Culture in for and as Sustainable Development

Culture is complicit in signifying that particular
places of memories or identity benchmarks
serve as touchstones. These places
may be sites of solemn remembrance or,
in contrast, significant places of celebration.
Some may be marks of deep antiquity
and have an ancient history, while others
are more recent; some still live in collective
memories of local or national communities,
such as locations constructed in the context
of European Capital of Culture designations
or important historical events. Some memorial
sites remember and deal with a shameful
or sad pasts, others commemorate or celebrate
the foundations of society and identity.
Either can be subversive or ‘dissonant’ in the
sense of both uniting and dividing, carrying
different meanings for different communities.
Heritage functions as a key means to facilitate
social communication, and can also be
a platform for unheard voices and to allow
tensions (sometimes suppressed) to be negotiated
publicly, for example where there is
a lack of dialogue between ethnic groups,
social groups, races and nations .
BRIDGES AS PLACES OF DIVISIONS IN LOCAL
COMMUNITIES
Bridges are functional public spaces, and spaces used for festivities,
and everyday social and cultural practices. They also
have great significance as evidence of human achievements.
In the collective memory of the Balkans, bridges are also
symbol-bearers of attempts to make connections between
communities on both sides of a divide.
Throughout history, bridges have been a symbol of territorialisation
and state power. Remarkable examples are the Ottoman
bridges in Bosnia and Hercegovina, such as the famous
Old Bridge in the city of Mostar, or the Latin Bridge over the
River Miljacka in Sarajevo.
All of these bridges have multiple narratives and function as
symbol- bearers of their cities. People attach different meanings
to this heritage. Many of these bridges are ‘heritage
which divides’. The bridge on the Drina for the Bosniak (Muslim)
community, as do other bridges of the Ottoman period,
contributes to a much wider sense of cultural identification,
as symbols of the greatness of the culture they wanted to
participate in, and the importance of the Ottoman Empire. The
destruction in 1993 of the Old Bridge in Mostar by Croatian
forces had no strategic or military purpose, but led to a decrease
of self-confidence and respect and created a feeling of
hopelessness among the Bosnian community.
(Milena Dragićević, Šešić M. Ljiljana, Rogač Mijatović)
Policies on place, landscape
and territory
40
People are involved with places via location,
ecological participation, socio-territorial
belonging and cultural conformity or commonality.
Memory, heritage and identity are
also relevant. They attach subjective cultural
meanings to place, often described as
a sense of place, but the concept of landscape
is a close synonym. Sense of place
has frequently been linked to sustainability,
suggesting that the construction of socially
-sustainable (and in the case of ‘landscape’
approaches, also environmentally-sustainable)
communities can be facilitated through
a shared (re)connection with a place they
call home [20], inspiring people to collective
action as a response to unwanted spatial
and sometimes unsustainable developments
even beyond the local scale [21][22]. Territorialisation
is a closely-connected concept,
too, that refers to a framework within which
to facilitate the role of culture to mediate
intentions and practices in spatial development
at multiple scales [23].
The construction of identities is often linked
to particular places. To enhance the symbolic
identity of a place, and contribute to
residents’ connecting with a place, attention
is increasingly paid to the importance of
‘everyday’ markers such as architecture,