Chris Johnston

Where now for heritage practice? This significant question was integral to the Australia ICOMOS 2013 conference Imagined pasts..., imagined futures. This paper describes how 'voices' from the floor of the conference were captured in quick interviews held between sessions, and examines the themes that emerged both from these interviews and a short post-conference survey. Overwhelmingly, conference delegates who contributed through the interviews and survey expressed a desire to look beyond traditional approaches to heritage practice, and to develop considered responses to challenges associated with cultural diversity, globalisation and sustainability. Heritage practice, in their view, needs to become less expert-driven, more creative in responding to change, and more open to different ways of valuing heritage, especially in relation to cultural diversity both at home in Australia and across the Asia-Pacific region.

How can aesthetics be understood from the perspective of the ethnicminority migrant subject or the ethnic-minority migrant community? The mainstream paradigm of migrant settlement is one of deprivation, conditioned by hardships, financial struggles, and bare functionality. But migrant aesthetic production transcends this narrative of thrift and survival. It is underscored by desire and agency, beauty and inspiration. A taxonomy of identifiable migrant architectural types – housing, worship structures, street and retail spaces, gathering spaces – evolving in the migration histories of Australia and New Zealand, as in other settler nations, outlines the interface of migration and aesthetics. This Forum invited these short texts to offer provocations to mainstream aesthetic framing in architecture and its conventional understandings of migrant architecture. A powerful narrative of “remittance” economy frames the discourse on migrant architectural aesthetic production in homeland sites. In The Remittance Landscape, Lopez details structures including sport stadiums and cultural facilities, in addition to housing, that result directly from emigrant economic flows. Images in postcards and magazines, and of iconic structures discovered by migrants are just some of the complex aesthetic sources of this architecture. In contrast, migration studies often assume the aesthetic sources of migrant architecture in destination sites to be homeland vernacular architecture. Singular directional flows of architectural aesthetics are problematic for migrant architecture as for architecture generally. Visibility/invisibilty is important to ethnic-minority migrants, as is the narrative about that visibility. As Lopez illustrates below – a material reference to the homeland and a right to exist and to be visible in the US city – are both part of the objective of using stone transported from Mexico into the United

In the following text, there are hyperlinks to indicator documents which informed the particular statement or comment to which they are linked. It should be noted that, at different points in the commentary, different words might trigger links to the same indicator ...

extraordinary triumph of the Gunditjmara people in having this place recognised as a place of the spirit, a place of human technology and ingenuity and as a place of resistance. The Gunditjmara are the Indigenous people of this part of south-

These proceedings present nine papers from a 2009 workshop organized by the GCI, with the assistance of the Consensus Building Institute, including background papers concerning relevant challenges in heritage place conservation and management, and on dispute resolution and consensus building concepts and strategies, as well as case studies from diverse geographic and cultural contexts. Also included are recommendations made by workshop participants for promoting the application of dispute resolution methods to heritage management. ( source : The Getty Conservation Institute)

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