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Exploring the cohesive and social potential of a territorial ecomuseum in eastern sicily
International Journal of Heritage Studies
Within the debate on coproduction, framed as an immanent characteristic of strategic spatial planning aimed at enhancing transformative processes, the paper questions the difficulties and limits that emerged from a long-term action-research partnership leading to the experimentation of the Simeto River Agreement, a river contract in an inner area of Sicily. By discussing some phases of the process through a critical lens, the author, based on her direct engagement in it, reflects on the challenges associated with the co-productive approach experienced in a river valley: issues of scale, governance and coordination with other strategic programmes within the Italian territorial cohesion policy. Finally, the paper calls for a reflection on agonism in co-productive planning, as a way of strengthening the relationship between civil society and public institutions.
Ecomuseums are 'in situ' museums of the community addressing the relationship between people, society, space and time. An ecomuseum is based on structured narratives on selected themes through which the specificity and uniqueness of a place can be captured, conveyed and highlighted, and the participation of local people in the management of their local resources and decision-making can be strengthened, offering opportunities and prospects for quality economies and territorial development. The present study concerns the case of the Greek ecomuseums and aims at their comprehensive recording and evaluation, which has not been done so far. The findings testify that in Greece despite the fact that quality economies are being present in domestic ecomuseums, a common vision of territorial local development has not yet been formed/imple-mented, unlike the rest of the European Mediterranean countries. This is due to reasons related to community participation, to the linkage between production-processing-tourism-culture-sports, to the cooperation of institutional actors and to their sustainability management.
Community museums can be contested sites for learning as they often communicate clear, subjective narratives that challenge mainstream ideas of the past by introducing knowledge that they know to be uncomfortable, rather than displaying multiple perspectives on a violent past. For that reason, educators of history in a divided society may be cautious to expose their students to such information, as their school curricula aim to create both greater social cohesion and criticality in their students that the emotion-laden museum environment could distort. This paper scrutinises the role that two community museums, each located in one of Northern Ireland’s two major identity traditions, play in educating on difficult heritage and, particularly, how conscious each is of developing young people’s critical thinking. Thereby, the underlying values and observed approach to emotions of museums are considered, alongside staff cooperation with teachers, to find out which concept of learning, if any, the museums follow. Key findings reflect a passionate but restricted view of education which lacks a defined concept of what education should be, and how exactly people learn.
The pandemic, with its environmental and socio-economic crises, has highlighted the urgency of structural responses. Overcoming this polycrisis requires the reactivation of a community and identity dimension of places. Cultural institutions can play an important role in this process. This paper proposes a focus on the role of ecomuseums in the creation of resilient communities, able to renew themselves to respond to crises. The ecomuseum movement is strongly committed to the eco-social transition of communities and territories and offers good practices for the management of common goods, methods and tools for the recognition of local identities, joint decision-making, co-planning, the care of living cultural heritage, the integral development of the landscape and the monitoring of impacts.
As De Angelis, Federici, and others have noted, there are “no commons without community.” The concept of community, however (as, among others, Jean‐Luc Nancy and Roberto Esposito have shown), has a dark history continuing up until today, when extreme right‐wing or even downright fascist appropriations of the concept have understood it as a static and identitarian unity bound to a specific territory or ethnicity. While commons‐scholars try to circumvent this legacy by emphasizing the commons as a “praxis” (Dardot and Laval) or “organizational principle” (De Angelis), they thereby tend to neglect the important cultural and symbolic connotations of the concept of community (which, in part, seem to make right‐wing movements appealing for certain segments of the population). In my article, I want to raise the following question: Do we need a sense of community for a politics of the commons, and, if so, what concept of community should it be? To answer this question, I will refer back to the use of the concept of “common sense” ( sensus communis ) in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment . Characteristic of Kant’s use of the term is that it does not refer to an actually existing community, but rather to an imaginary community that is anticipated in our (aesthetic) judgment. Common sense, in other words, involves “acting as if”—with the dual dimensions of acting (i.e., the community is based in praxis) and as if (an imagined, anticipated community bordering between the fictional and the real).
The ecomuseum is a tool for the participatory management of the natural and cultural heritage of a territory. In many instances, we observe that ecomuseums define geology as a central factor of their action: adult and school education on environment and geology, collective organization of facilities for scholars and visitors, assistance to field research and protection of sites. After presenting the concept of ecomuseum and offering various examples of good practices in different contexts, we shall give a more detailed account of one exceptional site, where the ecomuseum has played a major role in revealing to the local population the existence and characteristics of a spectacular landscape sculptured by the Pleistocene glaciations: the Ivrea Morainic Amphitheatre, in the Italian Piedmont.
This article aims to show the clearly differentiated national context in which concepts of community as used in heritage developed from the late nineteenth century to the present day. In the first part of this article, we look at the origins of the academic use of ‘community’ in Germany from the late nineteenth century to the present day arguing that its association with National Socialism has tainted the concept permanently. In the second part of this article, we move to France, where we also find a long-term scepticism when it comes to the concept of community. The strong republican tradition, which mistrusted everything that was capable of constructing identities that would divide and compartmentalise the republican ethos, rejected notions of community. Ideas associated with community were usually seen as particularist and therefore incompatible with the universalism of republicanism in France. In the final part of the article, we compare the sceptical reception of ‘community’ in the German and French cases with a far more positive left-wing tradition of community studies in Britain. The comparison of the uses of the concept of community in those three countries shows how a transnational dialogue can lead to more theoretically aware use of the concept of ‘community’.
Italy is the only country in the world where ecomuseums have multiplied in the last 20 years and are now recognised by law in 11 regions and one province (de Varine 2017). A national network has been set up to facilitate cooperation and solidarity between the existing ecomuseums and to welcome new ones. The Italian ecomuseums worked on a common text, entitled Manifesto (or Agenda 2016-2017), which summarises the experience gained within the network. It became a permanent, work-in- progress document aimed at reflecting on both the theoretical and the practical collective construction of the ecomuseum movement in Italy and at explaining the relationship between ecomuseums and cultural landscape.
This text describes the discussions and results of the 24th ICOM General Conference, held in Milan from 3 to 9 July, 2016. The first part describes the Conference attendance and programme. The second section presents the issues addressed by keynote speakers and panellists. The third part explains the theme of the Conference, Museums and Cultural Landscapes, and the discussion that developed before and during the Conference, both in Italy and within ICOM's international network. The last part deals with the resolutions and ICOM's strategic plan for 2016-2022 approved at the end of the Conference, and the results of the election of the ICOM governing bodies for 2016 to 2019.
This paper explores the spatial dimensions of a northern landscape – the Flodden battlefield. This is the focal site of the Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum; the centre to a network of 40 other sites around the United Kingdom which together interpret the Flodden story. However, this distributed network does not fit easily with the foundational ecomuseum concept of ‘territory’ as the boundary around a shared heritage, memory and community. The relative merits of three concepts of ecomuseums are discussed in relation to the Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum. Inspired by Doreen Massey’s interpretation of space, this study explores multiple dimensions of Flodden space through four semiautobiographical journeys to the Flodden battlefield during the author’s life: as a family holiday; a teenager with interest in military strategy; an early career field geologist; a project manager working with the local community and artists. The article concludes by suggesting the word territory may not be appropriate for ecomuseums: it suggests that Peter Davis’s favoured term place may be an improvement; however, it ends by proposing that space may be an even better word for the geographic context of ecomuseums.
This chapter illustrates the importance of incorporating local perceptions of heritage. It addresses governance structures of heritage and the political economies that give rise to them. It stems from a growing dissatisfaction with the ever more dysfunctional and socially and economically unfair character that heritage management has adopted in Spain since the start of a devastating economic crisis in 2008. The aim of our exploratory inquiry is to prompt a necessary debate about new potential forms of heritage governance in Spain that could have broader implications elsewhere in heritage management. To do so, we first situate recent conceptualizations of heritage in the current postindustrial economic context. We draw inspiration from the theory of cognitive capitalism, which argues that the modern economy has superseded the classical differentiation between economic wealth derived from labor processes on one side and physical capital on the other. Cognitive capitalism holds that the wealth created today derives from information technology and knowledge that are the products of human imagination and networks of interaction among people and objects. Such “immaterial wealth” is inherently difficult to value quantitatively or to restrict for proprietary use. As a result, wealth created is realized through mechanisms such as patents or other means to protect intellectual property, with the beneficiaries of that wealth determined by prevailing systems of political economy.
As the Spanish Civil War drew to a close, retreating Republican troops in the northern region of Asturias took refuge in caves in the mountains from the brutal victor's justice of the Francoist forces. In this paper we examine three of these caves in the context of the Civil War experiences of the rural municipality of Santo Adriano, based on a combination of archaeological recording and oral history interviews. The paper focuses on the role of the La Ponte-Ecomuseum, a grassroots heritage organisation that has worked to preserve and communicate the tangible and intangible heritage of the district. The Civil War heritage presents cultural, political and practical challenges for the museum: nonetheless it has succeeded in establishing an ongoing programme for its communication and protection.
The Ecomuseo Urbano Metropolitano Milano Nord (EUMM) is a new entity, a widespread and participatory museum interpreting the territory and enhancing its tangible and intangible heritage. The described projects highlight the ecomuseum’s ability to test innovative practices and to promote participated actions in order to understand and to reassemble the urban landscape and the ongoing transformations, evident ones and hidden ones, the knowledge, the history and collective memory, by involving citizens in tasks of active protection.
This paper discusses what museums can do to address the issues brought about by global change and ensuing social, economic and cultural tensions. Just as globalisation can encourage international and intercultural relationships, enrichment and creativity, so too can it foster intolerance and the destruction of cultural heritage and diversity—dual scenarios that are currently playing out in several parts of the world. Traditional policies seem, moreover, unable to successfully confront nationalism, xenophobia, interreligious conflicts, social tensions, and extremism. New approaches to global change are needed. How can museums contribute to social cohesion and intercultural exchange in the current context of changing demographics? What approaches can they take to enhance cultural diversity and inclusion, promote cultural exchange, and foster the new identities of 21st century communities? In the present article, I explore Italy's longstanding history as a cultural meeting ground and examine five recent projects undertaken by museums in different Italian communities in response to globalisation and the cultural diversification of Italian society.
One important reaction to globalization in the twenty-first century has been the democratization of culture and heritage. Local communities have increasingly attempted to recognise and conserve their heritage resources and use them to create sustainable economic development through ecotourism and cultural tourism. Ecomuseum philosophy and practical processes, although they originated in France, have been used in many countries to enable local residents to define, validate and celebrate local distinctiveness and local identity. This article introduces and critiques these philosophies and processes and then describes how one community in the north of Italy (Cortemilia) used them to harness the natural and cultural resources of its locality to enable local people to re-identify their own ‘sense of place’ and rekindle pride in their community. The conclusion compares the processes and outcomes in Cortemilia with two other ecomuseums created to aid community development.
Ecomuseums are attracting increasing attention as means of preserving heritage and also impacting positively on social and economic issues. This paper contrasts ecomuseums with previous forms of cross-sector partnerships. The authors focus on the governance, strategy and leadership of the Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum. The findings have lessons for ecomuseums and other cross-sector partnerships both in and outside the UK.
Ecomuseums may be important settings for understanding cultural heritage through a local community approach, but until now there is no overview of the existing scholarly literature. In this review we analysed scholarly articles on ecomuseums thematically with the aim to provide a comprehensive knowledge base for future research and to distil a common denominator for ecomuseum research. Using pre-defined inclusion criteria we identified 61 articles and a comparative thematic analysis revealed the following six themes: "concepts and theories", "landscape", "culture and anthropology", "development", "management", and "evaluation". Most of the literature examined was conceptual, but a few studies included empirical material. Several themes hold potential for future transdisciplinary research as well as for collaboration with museum and community practitioners. Sustainability emerged as an important element in ecomuseology, although it sometimes remained unstated, thus forming a significant, but implicit core element of ecomuseums. This suggests that sustainability may be ecomuseums' main contribution to a society. The field has the potential to contribute to the larger field of sustainable community development. © Common Ground, Cheng Chang, Matilda Annerstedt, Ingrid Sarlöv Herlin, All Rights Reserved.
In tourism trends on global level became obvious the popularity of cultural tourism. There is a growing interest and connection between natural and cultural heritage with a living societies, with the growing concern for nature and heritage preservation. Importance of tourism and the role of cultural tourism are becoming of strategic importance in global economy, especially in underdeveloped countries. This study examine the successful management practices in creation of culture based tourism destinations and applying their practices to undeveloped regions. Study is using principles and practices that are in-line with “eco-museum”, “cultural routes” and “cultural district” ideals, which break from traditional approaches to heritage management and tourism use. The aim is to highlight the synergies between common philosophy and promotion, safeguarding and conservation of heritage and enhancing the economic, social and cultural wellbeing of local communities. Theoretical base of study is focused on principles of tourism valorization method applied on heritage complexes, sustainability indicators of tourism development and a survey conducted on a focus group of tourism experts engaged in Ibar Valley in Serbia, that enabled the quantitative
results of the evaluation process. The aim is to highlight the synergies between landscape, heritage and festivals (living culture), trough safeguarding and conservation of heritage resources and tourism promotion.
"We analyze the emergence of an adaptive co-management system for wetland landscape governance in southern Sweden, a process where unconnected management by several actors in the landscape was mobilized, renewed, and reconfigured into ecosystem management within about a decade. Our analysis highlights the social mechanisms behind the transformation toward ecosystem management. The self-organizing process was triggered by perceived threats among members of various local stewardship associations and local government to the area's cultural and ecological values. These threats challenged the development of ecosystem services in the area. We show how one individual, a key leader, played an instrumental role in directing change and transforming governance. The transformation involved three phases: 1) preparing the system for change, 2) seizing a window of opportunity, and 3) building social-ecological resilience of the new desired state. This local policy entrepreneur initiated trust-building dialogue, mobilized social networks with actors across scales, and started processes for coordinating people, information flows and ongoing activities, and for compiling and generating knowledge, understanding, and management practices of ecosystem dynamics. Understanding, collaborative learning, and creating public awareness were part of the process. A comprehensive framework was developed with a shared vision and goals that presented conservation as development, turned problems into possibilities, and contributed to a shift in perception among key actors regarding the values of the wetland landscape. A window of opportunity at the political level opened, which made it possible to transform the governance system toward a trajectory of ecosystem management. The transformation involved establishing a new municipal organization, the Ecomuseum Kristianstads Vattenrike (EKV). This flexible organization serves as a bridge between local actors and governmental bodies and is essential to the adaptive governance of the wetland landscape. It is also critical in navigating the larger sociopolitical and economic environment for resilience of the new social-ecological system. We conclude that social transformation is essential to move from a less desired trajectory to one where the capacity to manage ecosystems sustainably for human well-being is strengthened. Adaptability among actors is needed to reinforce and sustain the desired social-ecological state and make it resilient to future change and unpredictable events."
The birth of science is based on a strict dissociation of scientific knowledge from the various aspects of practical knowledge.
The ideal of scientific knowledge as it was shaped in antiquity is still influential today, although the conception of science
and the relationship between science and the life-world has undergone major changes. The emergence of transdisciplinary orientations
in the knowledge society at the end of the 20th century is the most recent step. The Handbook focuses on transdisciplinarity
as a form of research that is driven by the need to solve problems of the life-world. Differences between basic, applied and
transdisciplinary research, as specific forms of research, stem from whether and how different scientific disciplines, and
actors in the life-world, are involved in problem identification and problem structuring, thus determining how research questions
relate to problem fields in the life-world. However, by transgressing disciplinary paradigms and surpassing the practical
problems of single actors, transdisciplinary research is challenged by the following requirements: to grasp the complexity
of the problems, to take into account the diversity of scientific and societal views of the problems, to link abstract and
case specific knowledge, and to constitute knowledge with a focus on problem-solving for what is perceived to be the common
good. Transdisciplinary research relates to three types of knowledge: systems knowledge, target knowledge and transformation
knowledge, and reflects their mutual dependencies in the research process. One way to meet the transdisciplinary requirements
in dealing with research problems is to design the phases of the research process in a recurrent order. Research that addresses
problems in the life-world comprises the phase of problem identification and problem structuring, the phase of problem investigation
and the phase of bringing results to fruition. In transdisciplinary research, the order of the phases and the amount of resources
dedicated to each phase depend on the kind of problem under investigation and on the state of knowledge.
This article builds upon a rich scholarship that has proposed, though with different shades, the concept of socionatures, meaning by this the inextricable hybrid of ecological and social facts. In this article, we aim to explore how the Mafia produces particular socionatural formations, entering into landscapes, becoming rivers and cities, penetrating into the bodies of humans and non-humans. We will develop our argument by exploring a specific geographical area, the Simeto River, and how the Mafia has become intertwined with its ecologies. We will analyse the appropriation of the river since the 1950s, illustrating various ways in which the Mafia has blended with its ecologies: the control of water, the touristification of the river’s mouth and the placement of waste facilities. We argue that one crucial feature of Mafia socionatures is the attack against commons, i.e. the attempt to subdue the (re)productive properties of human and more-than-human communities to Mafia economic interests. Therefore, we will propose the practices of commons and commoning – that is, the making of commons – as one of the possible strategies against the Mafia.
After decades of both enthusiasm and criticism over participatory mapping in planning, some scholars are accusing it of being an empty ritual, unable to deal with substantial issues or being servile in the face of power. This article presents a participatory mapping and planning experience carried out by an action-research partnership in the Simeto valley (Italy). It claims that reframing participatory mapping through action research means both dealing directly with power and addressing substantial issues. Action research-based mapping’s effectiveness is related less to mappers’ ability to map spatial changes and more to the impact that mapping has on the mappers themselves.
While politics has always been linked to geography, the Earth itself has largely been seen as playing a backstage role, the mere window-dressing for human intention and interest. With the advent of the epoch known as the ‘An-thropocene’, the Earth is no longer in the background, but very much in the fore-ground, in constant rivalry with human intentionality. In the meantime, human ac-tion has taken on a dimension that matches that of nature itself, and consequently the definition of geo-politics has been transformed. Appeals to nature, therefore, do not seem to have the same pacifying and unifying effect that they did in earlier ecological movements. By drawing on anthropological and philosophical literature, this lecture will discuss this new geo-political framework and show how the exten-sion of politics into nature must modify our views on war and peace in the future.
In this Interface we examine the challenging and innovative work of community and environmental
mapping in the Simeto Valley of Sicily. In the Fall of 2015 Daniela De Leo and John Forester interviewed
diverse Italian planners to learn about the obstacles, opportunities and surprising turns of their practices.
De Leo and Forester hoped, along the way, to explore the work of Laura Saija and her colleague
Giusy Pappalardo. While the practice stories of both Saija and Pappalardo will appear in a forthcoming
book (De Leo & Forester, 2017), we have selected Pappalardo’s account to examine here with the help
of five distinguished commentators from Italy, Brazil, Kenya, and the USA.
The detailed practice account that follows reveals specific aspects of innovating in daunting planning
contexts. In particular, we learn about new practices that integrate common and traditional plan-making
techniques of planners with skills of enabling productive, even transformative engagements with
local people and the territories in which they live. We learn here too about new possibilities of teaching
by identifying essential skills that are often neither taught nor tested in university curricula.
In Italy, planning is typically taught in schools of architecture and engineering and, with some
notable exceptions, with a heavy emphasis upon (1) making plans or rendering projects rather than
constructing processes or assessing and formulating public policies, and (2) specifying formal aspects
of physical planning rather than crafting incentives and regulations to shape collective behavior. This
remains largely true in a “planning world” that has changed and is changing significantly, where challenges
of knowledge and public action remain pressing if planners are to address necessary needed
social, physical and environmental changes.
This book is based on my doctoral work, which traced the transformation of a colliery in South Wales into a heritage 'park'. It presents a sociologically-informed historical account of how this transformation was effected, pulling out the often competing interests and investments manifest in the interactions and perspectives of the various parties involved. The analysis shows how the heritage project grew out of a complex terrain of political, economic and social-cultural conditions, emerging as an uneasy symbolic and material negotiation of local and wider tensions. These included the actualities of local economic deindustrialisation and decline, coupled with a local politics of 'labourism', which encountered a new discourse of tourism-driven regeneration promoted within policy circles in the 1990s. As well as analysing the conditions for its production, the book describes how the heritage park displays were created, using outside expertise that marginalised local people's involvement in the project, as well as presenting visitor research into how visitors responded to these narratives. It concludes by discussing how the trope of 'community' is put to work in heritage to engineer alliances and investments that create a symbolic 'object' of collective identity, yet which fail to enable the living 'subjects' of heritage, with their complex social positionings and experiences, to take centre stage.
As Michael Goodchild reminds us1, the Seventeenth-Century geographer, Bernard Varenius, produced a treatise focused on two views of geography. One, clearly related to the work of Newton, covered general geography (dealing with a general set of principles) and the other dealt with ideographic geography (having to do with the special character of places). Varenius’ (1650) two-fold approach affirms what our society has forgotten, but what is in agreement with Newton himself: we need to conceive of — there is — both absolute and relative space. The former is assumed by physicists in the course of their abstractions and the latter is experienced by ordinary people in the course of making their way in the world. However, today, the powerful realm of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), for all its potential for human understanding and good, does substantial violence by requiring that all our transactions and uses translate (radically convert) our experiential realms into the coded terms of GIS as based on data provided and available only in Euclidean geometrical terms for Newtonian space.
Which kind of tool can be used by the social community to "take care" of its cultural and natural resources? What public support has been expected by cultural organizations in charge of managing such common goods? Managing Cultural Heritage explores managerial and governance issues within the cultural heritage sector, with particular regard to the ecomuseum. Moreover, a social accountability model is supplied to ecomuseums in order to be accountable towards its shareholder, the local community.
Since Ostrom pioneered work on community-based forms of management of common-pool resource systems, the amount of research on the topic has increased. Action-oriented researchers have contributed to the debate identifying how, in specific problematic situations, communities can be helped to fill the gap between a disappointing reality and best planning practices and theories. The paper shows how, in a highly contested milieu challenged by the presence of organised-crime (Eastern Sicily, Italy), a collaborative and action-oriented approach to research helped the Simeto Valley community to evolve from a successful social mobilisation against the project of building a controversial waste-to-energy facility to an innovative and stable form of community-based natural resource management.
This is an essay about the interplay of objects, art and visual culture in several community museums and historical sites dedicated to local social history in coastal Brittany. There, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Breton maritime culture invented a range of compensatory ritual objects, sites and practices to account for loss of life at sea. The presentation of this material culture of mourning in small museums, regional museums and ecomuseums on the Breton North Coast and the islands of Sein and Ouessant are examined in this essay. These material objects once bore material witness to crucial moments in the life of the family and today serve to represent the community’s collective memories and to narrate the community’s heritage to the outside world. In several cases examined in this essay, literary representations, art and visual culture are compared to heritage sites and museums. Methodologies are drawn from social art history, studies of tourism and collecting, museum studies, material culture studies and feminist interests in the politics of the everyday.
The idea of the 'integrated museum', a more socially inclusive form of cultural institution, was a key outcome from the UNESCO/ICOM 'Round Table of Santiago' in 1972. Many of the concepts embodied in this idea became part of ecomuseum philosophy and practice during the 1970s and 1980s, in particular the need to involve local communities and make museums more democratic. The ecomuseum has the potential to be a socially inclusive mechanism and is now a worldwide phenomenon. Many of its tenets (the museum as territory, fragmented sites, in situ conservation and community leadership) are used--in a variety of ways and with varying success--as a mechanism to conserve cultural and heritage resources and to construct and promote local or regional cultural identities. Although the philosophy and practice of ecomuseums has been subject to criticism, they are still being created, mainly in rural areas, as a means of conserving traditional landscapes and ways of life. Japan has embraced the ecomuseum philosophy, and three contrasting ecomuseums (Hirano, Asahi and Miura) are described here, their roles analysed and their democratic nature questioned. It appears that the ecomuseum does have the ability to be a truly democratic method of heritage conservation, but that ultimately much depends on leadership and the identification of the local community as the key stakeholder.
We live in the ‘era of disparition’, in Paul Virilio's words. Globalisation causes our common markers to disappear: time is worldly and instantaneous. Perception of space is modified; everything can be in the same place at the same time; places tend to standardise. Communities are baffled by wars, ethnocide, emigration. In the midst of all this, collective memory fights for existence. The motto of museums could be, as Virilio says, ‘searching for signs rematerialising the world’. To counter the deleterious effects of disparition, museums should stress the importance of territory and history. Ecomuseums in particular can become the archetype of social places for meetings, for common elucidation resulting in exhibitions, for remembering collective memory. The museum must help the community undertake not so much a duty of memory as a work of memory. The function of the museum is awakening consciousness in many dimensions.
Research carried out by the authors in northern Italy (see Corsane et al., ‘Ecomuseum Evaluation: Experiences in Piemonte and Liguria, Italy’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 13, no. 2 (2007): 101–16) was designed to assess how closely selected ecomuseums met the demands of ecomuseum theory. However, the discussions with ecomuseum personnel at five sites in Piemonte and Liguria also provided an opportunity to explore how these community‐based heritage projects measure their ‘success’. This research indicates that the methods of performance evaluation that are applied to most national or regional museums—criteria such as visitor numbers, the number of new collections that have been acquired, or number of educational activities delivered—have less meaning in an ecomuseum context. This work suggests that success could be measured more effectively in terms of the forms of capital that result from local people’s use of ecomuseological methods to engage with and conserve their heritage.
The term ecomuseum has been applied to a wide range of projects that seek to conserve and interpret aspects of tangible and intangible heritage of a defined geographical territory. Ecomuseum theorists have assigned a number of characteristics to these organisations, including in situ conservation, fragmented site interpretation and a democratic, community‐based approach. However, there has been a tendency for the term to be applied casually—sometimes simply as a marketing device—with scant regard to ecomuseum philosophies. To date, little critical evaluation of ecomuseums has been carried out that compares practices at individual sites to the demands of ecomuseum theory. This research examines five ecomuseums in Piemonte and Liguria, northern Italy, to try to discover how far they achieve the tenets of ecomuseum philosophy. Although four of the five sites appear to meet most criteria, the results confirm that a wide variation in ecomuseum practices is inevitable due to local circumstances. Consequently, the ability of any ecomuseum to be a truly democratic organisation and meet all ecomuseum principles is compromised.
Among the reasons for the development of the eco-museum concept, largely in France in the 1970s, was that of encouraging economic advance in areas which had suffered serious reverses of fortune. The paper examines the current position of some important early eco-museums, at Le Creusot (intended to assist development in a former industrial area) and two in the Cevennes (designed to stabilise the culture of a remote rural area). The relationship with the local people, one of the critical features of the eco-museum, may suffer severely as generational change occurs.The takeover of such developments by institutions for different purposes, or for the benefit of visitors rather than locals, can make them victims of their own success in stimulating economic growth, with the risk of consequent unintended shifts in society and economy.
This article considers some aspects of an historical open‐air museum, an ‘eco‐museum’, in a region called the Bergslag in mid‐Sweden, an area renowned for its age‐old iron ‐ore mining and iron foundries and its modern steel industry. It is now an area in economic decline with a relatively high unemployment rate—proclaimed by the state some years ago as a ‘crisis area’ in need of ‘economic and cultural support and development’. The argument of the article is that concern with controlling the future is a central motivation for the ecomuseum to turn to the past, since history is interpreted as a rational continuity and the roots of local identity, essential ingredients in the making of a good future. This lends the concentration on varying techniques of iron production and work some of its cultural meaning. This concentration is a projection of present values and interests on to the past—from which people in turn seek knowledge as if it were something natural of the past while in fact the cultural identity and a sense of uniqueness are inherent in the events of their ongoing lives, tied to places and networks of social relations.
The working-class town of Fresnes, in the Paris suburbs, is the site of an ecomuseum founded with a view to conserving, presenting and explaining the specific territory of the town and problems related to urban development. But first and foremost, this museum was created to give a voice to those who have traditionally been unable to express themselves: women doing manual labour, prisoners, immigrants, the unemployed, and those living in housing projects. Born in Caracas, author of several articles on the relationship between cultural identity and museums, the sociologist Coral Delgado holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from the University of Paris and a diploma in museology from the École du Louvre. She is currently a lecturer at the Simon Bolivar University in Caracas.
Elinor Ostrom delivered her Prize Lecture on 8 December 2009 at Aula Magna, Stockholm University. She was introduced by Professor Bertil Holmlund, Chairman of the Economic Sciences Prize Committee.
Ecomuseums and the New Museology–Some Definitions
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Genius Loci. Perché, quando e come realizzare una mappa di comunità
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22 ans de réflexion muséologique à travers le monde
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The Taboo of the Collection Between Museums and Ecomuseums
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The Game of Heritagization
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Il principio territoriale. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri
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