Heritage and cultural mega-events: backgrounds, approaches and challenges

ABSTRACT

Cultural heritage is not simply the stock of a given culture's material assets, but also the sum of our memory and identity – and this is part of the increasing significance of cultural heritage. Cultural heritage today is not only a resource in need of protection, but also a potential that must be exploited for future development. The three issues of significance for the future condition of our historic resources should be emphasized. The first is the rapidly accelerating process of transformation of the entire built heritage stock. The second is the increasing need for heritage. The third issue is the clear shift in emphasis from the value of the heritage to the needs of society. This breeds an increasing need for us to redefine ourselves and open up to others, so promoting the interaction between social capital and heritage is becoming vital for the rebuilding of social cohesion. Social capital should be nurtured as an opportunity both for the protection of cultural heritage and for its exploitation as a pro-development resource. It is also a big challenge for the Cultural Mega-events that may, and should, be well melded into a policy of building a broad base of heritage awareness.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural heritage
• cultural mega-events
• historic cities
• social capital
• integrated approach

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Pursuant to Decision 1622/2006/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 2006 establishing a Community action for the European Capital of Culture event for the years 2007–2019, one of the fundamental criteria for selection of the ECC city is a European dimension to the proposed actions; the other criteria is ‘the City and Citizens’, which is intended to foster involvement of the city’s residents in preparing and conducting the projects. Another important tenet was incorporation of culture into the candidate cities’ development strategy.

2 See this webpage for further information regarding the Charter: https://mck.krakow.pl/homee-charter.