Connectivity In Cultural Environments

Connectivity in Cultural Environments is the first seminar held by The Nordic Cultural Environment Research Network. The seminar explores the complex interrelationships and cultural significances between entirety, scales, forms, understandings, legislation, management, practices, processes, dynamics, and methods to ensure the future preservation and caretaking of cultural environments in synergy with other pressing societal agendas. The heritage category of cultural environments encompasses landscapes, built structures, buildings, usage patterns, and historical layers. Cultural environments consist of the physical environment around us; they are dynamic milieus in constant flux comprising numerous material and immaterial elements, connections, and interrelationships across scales extending beyond the specific cultural environment.

Cultural environments are the framework for daily life and perceived values such as atmosphere, belonging, place identity, and communities. These experiences emerge from the interaction between people and the physical environment. Through this interaction between lived life and physical place, a temporal continuity is created, connecting people and places across generations, ensuring that the past remains a living part of the present and future. Rodney Harrison uses the notion of “connectivity ontologies” to describe this aspect of cultural heritage:

– modalities of becoming in which life and place combine to bind time and living beings into genera- tions of continuities that work collaboratively to keep the past alive in the present and for the future.

The dynamic interconnection between past, present, and future is created through cultural and social practices rooted in the physical environment, which preserves and sustains the cultural environment.Through the concept of cultural environment, we can obtain a broader under- standing of what architectural cultural heritage is, its mechanisms, potentials, and challenges, and how cultural heritage impacts people within the built environment.
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