Living with Cultural Heritage
The Rei Alfonso Henriques Foundation of Zamora held the International Meeting of the RED PHI with the 2nd Seminar on Living with Spanish American Heritage, Se + PHI. Cooperating with Cultural Heritage which this year brings together speakers from eleven countries under the theme Living with Cultural Heritage.
This Network, which began in 2010, joins the Spanish-American Cultural and Historical Heritage Group, PHI, with the main universities with active roles in this field in more than 14 countries. Under a scalar structure, a network of networks connecting projects, students and professors to share the knowledge of their respective institutions with society, while also sharing the specific methodologies and projects with the academic world.
One of the principle tasks since the beginning of this project were the seminars for sharing experiences like the one being held here. These meeting spaces have contributed to the debate and exchange of information in the fields of conservation, management and intervention in cultural heritage, especially in relation to sustainable development and development cooperation. Thus, to date, meetings of this nature have been held in Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2011), Mexico (2012), Santa Fe, Argentina (2013), Coimbra, Portugal (2014), Lima, Peru (2015) and La Antigua Guatemala (2016), before this meeting in Zamora, Spain (2017), the seventh international meeting of the network.
Kalam has been involved with and has supported this project since its inception, participating in the first meeting in Belo Horizonte in 2011. The company, specializing in the restoration and rehabilitation of historical cultural buildings, has shared its knowledge of the implementation of its work, adding to the Network’s cultural debates. Since 2014, it has also been the Technical Secretary for the Project.
On this occasion, the head of our Real Estate Restoration Department, Manuel Montañés, an Art History graduate and restorer with more than 20 years of experience in heritage conservation, gave a speech entitled Gentrification and Heritage, sharing Kalam’s point of view after working on historical centres and compounds for over thirty years. Kalam’s Director himself, Ramón Mayo, and the architect responsible for Project Development, Llanos Gómez, also participated in the Network’s Executive Committee meetings held on the 2nd and 3rd in Madrid.
We hope that the conferences are a success and that their content and conclusions can be spread far and wide, helping to enrich the strategies, reflections and debates concerning our cultural heritage.
