Heritage landscapes in mountains

Details

Full Title
FS 3.136: The heritagisation of abandoned mountain environments: challenges and opportunities for cultural sustainability and community renewal
Scheduled
Posters:
2025-09-17, 15:00 - 16:00 (LT), Theologie – SR VI
Convener
Asja Gollo
Co-Conveners
Andreas Haller,
Assigned to Synthesis Workshop
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Thematic Focus
Anthropology, Culture, History, Migration, Sustainable Development
Keywords
heritage landscape, abandonment, heritagisation, sustainability, community renewal

Description

Worldwide, mountain communities and environments continuously transform under the pressure of local/global processes (i.e., spatial mobility, economic globalization, biodiversity loss, climate change). Abandoned mountain environments, in the Global North and South, are among the most visible signs of changes in territoriality, land use and landscape value. Although they no longer serve the economic needs of a region, these landscapes are often associated with community identity, because they represent traces of the past and vital sources of inspiration for the future. Connecting past, present and future, these heritage landscapes highlight the role of culture as means to attach new functions and values to abandoned mountain environments and as possible resource to sustain community renewal. Examples include not only the inscription of cultural landscapes on the UNESCO World Heritage list, but also the establishment of ecomuseums/community museums and the emergence of grassroot initiatives for sustainable development of mountain areas. This session will explore the life cycle of heritage landscapes in mountains around the world, with a focus on those emerged from the transformation of abandoned environments. We welcome conceptual contributions and case studies that

highlight mountain specificities of heritage landscapes,
reflect on drivers, factors and actors of heritagisation, and
consider perceptions, conflicts and negotiations.

We, ultimately, aim to reflect on whether and how the heritagisation of abandoned mountain environments paves the way to cultural sustainability and community renewal.

Registered Abstracts

ID: 3.8900

When heritage fails: anthropological understandings from an unachieved UNESCO inscription in the Italian Western Alps

Gabriele Orlandi

Abstract/Description

Since they connect the past, present and future of a territory, heritage landscapes have an inescapable instrumental dimension. As such, they can be regarded by decision-makers and agents of institutionalized culture as a vector for conveying new territorial visions and practices, as it happened between 2020 and 2023 in an Occitan-speaking valley of the Italian Western Alps. Here, the reduced light pollution and low level of infrastructure resulting from long-standing depopulation trends represented the starting point of a process of heritage-making. Promoted by the valley’s mayors and by the local Ecomuseum, the UNESCO Heritage of Astronomy inscription aimed, by raising an astronomically-aware culture and preserving mountain dark skies, to revitalise the local economy through innovative and sustainable mountain practices (scientific dissemination, astro-tourism, astronomical education, etc…). Nevertheless, discrepancies between such project and previous practices of landscape stewardship finally resulted in the abandonment of the heritagisation process. Moving from the author’s personal involvement in this UNESCO inscription (Orlandi 2021), this paper will explore the reasons pushing some members of an Alpine ethnic minority to resist and contest heritage-making projects. In particular, by considering the contradictions between authorized heritagisation practices (Smith 2006) and community expectations, it will explore how multi-scale frictions within the UNESCO governance (Bortolotto 2013) can result from the articulation of non-dominant understandings of Alpine landscape with heritage-related forms of expertise and know-how. More broadly, by ethnographically unfolding the material, discursive and institutional settings of a UNESCO inscription, this paper aims to contribute to analytically explore affects, meanings and landscape practices attached to heritage (un)making in mountain areas.

ID: 3.10106

Past, Present and Future Challenges of Protected Areas in Dinaric Mountain Range

Taulant Doli
Kučera, Zdeněk

Abstract/Description

Protected Areas in the Dinaric Mountain range face their own challenges, which have changed over time in line with political and socio-cultural development of the Western Balkans area. The protection efforts began at the end of the 19th century aiming to protect certain small areas representing scenic landscapes or with significant cultural values. During the 20th century with the increase in scientific knowledge about nature, the purpose of protection transformed into more ecological approach. Nowadays, maintaining sustainability is the most often claimed aim in relation to protected areas in the Dinaric Mountain range. Number and size of protected areas has been relatively modest, but during recent decades it has increased progressively. In the past, the main challenges were the creation of institutions, legal framework and establishment of protected areas. Today, the increase in the number of protected areas poses new challenges to be met in the region. The role of protected areas is being transformed and reinterpreted by development in national policies as well as in local economic activities that impact their sustainable management and functioning of local communities. Addressing these challenges requires a more holistic approach crossing cultural and political borders among nations and communities in the region. Combining the already established top-down management strategy with a bottom-up approach should help in addressing these challenges. Involving local communities in the management process will make them more aware of the heritage in protected areas, encouraging them to actively participate in conservation efforts.

ID: 3.10375

Urban perspectives on abandonment and heritagization of mountains: Reflections on the example of Bolzano/Bozen in the European Alps

Andreas Haller

Abstract/Description

In the course of planetary urbanization, cities and mountains are increasingly connected by vertical rural-urban linkages. Ecosystemic, infrastructural, demographic, economic, and sociocultural linkages between valleys and peaks present numerous peculiarities due to relief and altitude of the urbanizing environment. This diverse functional integration of cities and mountains is also illustrated by the example of abandoned landscapes, which can illustrate different development phases of the city–mountain relationship. The example of the Alpine town of Bolzano/Bozen, Italy, will be used to show how the physical, demographic and socio-cultural urbanization of mountains created “landscapes”, contributed to their abandonment and finally redefined the role between city and mountain through heritagization processes. The example of the local mountain (“Hausberg”) Virgolo/Virgl illustrates that this can lead to very different perceptions and ideas about the role of the common good “Hausberg” in urban development.

ID: 3.11000

Heritage, activism and guardianship: a way toward cultural sustainability? The example of the Alpine chapel of St. Erim and its landscape

Asja Gollo

Abstract/Description

Due to major socio-economic shifts that have happened over time, abandoned landscapes are widespread in the Alps. While they are one of the visible signs of changes in land use and territoriality, in terms of emotional experience they also provoke a sense of loss and a feel of nostalgia for a temporal and spatial past. However, nostalgic feelings can be productive, enable actions ─ such as the recover and reuse of cultural landscapes ─ and significantly contribute to community renewal. In fact, the heritage value of landscapes that fall out of the purview of formal processes of patrimonialisation often emerge from those groups whose identity is embedded in those places. Based on ongoing research on the culture-sustainability nexus among ethno-linguistic minorities in the Italian Alps, this contribution focuses on the transboundary minority of the Brigaschi and explores the heritagisation of a small chapel and surrounding landscape located in the Alpine pastures of the Valle dei Maestri (Nature Park of Marguareis, Western Alps), where also a modern hut was built in the 2000s. Multiple landscapes (e)merge with each other and their components move at different paces, challenging the ethical and aesthetical dimension of the chapel’s heritagisation. The life cycle of this landscape and its heritagisation are discussed within the frame of cultural sustainability: the recover and reuse of this abandoned landscape can be seen as a form of cultural activism and its conservation is guided by principles of guardianship, both signalling that there is value in it and it is considered something to be inherited. Considering both the spatial/temporal and the ethical/aesthetical challenges, this contribution also reflects on whether the way this process is being handled by the minority has the potential to make the chapel and its landscape a meaningful long-term presence.

ID: 3.13108

Whose mountains? Landscape as adopted heritage in the borderland mountain regions of Czechia

Zdeněk Kučera

Abstract/Description

During the period following the end of World War II, majority of mountain areas of the Czech borderland witnessed almost total population exchange connected with significant environmental, social and cultural transformations. With the transfer of the Czech Germans the continuity of its settlement, cultivation and interpretation of local landscapes was broken. In consequence, two major characteristics may be recognized that define contemporary borderland mountain areas: absences of continuity in cultivation, identity and tradition followed by transformation of former cultural landscapes into protected semi-natural environments; and ongoing attempts on revitalization and growing interest in the history of local cultural landscape, places and communities. Due to depopulation, settlement desertion, land abandonment and access restrictions, the character of large parts of the borderland mountain landscapes has changed extensively as well as the perception of its meanings and values due to latter establishment of national parks and protected landscape areas. Although local landscape transformations were rather complex and extreme, traces of former cultural landscapes have not been completely abandoned and forgotten. Their use has either continued or they have attracted attention through the material inertia of their remains and have become part of a culture of remembrance and imagination. Mountain landscapes in the borderland of Czechia are now thus in a unique position of being perceived and interpreted as part of the natural heritage of the state as well as cultural heritage of various local stakeholders and communities. The presentation therefore focuses on the discussion of the issues of management, protection and interpretation of local landscapes and of its role in the formation of regional heritage and identity in the context of its past transformations during the 20th century.

ID: 3.13908

Ancient Socio-Hydrological Landscapes of the Upper Amazon: Adaptation, Resilience, and the Case for World Heritage Recognition

Alden Yépez

Abstract/Description

One of the most impressive abandoned urban mountain landscapes in the upper Amazon region is the archaeological complex of platforms and excavated linear features in the region of the Upano and Palora rivers region, which covers a vast area estimated at 2000 square kilometres. They have been in use for three millennia (ca. 1400 BC to 1200 AD) in a socio-hydrological dynamic system based on drainage and agricultural adaptations in a very humid, stationary conditioned environment. In this presentation we will try to answer how human societies can develop adaptation or mitigation strategies to global climatic changes such as the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (MCA) and the subsequent Little Ice Age. Finally, we will highlight the urgent need to include this cultural landscape heritage in the UNESCO World Heritage List.