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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

Creating green havens in mega-cities of the Global South: transregional heritage networks and global challenges

presenters

    Rebecca Sauer

    Nationality: German

    Residence: Switzerland

    University of Zurich / Institute for Asian and Oriental Studies

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

This paper focuses on the work of the Aga Khan Development Network, with a special emphasis on how questions of climate change, marginalization and mental health are addressed in heritage projects in mega-cities of the Global South. As early as the mid-1990s, actors within the network facilitated a large urban regeneration project located in Cairo that explicitly took into consideration environmental topics connected to marginalization and wellbeing. Framed as “giving Cairo back its Gardens”, a blueprint for urban regeneration was formed that would later strongly be conceptualized as being in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) promoted by UNESCO. While philanthropic practices connected to heritage, climate change, wellbeing and marginalization developed in the Global South for the Global South by organizations such as the AKTC (Aga Khan Trust for Culture) are embedded in a particularly successful story, it is also worthwhile to reflect on how these organizations are simultaneously branding particular communities to the disadvantage of others. By zooming in on two case studies, this paper will address how the network has developed its agenda within the last several decades between community-led initiatives and critical heritage studies and analyze how AKTC heritage practitioners try to mitigate global challenges such as climate change, marginalization and mental health on a local scale.

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