300 words with…
Marilena Mela
Lecturer and PhD candidate Faculty of Humanities Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Heritage, landscape, and sustainability in four European Islands
Memories and stories of the past are channels through which we connect to our environments. In parallel, multiple traces of the past live on in landscapes, which provide windows into the ways people and environments mutually transformed each other at different times.
Heritage studies recognizes that the understanding of the past relates to courses of action about the future. This aspect is crucial at a time of environmental and social crises, when forms of action towards the “saving” of the planet seem to clash with continuing agendas of expansion, extraction, and growth. Sustainable development strategies seem to rely mostly on technological, top-down solutions of global or national scales, the impact of which is elusive and unevenly distributed. Instead, humanities research puts forward the need to engage with specific landscapes, with the frictions and conflicts produced both by climate change and climate mitigation, and with their (often sustainable) pre-capitalist pasts. Heritage, memories, and local knowledge are ways to unlock such distinct pasts.
Under these premises, my PhD research looks at relationships between heritage and sustainability in four archipelagoes around Europe: the Wadden Islands in the Netherlands, the Cyclades in Greece, Shetland in Scotland, and the Aeolian Islands in Italy.
"Heritage, memories, and local knowledge are ways to unlock such distinct pasts."
It discovers responses to the environmental crisis expressed as collaborative initiatives, as resistance to top-down planning, or as virtual indifference; and it connects such responses to the long geological and human histories of these places.
This comparative methodology sheds light on alternative and coexisting conceptualizations of human-environment relationships, both in the past and the present. Instead of concrete results, its impact lies with the thick local stories that it tells, inviting the readers (researchers, activists, policymakers, local actors, or other audiences) to participate in the life, troubles, and global-local friction that characterizes the four island landscapes; and in doing so, to think along on established and emergent courses of action around shared environments.
Marilena Mela (1991) is a lecturer and PhD candidate in the Faculty of Humanities of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is trained in architecture and architectural theory, and she is conducting her PhD within the European project HERILAND which explored the relationships between cultural heritage and spatial planning. She obtained her MSc Architecture Engineering in 2016 and MSc Research in Architecture in 2019.
magazine for humanities alumni december 2023