Use of Cultural Heritage for Place Branding in Educational Projects: The Case of Smederevo and Golubac Fortresses on the Danube

Abstract

Medieval fortresses represent an important tangible heritage of a nation’s culture and a valuable development asset for a particular destination on which its place-branding strategy for tourism could be built upon. Traditionally in Serbia, heritage protection and conservation have been mainly concentrated on the tangible aspects of cultural sites and monuments. Nevertheless, with the advent of urban heritage integration in the local sustainable development processes and place-branding strategies, a greater appreciation of the spirit of the place and its intangible components, as well as the need to adapt it to local contexts with more participatory forms of heritage planning, have started to emerge. A wide range of stakeholders brought the involvement and participation of both the local government and community members, including residents, as an indispensable element of the protection actions and broader urban development policies. The paper aims to validate the correlation between both intangible and tangible cultural heritage and its contemporary use for place branding and tourism development. In doing so, we have employed the case study method on the two fortresses on the Danube in Serbia to show the ways in which local stakeholders have mobilized their forces in cooperation with the university to use their cultural heritage assets for tourism and more extensive sustainable territorial development. We have found that despite new inclusive forms of governance, which is attracting the attention of planning and heritage practitioners in Serbia, the contemporary approach of integrative protection and the intangible aspects of cultural heritage are still not fully utilized. For this reason, in this study, we consider methods based on environmental aesthetics approaches to cultural heritage that point out the significant inclusion of immaterial intangible cultural heritage in an unbreakable bond with material tangible heritage. The most remarkable result of our research is that while a vast number of stakeholders with local knowledge and sense of the spirit of the place have been involved in the planning process, intangible aspects of the analyzed heritage cases are present in educational projects, and are only partially present if it comes to implementation. This clearly demonstrates that the focus on tangible aspects and spatial interventions of the place branding of cultural heritage is still dominant in Serbia, despite acknowledgment of the economic and social aspects of sustainability in the planning phase in educational projects.

Transferring COVID-19 Challenges into Learning Potentials: Online Workshops in Architectural Education

“…Building on the existing practice of organizing workshops in times of emergency [34], constant endeavors to improve education processes through innovative curricular and extracurricular activities in architecture and urbanism at the University of Belgrade-Faculty of Architecture (UB-FA) [35][36][37], and integration of the SDGs in curricula [38][39][40], a group of teaching and research assistants (authors of the paper) initiated an online workshop aiming to address COVID-19 challenges. The online workshop was implemented by the UB-FA in April 2020.…”

How Can Rural Tourism Be Sustainable? A Systematic Review

“…Studies on the topic of environmental sustainability can be divided into those that specifically deal with sustainability in terms of "physical environment" (7.9%) and those that explore sustainability concerning "ecological environment" (17.1%). First, studies related to "physical environment" analyze the transportation accessibility and transportation systems that increase the sustainability of rural tourism [85,86], cases of rural tourism used as a tool to increase the sustainability of agricultural land [87], and studies on developing the ways to preserve and promote cultural heritage in a rural area [88][89][90]. The second sub-topic in terms of environment is the "ecological environment".…”

The Possibilities of Preservation, Regeneration and Presentation of Industrial Heritage: The Case of Old Mint “A.D.” on Belgrade Riverfront

“…The promotion of intangible components of industrial heritage in our case study creates multifaceted opportunities for creative and economically progressive development. Intangible heritage can be a very original management and branding tool for urban development, tourism, culture, entertainment, recreation, catering, etc., [17,51,52]. Cultural content is a valuable asset that can become a driving force if it is used to establish a "creative city", in cases of urban reuse [53].…”

“…Through the analysis of student proposals for reactivation of the Sava riverfront with special emphasis on the industrial complex of the Mint "A.D.", a significant contribution was made to a critical review of current approaches to protection, revitalization and presentation of Belgrade's industrial zones, all in order to find recommendations and guidelines for further urban development and preservation of authenticity and identity of industrial heritage. The relation of the application of spontaneous or imposed contents in the processes of reuse of industrial heritage is especially considered [17].…”