Small Town Resilience and Heritage Commodification

Luďa Klusáková (*1950–†2020)

Jaroslav Ira

I feel honored to write this short portrait of our dear colleague and teacher, Professor Luďa Klusáková. At the same time, it is hard to accept that she will no longer be able to see this result of her work and to make so many of the plans she had in mind really happen.

Luďa Klusáková studied history and French philology at Charles University, where she later pursued her academic career as a historian of modern European history, with the main focus on urban and cultural history. For more than forty years, Luďa Klusáková was a respected scholar and gained a high reputation in international academic circles. She became professor of History and led a Seminar on General and Comparative History for two decades. Enormously active in international cooperation, Luďa played an important role in several international projects, such as the CLIOHRES.net research network (leader of thematic workgroup), TEMA Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree (academic coordinator for Charles University), REACH Horizon2020 project (leader of Charles University team), and KREAS research project (work-package leader). Last but not least, Luďa has long been an active member of the international committee of the European Association for Urban History (EAUH) and served as the president of EAUH from 2010 to 2012. Among her awards, one could mention the title of Chevalier de l’ordre des palmes académiques, awarded by the French Government for building relations between France and the Czech Republic in the academic sphere, and recently, honorary membership in the Finnish Academy of Sciences.

Luďa’s preoccupation with cities and towns dates back to her studies, during which she focused on railways and urban spatial development. In the 1980s, she conducted a comparative analysis of the transformation of urban systems in Western and East-Central Europe on the threshold of ←11 | 12→capitalism¹. In subsequent decades, her focus shifted to cultural themes such as identity, image of the city, and cultural encounters, and resulted in a study on the imagery and perception of the Ottoman cities in early-modern travel literature². In the final phase of her career, Luďa turned her major research interest to small towns in peripheral regions of south-western France, the Czech Republic, eastern Slovakia and Poland, and analyzed them through the prism of the debates on the creative and innovative cities, revitalization strategies, uses of heritage, and urban resilience³.

The intellectual trajectory of Luďa Klusáková represents some of the major turns in urban history: from large-scale study of urbanization and urban systems to the study of urban cultures, and more recently to domains such as heritage studies and research that borders with urban economy or tourism. Forever young in spirit, Luďa always delved into the new vocabulary with curiosity and rigor of a fresh-minded student, only to come up with an original appropriation of fashionable concepts on her long-researched themes, or, to put it another way, with fruitful rethinking of the buzzwords through her urban perspective. She was a pedant in the best sense of a historian who insisted on familiarity with wider historical contexts and intimate knowledge of the places researched, and whose awareness of the history of words used was accompanied by her openness, and indeed eagerness, to implement concepts and insights from other disciplines such as ethnology, geography, or architecture.

I still keep in my memory a course of hers that I frequented in the early 2000s. Luďa took us on a virtual tour back in time, digging ←12 | 13→down into the historical layers of a region in south-western France. It was an intricate exploration of many themes that Luďa so interestingly illuminated through the perspective of small towns in Gers, such as a blurred boundary between the urban and rural sphere, the uses of the past and heritage in self-promotion and rural renewal, the interplays of local, regional and national identities, and the relations between landscape, technologies and everyday culture. It was a fascinating intellectual journey that opened hearts of many of us to the themes researched in this volume. May this volume be a discreet memorial to her inspiring personality.

Foreword

Jaroslav Ira

Literature on urban resilience has recently been accumulating at an amazing pace. Yet small towns have remained at the margins of this debate, although they provide a unique perspective on resilience and may help us broaden its understanding. Small towns embody a peculiar socio-spatial category. While closely connected to the rural sphere, they represent outposts of the urban world and often proudly display their urbanity. They thus have to cope with a specific mix of challenges, different from those of the big cities and the countryside, while sharing many problems of both. We may likewise presume that the small-town communities perceive their problems and vulnerability in particular ways and often come up with original solutions. Furthermore, the histories of small towns are often fascinating testimony to the social and cultural energy that has been invested in their endurance and development. Seemingly predestined to become obsolete in modernity, small towns have largely survived as a locus of human attachment, even if their fates have varied from thriving to serious decline. While bemoaned as being in constant danger of disappearance, local identity has often served as an important basis of community resilience.

The authors of this volume offer novel perspectives on these issues. In particular, they concentrate on the role of cultural heritage in small-town resilience. It has become a truism that cultural heritage is an important source of community resilience; or that it should be, especially in smaller and peripheral places. But this idea is far from self-evident. As readers will find out, the volume brings together a range of constellations and scenarios, drawn from many different contexts. There are various reasons behind this: Many actors may have many visions. For instance, the perspective of local citizens who dramatize their fate in terms of “survival” and a “stay or go” dilemma may often differ from the perspective of planners and policy-makers who articulate the small-town question as ←15 | 16→an “economic problem”, “development issue”, “social question” and the like. What is considered heritage has always been a contentious issue, and so are the objectives and impacts of its use. Many projects and strategies may succeed and set the town on a trajectory to a bright future, but others may turn out to be failures, immediately or in the long run. As is often the case with social and historical enquiry, it is complexity which is the major result and message of this book.

The editors are particularly grateful to project KREAS: Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions for the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World, a European Regional Development Fund-Project, held by the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, that co-financed the production of the volume¹. KREAS has explored social adaptability and creativity in various dimensions. The research group around the late Professor Klusáková has focused on cultural heritage in historical perspective as a form of adaptation. How cultural heritage has been used as a means for making small towns and urban communities resilient and thus capable of steering their own futures has been one of the major questions.←16 | 17→

Equally important for the emergence of this volume was the project REACH: Redesigning access to cultural heritage for a wider participation in preservation, (re)use and management of European culture, supported by the European Commission within the funding program Horizon2020.² The project supported language revision and enabled the editors and some of the authors in Budapest to meet during the REACH conference Resilient Cultural Heritage and Communities in Europe in May 2018. Luďa Klusáková with her team at Charles University conducted the pilot on small-town cultural heritage, which had as its objective the exploration of the uses of the small-town heritage, with a specific focus on participatory approaches in heritage practice and research. Furthermore, REACH aimed at creating a large social platform of heritage experts and stakeholders and Blanca del Espino Hidalgo became one of the project’s associated partners.