B8: Urban Infrastructure and Heritage Futures
Tracks
8
| Sunday, November 29, 2026 |
| 2:25 PM - 3:40 PM |
| RHLT3 |
Overview
Stream: Urban Heritage, Planning and Place
Paper / Session Submitter
Mrs Gianina Ivodie
Phd Candidate
Universitas Indonesia
The Paradox of Progress: Accidental Archaeology in Jakarta's Urban Rail Planning
Summary Abstract
Flagship projects such as Jakarta’s new urban rail network, initiated under President Joko Widodo’s administration in 2013, are envisioned as efforts to build a modern city. Paradoxically, these projects have also exposed the city’s buried past, producing instances of “accidental archaeology” found just beneath Jakarta’s main roads. Artefacts ranging from water infrastructure to objects of daily use were uncovered, revealing traces of the city’s colonial past. The artefacts discovered along the rail route canbe understood as locally and accidentally found, and through their repeated emergence, they have disrupted existing approaches to heritage-making, raising the question of whether they can be reintroduced to the contemporary public as active participants in creating and re-creating meanings beyond state-led narratives. By analysing the accidental archaeology found along this route, this study demonstrates how heritage is actively produced through infrastructure, highlighting the ongoing negotiation between modernisation, conservation, and intergenerational responsibility in preserving Jakarta’s colonial past.
Biographies
Gianina Ivodie, MRes is a researcher in art, conservation, and heritage, and a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Indonesia. She holds a BA from Leiden University, an MRes from Central Saint Martins, UAL, and a certificate from the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, University of Melbourne.
Argi Arafat, M.Hum. is a field archaeologist, PhD candidate, and lecturer in the Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Indonesia. With nearly a decade of experience in colonial and urban archaeology, he has supported the Jakarta MRT project since 2019, documenting and safeguarding archaeological discoveries.
Mr Kohei Suneya
Project Assistant Professor
University of Tokyo
Reframing Heritagization as “Resourcification”: Civic Preservation Activism of Modern Architectural Heritage in 1970s Osaka
Summary Abstract
This paper examines a civic preservation movement that emerged in the 1970s in Nakanoshima, Osaka, in response to redevelopment plans proposed by the Osaka City Government and the Bank of Japan to demolish several early twentieth-century public buildings. Led by young architects and local intellectuals associated with the Society for the Preservation of Nakanoshima, the campaign sought not only to conserve these buildings but also to articulate an alternative urban vision through activities such as citizen-led festivals and proposals for adaptive reuse.
Rather than viewing this movement merely as the protection of architectural artifacts, this study interprets it as a process of heritage-making embedded in broader struggles over urban governance and civic agency. It argues that heritagization functioned as a form of “resourcification,” through which elements of the past were identified, reinterpreted, and mobilized to articulate future-oriented visions of the city and civic society.
Rather than viewing this movement merely as the protection of architectural artifacts, this study interprets it as a process of heritage-making embedded in broader struggles over urban governance and civic agency. It argues that heritagization functioned as a form of “resourcification,” through which elements of the past were identified, reinterpreted, and mobilized to articulate future-oriented visions of the city and civic society.
Biographies
Kohei Suneya is a Project Assistant Professor at the MEC–UTokyo Lab, Organization for Interdisciplinary Research Projects, the University of Tokyo. His research focuses on sociological heritage studies, with particular interest in the social processes of heritagization involving Western-style architecture in Japan.
Dr Carolyn Hill
Independent researcher
Lifescapes
Creating Space Not Accumulation: Heritage (Un)making in Unsettled Urban Futures
Summary Abstract
An emerging futures orientation is reshaping the heritage field as cities confront climate change, intensification and cultural contestation. How can futures thinking transform heritage-making beyond the concerns of our moment? How might new planning directions move heritage past the mantra of "preserving the past for the future" toward critical engagement with the challenges of urban life?
This talk examines these questions in Aotearoa New Zealand’s settler colonial context. Situated at the intersection of heritage and urban planning, I explore how heritage is understood and critiqued both by established heritage policy leaders and early career planners. While critique of conventional practice is evident across both groups, implementing alternatives remains a multidimensional challenge amid environmental pressures, housing unaffordability and social inequity. Heritage will require new thinking about its making, sustainment and purpose as Indigenous and emerging generations forge (re)new(ed) relationships between people and place.
This talk examines these questions in Aotearoa New Zealand’s settler colonial context. Situated at the intersection of heritage and urban planning, I explore how heritage is understood and critiqued both by established heritage policy leaders and early career planners. While critique of conventional practice is evident across both groups, implementing alternatives remains a multidimensional challenge amid environmental pressures, housing unaffordability and social inequity. Heritage will require new thinking about its making, sustainment and purpose as Indigenous and emerging generations forge (re)new(ed) relationships between people and place.
Biographies
Dr Carolyn Hill (Pākehā, tangata Tiriti) is an architect, heritage consultant and environmental planning lecturer, with heritage experience across Aotearoa, Australia and the UK. Her research on urban heritage policy examines evolving perspectives shaping heritage making as cities face unprecedented change.
Miss Armelle Ninnin
Associate member
Ipraus
The Mae Kha canal as the cruicible of interactions between heritage and the city
Summary Abstract
As a candidate for inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List, Chiang Mai city (Thailand) recognizes the Mae Kha Canal as a foundational urban element dating back to the thirteenth century. Historically marginalized and environmentally degraded, the canal has been bordered by informal settlements inhabited by socioeconomically vulnerable populations, generating tensions between heritage preservation, urban development, and social inclusion. While institutional narratives often view these communities as incompatible with heritage objectives, residents articulate an alternative conception of “ordinary” heritage rooted in lived practices and human–environment interdependence. A recent participatory rehabilitation project seeks to reconcile these perspectives by promoting a relational and sustainable vision of urban heritage.
Biographies
Armelle Ninnin is an architect and urban planner, with a PhD in Urban Studies. Her research investigates the frictions between heritage-making processes and urban production, within the context of the inscription of Southeast Asian historic cities on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Her work challenges the dichotomy between the “heritage” and the “non-heritage,” the latter referring to spaces shaped by contemporary urban transformation. The research focuses particularly on the interface between these two spheres, understood as a crucible of interactions, inter-agentivities, and mutual transformations between the city and heritage. This interface reveals tensions – between the planned and the unplanned, the global and the local, and between competing interpretations of territory – and bears witness to processes of negotiation, resistance, and innovation. By analyzing this relational interface in its multiple configurations and mobilizing it as a heuristic tool, Armelle Ninnin’s work seeks to enrich critical theories of the city and of heritage. Her research deciphers what the forces and forms of heritage-making do to urban production – and, conversely, how urban dynamics reshape heritage.
