The focus of this case study is the renewal of Vällingby Centre which took place between 2004 and 2008. With its scale, ambition and content, Vällingby represented something completely new in Swedish urban development when the town district came into being in the early 1950s. The community centre also had an important role to play, it not only had a commercial function it also had a social and cultural function. Despite the fact that community centres appeared in great numbers, few of them remain as they once were. Many have undergone major changes including alterations and, quite often rather careless intervention, both with regard to their interior and exterior. New shop types, consumption patterns and increasingly fierce competition are just some of the factors that have led to the original values contained within this area being on the verge of disappearing. The entire town of Vällingby was nominated in 1987 by the National Heritage Board as a clear and well preserved example of an ABC city with regard to it structure and the planning ideals of the 1950s. An expression of such conservation ambitions signifies, however, a potential conflict situation with other interested parties and areas of interest, not least when it comes to buildings and environments that are for commercial use. The main purpose of this study is to deal with the renewal of Vällingby centre from a cultural heritage perspective. The first chapter will provide a background as to why Vällingby came about and present a picture of post-war town planning and the emergence of Vällingby Centre; while the second chapter will examine the decision-making process behind the renewal, where Välingby's town centre regeneration offers an interesting example of how areas which are classed as being of national interest are dealt with during the planning process. Vällingby Centre is an example of one of our modern national interests and of the maintenance and conservation problems post-war developments are associated with. The central parts of the town are also associated with a largely unexplored field of study, despite the increased diversity conservation intentions have received over the past few decades. / QC 20120502

This thesis looks into what it can be like to work as a conservation officer at a planning and building office in a Swedish municipality. Through five interviews with different conservation officers I have researched their perception of their role as conservation officers and their personal experiences of theirevery day professional work. The thesis topic has its starting point in my understanding that there has been a shift in the role of the conservation officer during the last couple of decades towards a more explicit partaking in urban physical planning. Much because it is seen as a more powerful tool and place to be in for more effective preservation and maintenance of built cultural heritage. In order to relate the outcomes of my interviews I have laid out a context made out of theories on rational as well as communicative planning; how the professional role is created, sustained and developed and organizational culture and value-analysis of built cultural heritage. The interviews lead up to a discussion where I reflect on the importance for such professionals to have communicative skills of listening, learning, negotiating, and be able to communicate your own interest in a pedagogical manner. The interviews also show that there can be seen to exist some differences in the roles of the more traditional free-standing conservation officer working at the museum and the more integrated conservation officer working in the planning and building office. The organizational structures at the museum and the planning and building office are different and the organizations have different goals (one stands for preservation, the other for development). This means that the conservation officer at the planning and building office need to use a different kind of strategy in order to achieve their goals. They are involved in planning projects for a longer period of time which means that they have the possibility to influence the planning processes more than once. It also means that they need to learn how to pick their fights and realize when to take step back. They also need to be prepared to negotiate and compromise with other interests in the planning processes. The organizational culture at the working place is important for how efficiently the work is carried out. As a professional it is important to feel that your task has support from your colleagues and that there are possibilities to influence the processes going on at the working place. The interviews also show that there are difficulties in making good valueassessments of cultural heritage and that such ground material is often difficult to understand for people working outside of the cultural heritage sector. One aspect is that it might be difficult to include all types of values, and that the conservation officer is the only one partaking in the process which can lead to values lost and that the process does not include a range of voices. Another aspect is that the ground material lack a sense of practicality in that there is no explaining what is actually possible to do with the cultural heritage sites. Other parties in the planning processes need suggestions on how the built cultural heritage can be developed, not only on how it should be preserved.

The aim of this study is to analyze how the EU perceives a European cultural heritage and its role in the EU project during the period 1970-2020. These perceptions do something with the notion of ”the Europeanness” and are part of a narrative construction that expresses conceptions of a European place. This European place is a place beyond territorial locability and something that this thesis seeks to investigate. Attentions is brought to how changes in EU’s cultural heritage discourse are interwoven partly with notions of crisis, partly with renegotiation of a European diversity. Even though, during the 2010s, the EU begun to stress interconnections between ”the Europeanness” and its ”other”, I argue that this interconnectivity is based on a conception of a unique European past. In contrast to previous research I thereby highlight a paradoxical tension between the EU’s perceptions of a European past and a European ”today”. Moreover, this thesis goes beyond the dominant trend in cultural heritage studies and its preoccupation on what is declared to be a heritage, as well as the concentration on what EU wants us to remember. Thereby this study provides an alternative perspective on the EU’s construction of a European cultural community. It’s a perspective that gives emphasize to how a sense of European situatedness is created through notions of a European cultural heritage.

Throughout history cities were built out of what could be found and salvaged from previous ancestors while having a continuation with the past by readapting structures to fit new functions. A constant state of development is threatening our built environment where a large stock of existing buildings are facing demolition if they are not reused to fit our contemporary ways of living. Today’s method of ploughing through historic buildings to make room for new development and careless renovations often forgets about our cultural heritage, memory and identity.The aim of this thesis is to investigate how different strategies of reuse within architecture can help to retain a sense of continuity with the past as a way of creating for the future with the focus of social sustainability.How can we retain a sense of continuity with the past as a way of creating for the future? And why should we retain a continuity with the past?Through literature reviews and case studies, the thesis collects knowledge from praised architecture practices working with the emerging discipline of reuse with highly social awareness. Together with the theory of Adhocism, the thesis provides a deeper understanding behind the methods of reuse within architecture in order to fully grasp the reasoning of why it’s important to retain a sense of continuity with the past.Through methods of extension, conversion and user-led, or vernacular, transformation the case studies provide tools for how we can create unique and intriguing spaces from our already existing built environment, thus retaining a sense of the past while designing for the future. The regeneration of buildings creates a sense of pride and responsibility to continue to cultivate our built heritage for generations to come.

Öppen länkad data används i kulturarvssektorn för att strukturera och publicera data och metadata på nätet. Tekniken används för att förbättra interoperabilitet mellan separata system och för att möjliggöra nya typer av utforskande och upptäckande av kulturarv. Öppen länkad data kan implementeras på olika sätt och tidigare forskning visar att den mängd beslut som måste fattas ses som ett hinder för spridningen av tekniken. En brist på kunskap och expertis i sektorn har även identifierats genom tidigare studier. Denna studie har för avsikt att underlätta användandet av öppen länkad data i kulturarvssektorn genom att undersöka hur implementeringar framställs i dokumentation. Detta fokus kan sammanfattas genom följande forskningsfråga: Vilka aspekter av implementeringar av öppen länkad data i kulturarvssektorn förekommer i dokument?  Studien använder en kvalitativ dokumentanalys genom vilken innehållet i relevanta dokument har kodats genom en induktiv metod. Det material som analyserats är dokument som är producerade i samband med fyra svenska kulturarvsprojekt som använder öppen länkad data. Genom analysen har 17 aspekter identifierats. Dessa aspekter är indelade i följande sju kategorier: Bakgrund, Data, Databehandlingsprocesser, Externa källor, Kulturarv, Publicerad data, och Resultat. Aspekterna och kategorierna har sammanställts i en konceptuell modell som visar hur implementeringar av öppen länkad data framställs i dokument. En analys av relationer mellan förekomsterna av aspekterna visar att modellering av data, databehandlingsprocesser, och typ av kulturarv framställs som de mest centrala aspekterna av implementeringar av öppen länkad data. Det faktum att databehandlingsprocesser inte kunde nyanseras ytterligare visar hur flexibel tekniken är och hur många beslut som måste fattas av de institutioner som implementerar öppen länkad data. Detta resultat stämmer överens med tidigare forskning. / Linked open data is used in the cultural heritage sector to structure and publish data and metadata on the Web. The technology is used to improve interoperability between separate systems and to enable new forms of exploration and discovery of cultural heritage. Linked open data can be implemented in various ways, and research shows that the number of decisions that have to be made is seen as an obstacle in the diffusion of the technology. A lack of knowledge and expertise in the sector has also been identified through previous studies. The purpose of this study is to simplify the usage of linked open data in the cultural heritage sector by examining how implementations are expressed in documents. This focus can be summarized by the following research question: Which aspects of cultural heritage linked open data implementations are expressed in documents?  This study employed a qualitative document analysis through which the content of relevant documents were coded through an inductive method. The analyzed material consisted of documents produced in relation to four Swedish cultural heritage projects which utilize linked open data. 17 aspects were identified through this analysis. These aspects were grouped into the following seven categories: Background, Cultural heritage, Data, Data processing methods, External sources, Outcomes, and Published data. The aspects and the categories were compiled in a conceptual model which displays how implementations of linked open data are expressed in documents. An analysis of the relations between the occurrences of the aspects showed that data modelling, data processing methods, and type of cultural heritage are perceived as the most central aspects of implementations of linked open data. The fact that data processing methods could not be split into multiple aspects shows how flexible the technology is. It also illustrates the many decisions that implementing institutions have to make. These results match results from previous studies.

Restoration has been a tool for enhancing selected parts of history, which tells about the ideals of its time. Today most older buildings have already been through several restorations or renovations. How should one approach and valuate historical layers? The purpose of this thesis has been to study earlier restoration work and its approaches and ideals. From this, interventions and design has been done through an alteration of Börshuset in Gamla Stan in Stockholm. The restoration proposal consists of three interventions done with three different approaches: reconstruction, alteration of the existing and an added function and element. Through this method, the project attempts to answer questions about how we can relate to existing buildings, not just as artefacts of their time, but as living things with a complex and layered history. My proposal is a suggestion to reintroduce lost qualities and value the historical layers that are or have been present in Börshuset. By being aware of the difficulty in appreciating newer layers there is a possibility for a better assessment and decision-making that could save historical layers which might become our future cultural heritage.

<p>Human action recognition continues to evolve and is examined better using deep learning techniques. Several successes have been recorded in the field of action recognition but only very few has focused on dance. This is because dance actions and, especially Traditional African dance, are long and involve fast movement of body parts. This research proposes a novel framework that applies data science algorithms to the field of cultural preservation by applying various deep learning techniques to identify, classify and model Traditional African dances from videos. Traditional African dances are important part of the African culture and heritage. Digital preservation of these dances in their myriad forms is a problem. The dance dataset was constituted using freely available YouTube videos. Three Traditional African dances – Adowa, Bata and Swange – were used for the dance classification process. Two Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models were used for the classification and they achieved an accuracy of 97% and 98% respectively. Sound classification of Adowa, Bata and Swange drum ensembles were also carried out; an accuracy of 96% was achieved. Human Pose Estimation Algorithms were applied to the Sinte dance. A model of Sinte dance, which can be exported to other environments, was obtained.</p>

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Digital technology has changed the nature of how humans live as a society with lives orbiting a digital core of internet, smartphones, social media etc. There is now not only a physical world but a digital one too. This far-reaching transformation also applies to cultural institutions to digitize their activities, a result of responding to the expectations of a contemporary audience. The aim of this study is to examine the digitization of art- and cultural heritage in a digital world. The essay examines the digital activities of the Swedish National Museum of fine art that has developed before, during and as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is done through visual analysis and the theoretic framework of postphenomenology and social semiotics. The study finds that cultural heritage can be digitized in many different ways but that the digitization can’t replace the physical encounter with an artwork. Yet it can constitute new ways and perspectives on how to experience, see and discuss traditional works of art. Digitization of cultural heritage can therefore work to enhance its general interest, disseminate and influence an increase in availability of knowledge about cultural heritage and art history.

Cultural heritage confronts the notion of change, both in the development process and in the tourism context. In the tourism context, as being used as a unique selling point, it is unavoidable that cultural heritage facing commercialisation and commodification, or even vulgarisation due to being forced to change to meet the market demand and tourists’ expectations. Hence, the question is, if changing is inevitable, what are the potential risks that cultural heritage might face in the tourism context, and how to maintain its significance, which are attractions for tourists in the first place? The overall aim of the study was to use the notion of change as a lens to investigate the concept of authenticity as well as the relation between sustainability and resilience in culture. The study's objectives approached based on a qualitative method, with semi-structured interviews focusing on the perspective of the cultural heritage community – a group of people who work closely with cultural heritage - local community, practitioners, researchers, authorised agency, and tourism stakeholders. Concerning cultural heritage's interpretation based on its existing definition, the intertwined and interdependent relationship between the tangible and intangible aspects of cultural heritage was investigated. An authentication process was introduced. Resilience thinking in culture was given as proposals. In this study, a case study in Hue, Vietnam with two examples – Nhã nhạc (the court music) and áo dài (long dress or tunic) were examined regarding the notion of change in relation to the concept of authenticity, sustainability and resilience.