Heritage marketing and architecture was the theme of the third seminar in the ESRC seminar series "Nostalgia in the 21st Century" which took place on September 24.Heritage marketing and architecture was the theme of the third seminar in the ESRC seminar series "Nostalgia in the 21st Century" which took place on September 24.
Ian Gilzean, chief architect in the Scottish Executive Architecture Policy Unit spoke on "Urban nostalgia - a Scottish perspective" which focussed on the importance of people and communities having a 'sense of place' and how urban nostalgia walks a fine line between a yearning for a past that may never have existed and a genuine concern for the loss of a community, place or habitat. He said that an ongoing tension between holding onto the past and the need to innovate is 'challenging'.
Mark O'Neill, Glasgow's Head of Art and Museums, gave a presentation on "Urban Nostalgia and Museums in Glasgow" which began by highlighting the ideological dangers of nostalgia in a city that experienced "the most rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in Western Europe, followed by its most rapid industrial decline." Mr O'Neill, who established the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art and was recently involved in the £30million lottery-funded redisplay of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, discussed whether museums as guardians of 'public history' should encourage nostalgia or challenge romanticising of the past. He concluded that it was possible to combine "a celebratory as well as critical" approach.
The third speaker was Professor Svetlana Boym from Harvard University whose written work includes an examination of the relationship between utopia and the commoditisation of kitsch. Her seminar, "Nostalgia for the Avant-Garde and Off-modern Urbanism" explored nostalgia from the perspective of 'off-modern' where she sees nostalgia as neither directed towards the past nor future but as an idea to be evaluated side-ways.
Denise Walder (Open University), Dr Stephen Tagg (Strathclyde marketing department) and Marina Moskowitz (Glasgow University) responded to the presentations and initiated the resulting discussions with seminar attendees.
The seminar series is organised by Dr Beverly Wagner, Dr Kathy Hamilton and Dr Juliette Wilson from the Department of Marketing together with Dr Sarah Edwards and Dr Faye Hammill from Humanities, Arts and Social Science. Details of the fourth seminar "Diaspora" are available from the Nostalgia website.