RESEARCH PROJECT MAPS CULTURAL ENVIRONMENTS IN 52 MUNICIPALITIES

Screening the Cultural Environments of Denmark is a research project which develops new knowledge and tools and is also a supplementary educational programme with a focus on cultural environments.

The aim is that the project should raise the competence level of the entire cultural environment area and identify the most valuable cultural environments in Denmark.

It is, for this reason, Aarhus School of Architecture and The Realdania Foundation have allocated funds for screening cultural environments and for supporting the municipalities in designating and managing their cultural environments over the next four years. Based on a screening to select particularly valuable cultural environments, the purpose of the project is to identify the values and development potentials of our built heritage in Danish municipalities.

Cultural environments are not just about conservation; the environments must have value for people today. Physical traces in cultural environments tell site-specific and often powerful stories with the potential to strengthen local businesses and attract tourists and new residents if their narrative power is activated and made relevant for the present.

The built cultural heritage of Denmark contains large building-cultural values and many interesting cultural-historical narratives. The aim of the project is to bring these narratives into play in order to exploit the large inherent potential of cultural environments.

The project’s ambition is to provide a strategic and methodological overview that allows municipalities to identify the values of cultural environments. Local narratives are made visible and thus become a tool for activating cultural environments as a resource for development in the municipalities.

Through a dialogue-based process involving the municipalities, Aarhus School of Architecture has been visiting, a method for screening cultural environments was developed. We call this method SAK. The objective is to provide a manageable tool that is simple to use for the municipalities, which have the authority in the area of cultural environments.