Communities, ecomuseums and sustainability

Who decides what should be regarded as heritage? Dorina Dobnig, an MSc Sustainable Heritage student, discusses a guest lecture given by Peter Davis (Professor of Museology at the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at the University of Newcastle) on the concept of the ecomuseum.

Professor Peter Davis presented his lecture ‘Communities, Ecomuseums and Sustainability’ to a mixed audience of students, academics and members of the museum and heritage professions at the UCL Institute of Archaeology on 20 January.

The concept of the ecomuseum or ‘ecomusée’ was developed in France by George Henri Rivière and Hugues de Varine as a reaction to traditional museum concepts.

Ecomuseums are community-based heritage projects that support sustainable development – a counterbalance to ‘top-down’ institutional approaches to communities that democratises the operative structures of cultural heritage interpretation and challenges the spatially bound traditional museum models.

In his lecture, Davis elaborated on ecomuseums as both mechanism and process, and the significance of their characteristics specifically in relation to the empowerment of local communities, who can make their own decisions about what constitutes their heritage and the creation of different forms of capital, cultural and otherwise.

As such, no single authoritative model for ecomuseums exists. Rather, the ecomuseum is what Davis calls a “toolkit of heritage practices” that may be adapted to the heritage of specific territories not necessarily defined by conventional boundaries, but instead, for example, by a common landscape, dialect, industry or musical tradition.

Local communities are at the heart of the ecomuseum philosophy and Professor Davis demonstrated its application in a deliberately broad scope of case studies, openly discussing the varied results and impacts on the respective communities, their identity and the challenges in sustaining community-supported ecomuseum practices in the longer term.

Among the wide range of eco-museums discussed were the Ecomuseo de Canapa, Carmagnola in Piemonte, Italy; Kalyna Country, the “world´s largest ecomuseum” for Ukrainian culture in Canada; the Japanese ecomuseums of Asahi-machi, Yamagata and Hirano-cho, Osaka as well as a group of Chinese ecomuseums initiated by a Sino-Norwegian cooperation project.

In his analysis of differing approaches to balancing visitor and community interests, cultural tourism, fragmentation of sites and content, community involvement, and the degree to which ‘heritage professionals’ and financing authorities influence the process in the specific countries, Davis assessed the wide-ranging applicability of the ecomuseum model as a highly flexible framework based on a holistic understanding of the history of a place.

Professor Davis’s book Ecomuseums: A Sense of Place will be published in a revised second edition in March 2011.