FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI / KOOZ I want to start this conversation from a notion which is inherent to both of your perspectives on heritage, and that is change. Francesco, you just released the book ‘Changing Heritage’ — could you expand on the ambiguity of that title?

FRANCESCO BANDARINFirstly, this is a book that tries to synthesise many viewpoints that I have been able to explore, through my long career in heritage. It is also deliberately provocative, because I think that the world of heritage has a tendency to be conservative; we remain attached to certain ideas that, while valuable, are historical — therefore potentially out of touch with the reality of the world. The title is ambiguous because it means that heritage is changing, but also suggests that we can actually change heritage through action. I would say the heritage has always changed; I'm not discovering anything new. If you look at the history of heritage, as I do in my book, we see quite clearly that the origin of heritage is a modern concept, not something that comes from antiquity. It comes, essentially, from the French Revolution, a moment of rupture in the feudal order of Europe. Before that, the heritage didn't exist. There were people — erudites — who regarded Antiquity as a source of inspiration, but they never thought of heritage in the modern sense. The modern sense comes after the revolution; essentially it is an awareness that there is a capital asset, accumulated over centuries of church policies and so one, which is actually a public good. This concept belongs to the state, to the new order that came out of the French Revolution. It was a very clear and simple assertion by the intellectuals of the revolution, figures of the Enlightenment that came out, those who created modern culture. This constituted an awareness that in this new world, there are assets which have both cultural and economic values.

Don't forget that heritage uses the vocabulary of economics, of values; you have inventories of assets. Heritage in French is patrimoine, which also infers personal wealth. So heritage is originally an economic concept, but now charged with cultural values that are deemed important for society. By the middle of the 19th century, heritage became something else; a tool of the national state, a tool to build up nationalist views of the new countries. This persists into the 20th century, for the many countries that gained independence, thus needing to to reinvent their pasts. I always quote Hobsbawm, whose fantastic book The Invention of Tradition, shows with clear historical evidence that many so-called traditions were invented, and this practice was very prolific. Many traditions are invented, they never existed; they are 19th century creations to give some weight to the idea of a nation-state. Later on, it becomes something else again: heritage begins to attract a new public of tourists. This happened at the end of the 19th century, where heritage is very much an object of economic use as well as for personal and cultural enhancement. So there have been a great many changes over time.

What I see today is that these changes have not continued. Mostly, the concept of Heritage that we use today — to describe, analyse, interpret, preserve etc — are essentially born in Europe. This principle spread around the globe, especially through various colonial adventures, eventually becoming universal principles — while remaining fundamentally European. When there was an emergence of new ideas of nationhood in other parts of the world, you can imagine how complex this became. The edifice of heritage starts to crumble because you can't use the same occidental concepts for cultures that have a completely different approach. Think about what might be the approach of a Buddhist society to heritage. A Buddhist society is based on the idea of reincarnation, a cycle of life and death. On the contrary, Europeans consider heritage to be an eternal thing; our whole system is designed to preserve heritage for the long term — for eternity, if possible. There are of course many other factors, from spiritual, cultural or religious dimensions and so on. So I think that there has been a clash between the Western concepts derived from the 19th century and the great inventions of heritage in the twentieth century, and this class is not reflected in the way heritage is managed internationally; it creates an enormous friction or tension. This tension comes on top of many of today’s most important issues, which at first might seem disconnected from heritage — but they're not. For instance, notions of human rights, gender, respect for diversity and so on: these things are not reflected in the way we work with heritage, because we are living under a universal system of values that was essentially born in and disseminated through European systems. So it's complex, but we can explore this complexity — that's what I try to do in my book.

KOOZ Rania, let’s discuss the idea of climate inheritance: you have talked about the changing climate, our approach towards the “future of our past” — arguing that our approach to climate must change with it. How does this concept of changing heritage sit within this idea of a changing climate?

RANIA GHOSN I think it's important to say that our practice — Design Earth — approaches the climate question with an interest in critical spatial representations, starting from narratives of specific places. Our work has addressed the climate crisis not only as a breakdown of physical earth systems, as critical as that is, but also as a challenge to the stories, images, drawings, and cultural systems of representation, or what we have come to refer to as “Geostories.” The work is a series of projects that channel sites of resonance to planetary imaginations – such as those of planetary commons — which we could then deploy as material and narrative media figures through which to engage the broader questions of planet and climate change.

So, how do we think of “world” and “heritage” – and their pairing! – in the shadow of disasters, mass destruction, all of which occur under the spotlights of mass media? The report “Future of Our Past” is one of several reports that the World Heritage Center has commissioned since 2005, in large part as the managers of such sites seek to identify sites at risk and advance policy recommendations as they been reckoning with the challenge of current preservation practices, and the limits of their own budgets, in the face of the climate change. What became noteworthy, even for the managers of these World Heritage Sites, were the limits of continuing to operate with “business as usual” tools — not least because of the mass scale of such change or transformation or destruction; thinking of the Great Barrier Reef, for example, and how it's kind of drastically impacted, or the recurrent flooding of the city of Venice. The 2019 report “Future of Our Pasts” opens with “The climate is changing and so must heritage,” a plea to include climate factors in decisions about the future of heritage, whether managing assets or allocating resources. However, what these many reports invite us to question is whether the same preservation paradigm — to arrest or reverse decay — remains desirable and “sustainable”: besides frequent, serious material problems and costly budgets, the insistence on preserving particular, intrinsically valuable things while the world around them collapses seemed ethically indefensible.

Change is just an indicator of difference, a modification that might still be of the same kind. So, it might be important to qualify such “change” — to inquire into assumed values of the “business as usual”. Whether one calls it “climate change” or “climate crisis,” “climate destruction” (or world destruction!), or “climate emergency,” each term determines how we identify the issues at stake and how best to respond to them. The other value of thinking through “change” as a verb — is an invitation to think through conceptions of heritage, other than its traditional definition as a cultural legacy that is received from the past, maintained in the present, and passed onto future generations. The proposal of changing heritage foregrounds that such cultural value has been already designed, which maintains open the possibility of it being designed again. Heritage is not a finished project; its values are subject to worlding.

If we're thinking through the lens of crisis and disaster, that logic of destruction is actually quite endemic to historical definitions of heritage — not least in terms of World Heritage and the large scale of urban modern transformations, the large-scale destructions and reconstructions after World War Two, and, even more recently, the destruction of climate. Thinking of heritage inevitably means thinking of its parallel concept, which is destruction. If we're thinking — particularly from within the UN agency — of the strong words of the Secretary General Antonio Guterres at the COP 27 Summit, where he says the world is on a “highway to climate hell”, in that sense, the question of what the hell matters in the world continues to be explicitly a question of value. But maybe we rescue value from the narrow domains of tourist economies, to say that questions of valuations — the way we attribute value to things — might be a broader effective relationship to site.

So, how might we inherit both of these terms — “world” and “heritage” — especially when they're coupled together as World Heritage. We ask: “What heritage is possible after the climate crisis?” or maybe more accurately ““What heritage is possible after the world crises?” and how to world other heritages? What forms of “experimental preservation” might interrogate conventional ways of preserving objects and to natural or cultural landscapes and issues? In a nutshell, how do we choose to inherit both “world” and “heritage” and to do that a speculative approach that is also a form of historical practice — one that chronicles the construction of past and present destruction to imagine through that what other futures might be. How do we engage sites and materials that might not have been valued as heritage sites to begin with? Such questions led us to look into a suite of master narratives – or narratives of the Western Master —with endless binaries, such as Nature and Culture, human exceptionalism, hierarchical understanding of cultures, and histories of injustice perpetuated by civilizing cultural missions, including the detrimental or destructive effects of heritage itself. but also, more broadly, opening it up at the precise moment of destabilization of both world and heritage. So how do we think of this question of heritage and what might be possible in the wake of many crises; at the moment when the world is the site of multiple compounding destructions, what might be relevant values and practices?

Maybe a quick note to add is that we're not coming at this topic as historians or even as experts on questions of heritage. This is a bricolage, a media archaeology which benefits from a generalist design agency, to reveal specific matters. This work deals with critical heritage experts, like Rodney Harrison and Caitlin DeSilvey, who have also been experimenting with forms of describing and operating with heritage sites and values. How do we deal with the matter of heritage — and how do we inherit the relics of the world as a universal category all while holding on to “worlding” as setting up of the world both materially and semiotically? What might we need to unworld, so that we begin to make the world anew? These are some of the questions that are part of this broader agenda of designing with and against both heritage and world equally.

These are some of the questions that frame the Climate Inheritance book. From around 1,200 World Heritage Sites worldwide, the book casts ten as narrative figures to visualise pervasive climate risks — rising sea levels, extinction, droughts, air pollution, melting glaciers, material vulnerability, unchecked tourism, and the massive displacement of communities and cultural artifacts — all while situating the present moment of emergency within the wreckages of other ends of worlds — of extractivism, racism, and settler colonialism. Each site is presented in a triptych with three drawings and an accompanying text.

KOOZ This idea of seeking value or values is complex; there are of course questions around how other cultures might hold different perspectives on value. Rania, you put this forward in one of your speculative postcards on sculptures on the island of Rapa Nui, while Francesco, you quote this idea of Rodney Harrison in terms of “embracing adaptive release” — can you expand on that?

FBIt’s important to acknowledge the work of Rodney Harrison and others (including Rem Koolhaas); it somehow projects one into considering the future of heritage. Unfortunately, this does not make much impact on the system, which is rather content with itself, because the project of World Heritage is a great success; it’s like a mega Michelin system. I directed the World Heritage convention for 10 years; member states are extremely pleased when they have heritage sites, and less happy when admonished for not preserving the status of sites as they should. Even the original idea — around the preservation of the most extraordinary sites, cultural and natural for future generations — has somehow muted into something else.

Today we are essentially celebrating lists of national sites, yet it’s funny how the “national” as a concept is rejected from the beginning; the World Heritage Convention is based on universal values. These then project into a system of national listings, which creates a lot of competition and a lot of pressure from and within member states to receive the award. The idea is very valuable; it has done a lot of good in the world, leading to the preservation of many sites today, while many countries have developed their own heritage processes, legislation and conservation capacities, because of the World Heritage convention. This was the best part idea of the grand 20th century initiative, which now seems partly consumed by processes that we may criticise; processes that belong to globalisation, to this new multilateral crises. Essentially, there is a very strong influence of the political and sometimes even economic market, which creates a lot of distortion upon a professional system which is based on identification values of and so on. It has become a political market, as I said, between member states to agree on certain decisions and directions; the crisis, perhaps, of the World Heritage Convention is that it is not responding very effectively to its original mandate.

These are some of the questions that animated the triptych on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, a Pacific island at the “world’s end” famous for the massive humanoid Moai statues along its coasts. The story of the island foregrounds the devastating impacts of European contact and the drastic reduction of the population following the arrival of explorers, whalers, traders, and slave raiders. In the late 19th century, over 97 percent of the population died in less than a decade. The history of the island makes explicit that climate modification, or the climate crisis, is not something of the future, yet to happen to “us-the planet”, but that is already a historical object or event for geographies away from Empires’ self-bestowed “centre of the world” position. Some worlds have already ended, and some of these worlds have ended multiple times over. And the stories of European colonisation and settlement have drastically impacted other islands and other people, and continue to do so.

Rapa Nui faces yet more ecological distress. The island is vulnerable to the impacts from climate change, as limited freshwater demands continue to grow with declining precipitation and the increasing number of tourists, which far outnumber the island’s permanent residents. Also, the waves from rising sea levels wash away the megaliths, half of which, along with the island’s only main settlement, are located along the coast. So you can imagine that within this century, the porous volcanic large rocks could be battered rectangular blocks.

The question of what is preserved in Rapa Nui is the question of the value of these megaliths. In a world where there's always a question around the distribution of resources, should those means be allocated towards the enduring preservation of the statues or to the life of the inhabitants of that site? These sea-facing stones were once transported from the main quarry to the island’s perimeter. In an Anthropocentric performance, the statues are walked, this time into the sea, rocking from side to side with rope pulls, so they might continue to oversee life, as imagined in Moai mythologies. The statues are ​​replanted into submerged seawall, volcanic-ash gardens, so that the ancestors may continue to care for the island and its people. This speculative fiction opens up questions on the materiality of heritage, not as the preservation of the figurative megaliths, but in their eroded afterlives. Here inheritance thrives through the circulation of parts, akin to a spolia of the imagination, which operates through reassembly or adaptive misuse of previous constructions.

KOOZ When the idea of heritage was formed, it was very much tied to man-made physical artifacts, whilst now it has expanded to include entire ecosystems. What prompted this idea of heritage is something which expands that far — and what does it mean to conserve, we accept the fact that that heritage needs to change? If we can't control the climate crisis, we can’t control that heritage — so where does that leave preservation efforts?

FBI think that we have to look at history and how the thing that we call heritage has emerged. Essentially, there are two streams: cultural heritage and natural heritage. In terms of cultural heritage, even the term heritage is a modern phenomenon; the term was the monument, the Latin etymology of which suggests a memorial place, essentially something to remember. In the beginning, it was about monuments, the definition for which is so strong that we still use that term; now, the International Council of Monuments and Sites is the organisation that deals with that. So besides churches, palaces, and the archaeological monuments themselves, we saw the introduction of urban heritage — a major change in the concept, as the urban environment is a living heritage. Then we had the introduction of landscapes, which was another important category — followed by other sorts of cultural itineraries, science buildings, modern architecture, and now the complex of cultural heritage is richly articulated. The category of natural heritage comes from another tradition at the end of the 19th century. Somehow this rises more strongly in the US than in Europe, which still retained a somewhat Romanticist view of nature. In America one confronts the expanse of nature; here one could view areas that were “pristine”, where nature seemed to be in its original state, or at least, so the thought at the time. We then see the birth of national parks in the US as a way to address the issue of natural preservation, an idea born in the US, and which is now a major tool.

Now, these two concepts are quite different, but at some point they were packaged together, in the World Heritage Convention. The World Heritage Convention is the first and only actual international treaty that deals both with cultural and natural forms of heritage, putting them together. It was a very interesting combination, very dynamic. This relationship works very well, although we retain the difference between culture and nature and we are still unable to define heritage as just one element, one complex; there are natural and cultural experts, criteria and so on. This idea created a lot of interactions; a lot of natural heritage concepts and principles of conservation became embedded into something that is defined as a cultural heritage and vice versa. People have understood that they cannot conceive of a natural heritage site, without considering the population and the anthropic use of it, because there are very few places on earth that have fully escaped human use. At the beginning, the category of natural heritage was reserved for so-called pristine areas and in fact, this also led to the violent expulsions of many peoples. Now, of course, we recognise indigenous people within the local population, not only as having rights but also carrying knowledge that is useful for conservation.

KOOZ I would love that Rania — especially as both of you have raised the question of the nation-state vs. territory and universality.

RGIn the speculative triptych of the Galápagos, we address how practices of ecological conservation might curate who is deemed worthy of life. The Galápagos Islands National Park Service ecological restoration program, which has supported the rewilding of “valued” giant tortoise, the icon of the island, by eradicating “predatory” animals — first introduced by colonial settlers and now labeled “invasive species,” such as goats, feral pigs, and donkeys — by ground hunting, sharpshooting, and poison-laden mini-helicopter drones. In particular, the Judas goat technique consists of capturing one animal from the herd and tagging it with a GPS device, after which it is released back on the island and tracked back to the herd, which is gunned down, except for Judas. Track, kill, repeat. The last sterilised Judas goat is allowed to live out the end of their days on the island, haunted by the effects of such repeated trauma. We reckon with this uneven valuation of life and grief, and draw on the trans-Atlantic slave ships to portray the values of settler-colonialism and its scientific enterprise, from Charles Darwin’s theory of evaluation to contemporary landscape “restoration” practice, in how they organise life and grief.

KOOZ I'd like to stay with this idea of natural heritage reflecting on the forest of the Cedars God in Lebanon’s Qadisha Valley, which itself is a UNESCO site. It's not directly in the line of fire of the ongoing warfare and genocide, but it is now threatened by climate change as well as the forces of conflict. Such events threaten both historical and natural sites. Could you share what that listing means, for either of you?

RGThank you for this question. It's helpful to situate this triptych, and the violence it reckons with, within other more “slow forms of violence” that climate change has been associated with, and not explicitly as sites of war and military destruction – both of which are also significantly entangled with practices histories of heritage, as Lucia Allais points to, but that’s a story for another day. The Cedars God triptych was a channel to make sense, or make do with the violent explosion of Beirut port explosion, which happened on August 4 2020, and maybe some more enduring forms of violence and destruction that I was born and raised into in Lebanon – always with the imperative to patch the pieces together and to continue the project of life. It was probably also a temporary refuge where I allowed myself to mourn. This explosion became an event to explicitly reach out to mythological imaginaries, and in particular the Epic of Gilgamesh, in a quest to make sense of things to survive within the bubble that myths delimit, to encapsulate life. And amidst it all, the ammonium nitrate falls from the sky as a high-nitrogen chemical fertiliser used in industrial agriculture. So that to sublimate the entitlement to kill transforms into many life plants. The site became a way of reckoning with this violence at degree zero and with forms of difficult heritage, not unlike the Peace Memorial on the site of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima. These sites remain an exception in the listing reason among the 1000 plus sites. And yet, they allowed me to meditate on a scale of violence that is “out-of-this world” – the stillness of death, fires in the sky. The ethical imperative of the storytelling – for the situated designer that I was with respect to this site – was how to narrate destruction, not for destruction's sake, but for what forms of life that might be possible in the wake of such destruction. The term “salvage” is often how we think of things that are passed down and that we choose to reassemble. Also to inherit, as someone recently reminded me, means that you've survived the catastrophe. There's a responsibility that comes with inheritance, because you are the form of life that remains; with that comes the question of what salvage you want to pass down to the descendants so that they continue to have life.

KOOZ In the book ‘Climate Inheritance’, you talk about a “means to figure and a means to figure out”, as inherent to the way that you deploy the image. Thinking about inheritances and what we leave behind, how do these images or these postcards figure?

RGWe were initially drawn to World Heritage sites in part because of how extensively they travel as media devices, and how they manage to capture popular attention. So for us, if people are interested in that artifact and they care about it whenever disaster hits, then maybe there's a way of including more more systemic things with that artifact, things, such as environmental and climate systems that extend over time and space. The medium becomes a tool through which we can tell these larger systemic questions at sites with density of attention and care, if only to push back against their uneven distribution and to recover some of the residues, echoes, and ghosts that rest in the shadows of world attention.

Figures allow to assemble such clusters of stories and meanings and scales. It's a way to reach out to that promise of worlding, through the projection of the figure. What does it do, that figure? It's both a material thing that allows us to put together many parts of the story. It doesn't need to end up with a recognisable or familiar whole, but almost like a cyborg — it puts together, beyond binaries, some parts and provisionally together. Figures may push back against some of the things that we inherit — not to completely dismiss them, but maybe to make them profane; to reuse and collapse things that might happen in separate domains of meaning or without an obvious thread. They allow us to work with stories that could be quite violent — but to stay with them, even if just for the time of a story, to look at them so that one may begin to attend to the project of figuring things out or to live through the figures – it is the imperative of the survivor.

FB We have seen in recent years, many examples of direct, specific and willful targeting of heritage sites. Of course, Palmyra is the most famous of them. But in the past ten years, we’re also seeing many instance of urbicide. How would you define Mosul, if not as urbicide? How do you define Homs, Aleppo, now Gaza and also Lebanon? The army is razing villages so the area cannot be inhabited by the same population. This has pushed the level of destruction to another level; we must be aware that at this point, heritage protection is an utopian dream.

I'm working a lot on the issue of Gaza; we recently presented a new report on the future of Gaza, which also seems a bit utopian. But I think it's important to think about the future in that place. There is a chapter on heritage, and when we had to address that issue, we felt paralysed. None of our professional tools felt applicable; mosques, museums, all sites have been manipulated. We need heritage as a tool for social identity, for social cohesion in the future. So we will have to invent a new type of heritage, which probably has nothing to do with the category in which we are trained in, but rather what the population will define as their own heritage; a completely bottom-up heritage creation. Heritage has been a top-down discipline; monuments are decreed as such by experts, by the state and so on. In most cases, they are not created by society. We will have to create mechanisms and processes that allow people to identify spaces, places, objects that carry their own heritage. Perhaps we will not recognise them; this will be a very painful but necessary exercise. I think this destruction — as much as the climate change destruction — calls for the complete reexamination of the fields and concepts we have inherited. And perhaps this is a good thing, albeit very painful.

KOOZ Francesco, in your book, you mention the contamination that comes from war; this is obviously a humongous concern that we see in Ukraine, across Palestine, Lebanon and far beyond. How do we reckon with sites where the land itself has been contaminated?

FBWe have published a booklet called Visions of Hope. When you open it, it's not what you expect. You might expect a response to the climate emergency, to the humanitarian crisis, to this incredible destruction of our entire society and so on. Yet we are not the ones to do this, because this is in the hands of the big powers and big organisations. So I think we thought that we would better focus on something that nobody's thinking about; somehow, we offer solutions and perspectives in terms of reconnecting certain regions with the rest of the world. We look at all the elements that constitute a connection; we even managed to discuss an integrated green national metropolis, which is an interesting model that we have studied both in Europe and Latin America, where there are many cases of integrated, multi-state metropolises. So this is a direction that we decided to develop, because we want to put these ideas on the desks of the decision maker so that they have something in their mind when they will discuss the future of Gaza; about a trajectory and a future.

KOOZ Thank you both for your generosity.

Bios

Rania Ghosn is Associate Professor of architecture and urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founding partner of DESIGN EARTH. Their design research practice employs the speculative project as a medium to make public the climate crisis. They are authors of Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (3rd ed. 2022; 2018), Geographies of Trash (2015), The Planet After Geoengineering (2021) and Climate Inheritance (2023). Ghosn is editor of New Geographies 2: Landscapes of Energy (2010) and a themed issue of the Journal of Architectural Education, titled “Worlding. Energy. Transitions” (2024). Ghosn is recipient of the United States Artist Fellowship, Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, Graham Foundation grants, and ACSA Faculty Design Awards for outstanding work in environmental design fields as a critical endeavor.

Francesco Bandarin is an Architect and Planner specialised in urban conservation. From 2000 to 2010 he was Director of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre and from 2010 to 2018 he served as Assistant Director-General of UNESCO for Culture. He is Member of the International Advisory Council of ALIPH, of the Advisory Committee of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and Founding Member of OurWorldHeritage. He teaches at SciencesPo in Paris and advises governments and heritage conservation projects internationally.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.