A foundation working across heritage, architecture, and social work through programming for young people, participatory design, and research—breaking down the language barriers that prevent citizen participation in defining their own heritage
Context
Cultural heritage is often the preserve of elites: government departments, international commissions, and academic experts who define what heritage is, and how it should be managed. When done badly, this model has a tendency to caricature, objectify, depoliticise, and ossify the living aspects of heritage. It is, however, the engaged aspects of heritage—as directly experienced by and through the citizens who live with them—that are of crucial importance to developing the built environment in parallel with building the capacity of communities and alongside a sense of ownership over the space they inhabit. The failure to adapt places and settlements to the challenges of climate often stems from a simple lack of regard for the knowledge of the local people.
Practice
Fundación Aldea (from the Spanish for village) is an organisation that works in and between the fields of architecture, learning, and heritage to question both by whom and for whom heritage is being preserved. Aldea—“a team of architects, social workers, heritage experts and art historians from the U.K. and Chile”—works with communities to promote an attitude to heritage that is less about definition, and instead more a form of cultural empowerment: evaluating what we have, recognising its value, and using this as a base to develop social justice.
Aldea’s work is done through engagement with participatory research and action methods, confronting expectations through embodied experiences and respecting everyone’s knowledge as equally valid. Workshops are often intergenerational, and build on existing concerns, expertise, and organisations. Working with young people, in particular, is about supporting them to develop both an understanding of their built environment, and the language and skills to participate in its development. Acknowledging the lack of formal built environment education in most national school curricula as the root of “reduced confidence in communicating qualities and issues that exist in people’s areas”, Aldea’s work seeks to transcend the limits set by this language barrier, allowing young people’s embodied expertise and knowledge of their environments back into the conversation.
Aldea’s ongoing activities include the organisation of Open House Santiago, which grew out of similar programmes developed by Open City in the UK. Similarly, in the commune of Castro, on the Chiloé archipelago in southern Chile, Castro Abierto is also an annual festival of free tours, workshops, and discussions aimed at celebrating local identity whilst providing a platform for communication and dialogue. Much of Aldea’s work is in the realm of architectural and landscape preservation: including buildings and construction, but also crafts, skills, and intangible heritage. As part of the research of co-director Magdalena Novoa they have recently been collaborating with 50 women from Lota to make arpilleras—patchwork quilts that narrate urban stories from the women’s point of view. The arpillera urbana is an activist textile art that originated during the dictatorship as a form of political statement and denouncement of human rights violations.
Aldea’s work demonstrates the power of interdisciplinary spatial practice when it recognises the knowledge held by so-called ‘non-experts’, and when professional skills are utilised to break down the language barriers that otherwise prevent people form participating in their own built environment. Aldea’s empowering approach is transferable into fields beyond heritage, including that of climate, as a means of engaging citizens with the spatial complexities that climate breakdown induces.