Stephanie Herold (Berlin): What remains of the coming? Home and transformation.

The political scientist Parag Khanna 2021 sketches possible future scenarios of global migration in his widely acclaimed work “The Age of Migration”. At the same time he points out that migration is a multifaceted and spatially defining phenomenon of great historical continuity. In Europe occurred the major migration movements after the Second World War. Places of arrival for the refugees were often improvised. It was common to use existing camps or land used for military purposes further on by pragmatical reasons. These places often developed contrary to the original idea of temporary interim uses and stabilized to permanent settlements.

Traces of their history can be read there to this day and bear witness not only to their emergence and various subsequent phases of use, but also to appropriation and settling. These places show how the arriving and the staying inhabitants developed and transformed them according to their ideas and needs. The specific heritage of these places could thus be localised not only in a specific or determining time layer, but precisely in these processes of transformation. In this lecture this thesis shall be elaborated on the basis of various European examples and lead on to further questions of appropriation, preservation and transformation against the background of today’s refugee movements and the urgent problem of future domiciliation.

Stephanie Herold studied art history, European ethnology and heritage conservation in Bamberg, Bergen (Norway) and Berlin. 2008-2021 she was a research assistant at the Department of Monument Conservation of the Institute for Urban and Regional Planning at the Technical University Berlin and at the Competence Centre for Monument Sciences and Technologies at the University of Bamberg. In 2016 she completed her doctorate with a thesis on the role of beauty in monument conservation (transcript, 2018). Since autumn 2021 she has been Professor of Urban Conservation and Urban Heritage at TU Berlin. She combines questions of heritage theory and architectural history and is primarily concerned with monument perception and appropriation, as well as the valorisation of and engagement with recent architectural heritage, especially from post-war modernism to postmodernism.