Yael Eylat Van-Essen PhD – Curator / Researcher

Cultural Heritage as an Urban Generator

This lecture suggests to see how cultural heritage can function as an urban generator and become a source for economic growth, innovation and social framing. I suggest to relate to heritage in the context of urban planning processes with a systemic approach. In practical terms, I suggest to integrate traditional heritage with smart heritage systems and smart cities’ planning methodologies, based on the acknowledgment that heritage cannot be separated from the infrastructures that enable its performance. In addition, I would like to extend the approach to heritage that would fit the 21st-century reality, in which the concepts of space and time have changed substantially in light of the use of digital technologies. I suggest to relate to heritage not just in its traditional form as: “belonging to the culture of a particular society, which was created in the past and still have historical importance”, but relate to new forms of “present” and “future” heritage which represent the changing concept of temporality towards real-time, non-linearity as well as emergence and prediction generated by new tools of artificial intelligence.