Culture has increasingly been recognised in the global urban agendas –the Sustainable Development Goals, the New Urban Agenda, Agenda 2063 and Agenda 21 – arguing for culture to be seen as the fourth pillar of sustainability. Cultural policies through instruments such as UNESCO Conventions have resulted in growing insights of the importance of culture, and since Habitat III, this has increasingly focused on the urban contexts. The Mistra Urban Futures comparative project “Cultural Heritage and Just Cities” has had the purpose to explore how cultural heritage can better contribute to realising more just cities in different contexts – building on the local work done in Cape Town, Gothenburg, Kisumu and Sheffield/Manchester. The team from the four platforms has produced a report on the cultural heritage and urban development through the lens of festivals; an article for a Special Issue in the International Journal of Cultural Heritage; has engaged in collaborative writing and speaking and has collaborated in the search for new funding. This has culminated in a new project funded by the British Academy on Mapping and Mobilising Heritage Values for Sustainable Urban Development, involving the platforms in Cape Town and Sheffield/Manchester.
In Cape Town, ACC will draw on the comparative work and its previous co-production work on cultural planning in the City and will turn this into policy relevant tools for urban decision makers. Key activities will include:
• Inputting into the regional and Cape Town events and the national policy workshop.
• Writing a journal article drawing on the cultural planning work, with a focus on how cultural planning can contribute to the localization and implementation of the SDGs.
• Developing a policy brief and a toolkit on how cultural mapping, cultural planning and impact assessments can contribute to the localization and implementation of the SDGs in low income countries in Africa
• Developing a set of guidelines around the civil society activation of cultural and urban policy.
In Kisumu, protecting and preserving tangible and intangible cultural heritage is critical for developing sustainable livelihoods in the context of urbanization and supporting community empowerment around Lake Victoria region with particular focus on women and minorities. This has in various ways been documented through previous local work.
Key activities in 2020 will include:
• Paper on the Cultural Economy initiatives for Kisumu City and its environs by July 2020
• Manual on Cultural Impact Assessment (CIA) for Kisumu City and its environs (Tool Kit development, generation, CIA Mapping, Geo-database and data analysis) developed by Nov 2020 and shared.
• A catalogue on the identification and Mapping of cultural artifacts, features, sites, planning, preservation and conservation programmes developed and shared.
• A Cultural Heritage Value Assessment for sustainable urban livelihoods (community perception, participation on heritage values for community empowerment)
• Regional workshop bringing players conducted by Sep 2020;
• Culinary culture around the Lake Victoria urban centres would have been documented.
This work package will be led by Rike Sitas, who led the CTLIP knowledge exchange work and was co-leader of the Knowledge Exchange comparative project. Dr Warren Smit, manager of the CityLab programme, and Dr Mercy Brown-Luthango, who has been a member of the core CTLIP team since 2010, will also be involved in developing and piloting the training materials. In Kisumu, this work will be led by Dr Franklin Odede, with support from Dr. Patrick Hayombe, Dr. Fredrick Owino, Ms. Belinda Nyakinya and Dr. Elizabeth Odhiambo.