stories this heritage represents, and the natural environmental setting.

Link to the full article: Tourism and heritage in Antarctica: exploring cultural, natural and subliminal experiences by Bob Frame ,Daniela Liggett, Kati Lindström, Ricardo M. Roura  & Lize-Marié van der Watt.

Connections at the End of the World

Author: Lize-Marié van der Watt

About a decade ago, a handful of humanities and social science scholars joined an international conference to commemorate 50 years since the signing of the Antarctic Treaty. They were part of an Action Group (est. 2006) within the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), delivering papers to a small audience in a windowless basement room in Washington DC. However, this year’s conference, “Antarctic Connections at the End of the World,”—handled by what became the Standing Committee on Humanities and Social Sciences (SC-HASS)—was attended by 130 participants from all seven continents and took place in a large hall with splendid views over the Beagle Channel, in Ushuaia, Argentina. It is clear that this community has not only reached a critical mass but also a critical maturity.

View from Ushuaia

Certainly, this year was a watershed moment. Well-known scholars whose primary work does not usually consider Antarctica chose to attend the conference. There were lively debates between different schools of thought—for example, on cultural heritage in Antarctica, the resilience of the Antarctic Treaty System, and colonial and decolonial perspectives on Antarctic history and literature. The conference empathetically demonstrated that—in addition to their usefulness in multidisciplinary approaches to major research problems—the humanities and social science disciplines are crucial in and of themselves. It is also becoming apparent that scholars can use Antarctica to think through a lot of contemporary outstanding issues in the humanities and social sciences.

Researchers from the Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment made a strong showing at the conference. Kati Lindström’s investigation of Chilean and Japanese perspectives on the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (CRAMRA) negotiations got a special mention in the SCAR newsletter for starting a conversation on the importance of working in different languages. She presented in a session on “Historical Antarctic Strategies” which highlighted how the dominant stories of significant moments, agents and actants in the governance and exploration of Antarctica are coloured by standpoints of those that tell them. Justiina Dahl, who until recently was a postdoc at the division but now works at the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat, presented in the same session, using an analysis of the justificatory narratives in the establishment of the Finnish Antarctic Programme. Peder Roberts argued in his presentation that the scale of logistics contracts and research infrastructures from the International Geophysical Year onwards constitute the hidden part of the historical iceberg when it comes to the history of Antarctic research.

attending group antarctic conference
Polar Presenters: Dag Avango, Justiina Dahl, Peder Roberts, Kati Lindström, and Lize-Marié van der Watt

A session organised by the Creating Cultural Heritage in Antarctica project (CHAQ) took critical heritage approaches to historic sites and monuments in an official but also unofficial sense. Lize-Marié van der Watt dug into the history of the procedure by which official heritage in Antarctica is created, asking to what extent it can be seen as part of a pursuit for knowing, and controlling, the Antarctic environment. In his presentation, Dag Avango proposed a theoretical framework for understanding the role of heritage making in international competitions for influence over the polar regions, by placing heritagization processes within the framework of a wider discussion on the relation between humans, things and ecologies in post-humanities scholarship. Kati also presented in this session, tracing the regionalisation of Antarctic Heritage in Chile and Japan.

City streets in Ushuaia

Travelling to the end of the world (or Fin del Mundo as Ushuaia is commonly known), the KTH team used this opportunity to also conduct some fieldwork in the area and en route, including visiting polar-related museums such as the Corbeta Uruguay, the Museo Malvinas e Islas del Atlántico Sur, some military museums in Buenos Aires, and the Museo Marítimo y del Presidio de Ushuaia. Kati also conducted interviews with key actors in Argentine Antarctic environmental and cultural policy. Excitingly, some of us also met with authorities in Argentina to discuss plans for an Argentine-Swedish Antarctic expedition to some key historical sites on the Antarctic peninsula. More will be revealed soon.

Sustainable communities and heritage politics beyond nature-culture divide – funding from Formas

Formas granted the divisions Kati Lindström funding for the project Sustainable communities and heritage politics beyond nature-culture divide: Heritage development as a strategy against depopulation in Japan. The project will start next year and run until the end of year 2020.

The aim is to analyse the use of heritage development as a possible strategy against depopulation, by comparing how different types of heritage relate to the local communities. Governments often see heritage development as a means for the depopulating communities to acquire a more stable economic footing. While there is sufficient proof that especially world heritage nomination has brought an economic boost to many locations, there is also evidence that this is not necessarily a guaranteed long-term strategy. However, there is no clear understanding which heritage types function best in case of depopulation and how does depopulation influence the maintenance of heritage in the long run.

The project carries out qualitative analyses of 7 heritage nominations from four different categories (cultural landscape, natural, industrial and archaeological heritage) in Japan and asks which of the four types benefits the related communities best (economically, socially,culturally), how they are impacted by depopulation and changing community structures and how do local governments envision heritage maintenance with reduced population. It is expected that the results of the study serve as reference to heritage developers in depopulating communities worldwide. The study will be carried out from the perspective of environmental humanities, using various methods and sources from macroeconomic data to stakeholder interviews, participant observation, focus groups, media and site analyses.