People have to stop thinking of heritage as saving old buildings and start thinking about it as a tool for community building, says the organizer of an international conference.
“Heritage creates value. Heritage creates belonging,” said Lucie Morisset, a professor at UQÀM’s urban planning and tourism department.
Rather than considering historic buildings as relics from the past, we should be helping communities to reappropriate them for modern-day uses, she said.
“Let’s stop talking about heritage as a victim and let’s talk about heritage as an agent of change,” she said.
Morisset, the Canada Research Chair in Urban Heritage, is organizer of the six-day conference at Université du Québec à Montréal and Concordia University, which started Friday afternoon.
With 747 events at the two campuses, bringing together 656 academics from 51 countries, the meeting of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies will tackle topics as diverse as the post-industrial landscape of Thetford Mines, a former asbestos-mining town east of the Eastern Townships, and the culinary traditions of the Peruvian Andes.
Morisset is a specialist on topics from how to re-use old churches in Quebec to the architecture of Arvida, a company town built for aluminum workers in the 1920s by Alcoa (later Alcan).
The two types of heritage sites have more in common than might appear at first sight, she said.
Church buildings are becoming redundant with declining religious observance while the well-paying blue-collar jobs that once paid the bills for families in industrial towns like Arvida have been disappearing.
The question in both cases is how to make the built heritage of a different era relevant for today.
The answer, says Morisset, is not a matter of preserving bricks and mortar buildings as monuments to the past. Rather, it’s to enable modern-day communities to reinvent yesterday’s heritage for current needs, she said.
Morisset pointed to Ste-Brigide-de-Kildare, a former Irish Catholic church in the Centre-Sud district that has been converted into a community centre, kindergarten, housing coop and theatre research centre.
Heritage builds stronger communities because it spans generations, creating a sense of permanence and belonging, she said.
“That’s how heritage can give meaning to people, because heritage tells them, ‘I was here before. I’ll be here after you. And you’re a part of my future,’” she said.
It makes cities more desirable as tourist destinations and lends a cachet to neighourhoods.
“Why does it cost so much more to live in Old Montreal?” Morisset asked.
“It does give economic value.”
How Montreal handles its heritage was the topic of a panel discussion Friday afternoon with Luc Ferrandez, mayor of Plateau Mont Royal borough; Dinu Bumbaru, policy director of Heritage Montreal; and Marc-André Carignan, an architect and columnist on architecture and urban planning for Radio-Canada and the Journal Métro.
How does Montreal stack up compared to other cities?
Not well, said Ferrandez. “We should take inspiration from what other cities are doing,” said the interim leader of Projet Montreal.
Bumbaru said that while Montreal has a poor record on demolition of historic buildings, it has the advantage of being a multicultural society – a “planetary republic” – as a trading centre for First Nations, a French colony, and a destination for settlers from the British Isles and around the world.
Official statistics show there were 33,000 demolitions in Montreal from 1960 to 1975 and another 22,000 from 1975 to 2000, Bumbaru said.
Carignan said Montreal has made strides by establishing public consultation on real-estate projects and with projects like the the Darling Foundry, a contemporary art centre in a repurposed industrial building in Griffintown.
Developing approaches to heritage geared to today’s increasingly diverse and mobile societies is a preoccupation that runs through several of the workshops at the conference.
In addition to events for academics, it includes 40 activities for the public, including walking tours in Chinatown, the alleyways of St-Henri, the Lachine Canal and Mile End; film screenings, including documentaries on the former Sparrows Point steel mill in Baltimore and on Phyllis Lambert, Montreal’s “Joan of Architecture”; live performances; and exhibitions.
For a complete list of public events, and to register in advance, see: achs2016.uqam.ca/en/public-events.html
