Culture in for and as Sustainable Development

The Saaheim power station in Rukjan (picture: Inger Birkeland)
sustainability and culture, and to be clear whose
cultural sustainability is being described. These
meanings are multiple, but include (as adapted
from [14]): values (as in the content of landscape
and/or heritage), processes (identifiable through
practices and participation) and affordances (in
terms of those living there and visitors, such as
sense of place, identity, locally -defining events
like the sun festival).
The stewardship of a post-industrial landscape
involves, like any aspect of heritage, a process
of selection of what is to be sustained, re-used
or adapted, protected or memorised. When deindustrialisation
remains, as in Rjukan, more or
less within living memory, local interests, tastes,
identities and powers come to the fore. They are
also usually foregrounded by the sheer scale of
the industrial remains and the imperative to find
new economic uses. A more reflexive policy approach
to culture would be helpful here. To make
culture an object of discourse can be relevant
as the relation between culture and sustainable
development is emotional, cognitive and ethical;
people have a sense of place or belonging to
their place. Policy-makers can include this sense
of place in policy-making via collaboration and
networking. This can even change the political
culture itself.
The key lesson is perhaps that cultural sustainability
can be achieved by maintaining links with
the past through an understanding of heritage
as a social and cultural process, especially in the
case of recent, still deeply ‘felt’ heritage such
as industrialisation. Recently de-industrialised
complexes and landscapes, amongst all types of
heritage, offer great opportunities via protection,
use and re-use to absorb elements from diverse
cultures, so that post-industrially-challenged locations
once again become ‘enlivened’ places.
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