This article is written by Richard Sandford, Professor of Heritage Evidence, Foresight and Policy, UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage

Around the world, societies have had to pause in the face of the pandemic, and are now imagining what sort of future they want when the world restarts. But these futures will be richer if they take into account our heritage — not simply our collective past experience with disruption and change, but the values of care and stewardship that underpin heritage work.

Our current moment has been readily characterised as “unprecedented” in public commentary and private emails. Certainly, there are aspects of this emergency that have never been seen at this scale before. But there are moments in our history that echo some aspects of the dislocation and rupture produced by the coronovirus. The lessons of the 1918 influenza pandemic are being pored over today, but many other events have produced comparable ruptures, such as the Partition of India in 1947 or the end of apartheid in South Africa.

It's important to notice the role of these events in contributing to the heritage of different communities. Memories of upheaval and loss, changing social practices, the hopes and fears that accompany the end of one way of life and the beginning of another — these all find expression in the cultural heritage produced by those living through them and those still coming to terms with their impact.

This heritage is a record of the impacts of these events on the people living through them, and a source of hope and identity to be drawn on in building new ways of life. It is part of the legacy of these disruptive events.

The legacy of the pandemic

Many are asking what the legacy of the current pandemic will be. The coronavirus has already found its way into art and music just as the 1918 pandemic did, as Anthony Curtis, contributing editor for Rolling Stone and a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, points out. And new forms of performance are emerging, from balcony singalongs to co-ordinated YouTube concerts and regular celebrations of care workers.

By protecting what matters to us today, we preserve the choice of future generations, keeping the future open

What else might a post-covid society inherit? We might pass on a new sense of ourselves as moral actors, able to make sacrifices for the good of people we haven't met. We might have a new determination to protect our natural heritage of clean air from excessive traffic. The general recognition that our present way of arranging the economy doesn't serve people well might encourage the development of a more equitable social contract. Governments around the world have taken action on a previously unimaginable scale: future society will use this as a benchmark for climate action.

But there will be other, more difficult, legacies. We are already doing the work of remembering those who have died, and who gave their lives to keep others safe: memorials to those who died or suffered during the pandemic will be part of all our futures. Our collective grief and trauma will extend (as many have pointed out) to our mourning an old way of life. We will hand on economic hardship and a new relationship between state and citizens, alongside a sense of what it means to face an invisible, mythic enemy able to shape-shift and attack without reason.

Using heritage to think about the future

Asking about what we might pass on and what we might leave behind is one kind of heritage work. Heritage, as a practice and a field of research, is used to thinking about what matters to us — like a sense of being part of something, or clean air — and about the difficult inheritances we might wish we hadn't received (like those arising from exploitation, pollution or discrimination).

Heritage practitioners are used to working with change and loss, understanding that deterioration might be slowed but never arrested, and to respectfully letting parts of our heritage go (for example, through deaccessioning items in a museum collection). And, most importantly, heritage embodies a stance towards the future that is distinctive for having at its heart ideas of care, responsibility, stewardship, and possibility.

By protecting what matters to us today, we preserve the choice of future generations, keeping the future open: if we were to let our present heritage slip away, they would be denied the opportunity to take it on, closing one part of their future down. This is in contrast to a dominant view of the future that tends to frame the future in terms of what it can offer us in the present.

By thinking with heritage, we can make sure that we think about the long-term not just as good policy advisors or social innovators but, in the words of the author Roman Krznaric, as good ancestors

So the field of heritage might be a useful source of ideas for policy teams and social innovators taking on the responsibility of shaping our post-Covid future. Many of us have a new appreciation for the resilience that comes with maintaining stockpiles: this kind of stewardship is a part of heritage thinking. Heritage recognises and respects the attachment people have to behaviours that might need to change: this understanding would complement directions to organise our lives in particular ways as we continue to manage the spread of Covid-19.

And it can help beyond the current crisis. Over recent years, social innovators have learned to recognise the importance of community expertise, to understand the limits of market approaches to describing what is important to people, and to aim to develop systems that are sustainable over the long-term: increasingly, too, policy and innovation teams appreciate that the decisions they take are rarely value-free.

Practitioners and researchers in the field of heritage begin their work with what people and communities find meaningful and significant: the questions of value and what matters are central to their work.

From a practical perspective, this might mean:

  • Making sure that stakeholder consultation processes try to understand what people value, beyond economic measurements, and show how proposed changes recognise what matters to people. How do they build on what is already there?

  • Considering how a given policy enlarges or reduces the choices open to people in the future. Does an efficient solution today make the future less resilient?

  • Including rights/interests of future generations in formal policy evaluation. What does it mean to use future discounting rates in assessing impact?

As we take this moment to ask questions about what we should continue to protect, what emerging ideas and social practices we should care for, and what we can respectfully let go, engaging with a heritage perspective will help us to do this with the values of care and stewardship that are necessary for a more sustainable and equitable society.

By thinking with heritage, we can make sure that we think about the long-term not just as good policy advisors or social innovators but, in the words of the author Roman Krznaric, as good ancestors. — Richard Sandford

(Picture credit: Unsplash)