Narratives of World Heritage Urban Environments in European medium-sized cities (MSCA-IF)

• Contact Person

Juan A. García-Esparza

• Brief description of the Research Group

Tecasós. Research line on the Analysis and Management of Historic Centres. For more information, please, click on here

• Brief description of the university

The Universitat Jaume I in Castelló (UJI), founded in 1991, is the public university serving the north of the Valencian Community (Spain). With almost 30 years of history, the UJI ranks among the 601- 800 best universities in the world, according to the World University Rankings 2018, conducted by The Times Higher Education, that places it in 12^th place out of the 38 participating Spanish universities and the second in the Valencian Community.

Ensuring the researchers can enjoy of their rights and obligations as well as boosting researchers' careers, the UJI has recently applied for the HR Excellence in Research Award in order to align our human resources policies to the principles of the European Charter & Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers.

The university has services to support research, such as the Central Scientific Instrumentation Service (SCIC), a prestigious Library, the Animal Experimentation Service (SEA), the Ethics Committee, the Scientific Culture and Innovation Unit (UCC + i), the Office for Cooperation in Research and Technological Development (OCIT) as well as the European & International Projects Office completely devoted  to the management of research projects such as the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA-IF).

• Project description

The project critically explores the assessment of Historic Built Environments (HBE) in European medium-sized cities in order to analyse the sites and the habitats. Informal HBE are habitats created by the narratives and how they are assimilated by autochthonous city dwellers. The interpretation of the informal HBE sometimes may challenge the ‘colonial’ or heterotopic constructed images of the past forcing new interpretations on the cultural diversity of the ‘indigenous’ or autotopic. This unconventional approach to HBE bridges the gap of the social and cultural aspects of heritage in the New Urban Agenda and challenges previous concepts of authenticity, dynamism and WH Criteria. The project is intended to understand how narratives affect the eventual stratification of habitats and their interfaces, and how it depends on the ability to select and assimilate asymmetries in-between heterotopias and autotopias. Official position from international charters and operational guidelines further reinforce what contemporary critical studies on HBE acknowledge as obsolete forms of control over historic urban habitats. The project, therefore, aims to approach ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ interpretations of narratives as forms of behaviour, expressions and adaptations which result in idiosyncratic innovation and experimentation in the urban fabric. The project would depart from four assumptions to expose the unconventional aspects of 6 WH HBE in Spain, from a marginal to a more central position within the official discourse on urban conservation. These assumptions are based on the potential assessment of informalities in the 6 WH HBE - Ávila, Toledo, Cuenca, Segovia, Córdoba y Salamanca- as cultural processes, where alternative areas of cultural biodiversity emerge with greater and more inclusive representations of socio-cultural significance.

• Research area

- Architecture, Social Sciences and Humanities.

- Urban conservation, Human geography, Ethnographic methods

• Applications (documents to be submitted):

- CV,

- Research portfolio,

- List of publications (papers),

- Brief description of the intended research within the project (1.000 words).