Heritage Place Lab, interlinking research and practice for improving World Heritage management
Summary
The World Heritage Leadership Programme (WHLP) is facilitating linkages between research and practice in order to support World Heritage site management and policy-making by applying a heritage place approach into a research-practice laboratory, the Heritage Place Lab. The intention of the Heritage Place Lab is to function as an incubator of practice-led research agendas for specific World Heritage properties, but also servicing a larger range of properties facing similar issues, by promoting research projects whose findings can have positive benefits for site management and promote site management practices that can shape future research. The pilot phase of the Heritage Place Lab consisted of six online workshops held across a period of one year. During these workshops, site managers and researchers worked collaboratively to explore real World Heritage place issues and concerns that can be addressed through practice-driven research.
Classifications
Region
Scale of implementation
Ecosystem
Theme
Urban and Disaster Risk Management
Challenges
Sustainable development goals
Challenges
The World Heritage system provides space for exchange between academic researchers and practitioners, however, such collaboration has not been sufficiently and systematically undertaken. The Heritage Place Lab aims to activate these networks by addressing the following challenges:
- Weak connections between academia and site management;
- Lack or limited exchange between researchers and practitioners from the natural and cultural heritage fields;
- Lack of direct impacts of heritage research on site management;
- Limited research that addresses site management issues;
- Lack or limited platforms to promote applied research for World Heritage; and
- Lack or limited platforms to promote interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and knowledge systems dialogues, including Indigenous and local knowledge for World Heritage.
Beneficiaries
World Heritage system actors, including researchers, site managers, youth, local communities, Advisory Bodies to the World Heritage Convention, heritage practitioners.
Building blocks
How do the building blocks interact?
Establishing partnerships between institutions sets the foundation to initiate the Heritage Place Lab process (BB1), in order to commit the Research-Practice Teams on the participation of the online incubator workshops (BB2) and the publication of outputs (BB4). Assessing the management effectiveness as a collaborative work between researchers and site managers (BB3) enabled the streghtening of the parternships, and the development of the outputs.
Impacts
The Heritage Place Lab has enabled:
- The establishment or reinforcement of partnerships between research institutions and site management authorities;
- The networking between researchers and site managers accross 4 world regions and 8 World Heritage properties, including historic cities, protected areas, archaeological sites, cultural landscapes, vernacular built heritage and industrial sites;
- The development of practice-led research agendas for World Heritage properties;
- The testing and formulation of a research-practice model of collaboration that can be scaled-up in other heritage places.
Pictures
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