Cultural heritage: an opportunity to connect university and society
Francisca Roger Espinosa
Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
Abstract:
The architectural discipline offers great challenges to researchers from the point of view of cultural heritage and urbanism. Both fields are linked, and they also require the collaboration of other disciplines such as sociology or archeology among others. Accordingly, this reveals the importance of working at the service of the collectivity and in continuous contact with their environment.
Sometimes we find the cultural heritage of a town, a region or a territory muted by ignorance or distance. It is in our hands, as scholars and professionals active in the matter, to make the citizenship rediscover their values in order to make them protagonists of their process of revaluation. After an examination phase controlled by our architectural and research discipline, there is room for fostering appreciation and proposing transversal actions that maintain open, reviewable and manageable contact between university, administration and society. At this point, we will need to walk hand in hand with other experts to combine the participatory task in both directions and record each trace to make the process transparent and permeable from its understanding and acceptance.
In short, the idea of our proposal lays out the design of a methodological model that drinks from the knowledge of the university, feeds from the resources of the administration and grows with the contribution of society.
Keywords: Cultural heritage; university; society; apreciation; feed-back.