Walking Heritage into Future Cities

Focused on the growing interest in heritage walking in urban settings the event had organised by University Of Exeter and Heritage walk Calcutta, on 23rd & 24th of June at Sri Lanka Archive of Contemporary Art Architecture and Design. We had two days of programs. The first day Gill Juleff, University of Exeter introduced the project team accordingly the participants also introduced themselves about their interest on heritage. Ruth Young University of Leicester and Hashini Haputhanthri ICES Colombo did their contribution to understand the ethics and morals through their talks.  We had a lot of discussions on the readings and finally separated as groups and argued more about different variety of heritage such as, Built Heritage- than the top 10(the top 10 means the very obvious heritage sides), Social Heritage, Working Heritage, Cultural Heritage, Entertaining and unexpected Heritage. In the end each groups had submitted their own idea to do a research. Also suggested the routs/ place for the heritage walk to do the next day.

As planed the second day was the final day as well. In the morning all of the team gathered in the Old Divisional Secretariat Building which is in the town area of Jaffna. And started to walk from there also guided well by each members of the groups. A lot of things had reminded through the history of the heritage sides. Some people talked through the history of war, and some talked in a religious view and some suggested some ideas to take an immediate actions to save the side from the hesitation of people. Finally the walk came to the end with a visit to the press where they still have the old Block printers. We connected that with the working heritage as well.

In the end all of us gathered again at the archive and discussed about the advantages and the challenges of the walk and the overall project. It was really useful to talk about the future plans to save the heritage sides as young people. The first thing we suggested was ‘Gaze’. It means the look with a specific aim to do something (in a good way) with the object or place (The sides) what we see. Gaze also let the viewer to make question on it and the questions push to find out the answer through the history. “Through the talks a lot of places which we think in the past just a place became and important place like a monument” one commented this. Some people said that they could hear more stories about the places. Some people who came from south they commented “these are really amazing…. how long it took to realize the truth behind the stories”. Some people showed their interest to continue the visits in Jaffna In the future.  In this way the two days event was very useful to gain our knowledge about Heritage and the same time it made to think about the preservation as well.