Looking at the past of Beykoz Kundura from the present, Kundura Hafıza took part in the Industrial World Heritage conference held in Essen, Germany, on October 13–15, 2021, keeping up with the international discussions taking place in this field. The conference, organized to identify the opportunities and responsibilities involved in preserving industrial heritage, was hosted by the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001.

The Ruhr region, which includes the city of Essen, was until recently a center of coal and steel production, and is dense with structures that fell idle in the recent past as production methods and resources changed, and that were subsequently transformed into elements of cultural heritage. The roughly 400-kilometer Route of Industrial Heritage in the Ruhr, made up of buildings repurposed for cultural functions, is an excellent example of transformation on a regional scale. On an excursion organized as part of the conference, participants had the opportunity to see exemplary transformation projects along the Ruhr industrial route, such as the Gasometer Oberhausen and the Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park, on site and to evaluate them together.

On Thursday, October 14, the first day of the conference, the opening speeches were followed by presentations on examples of good practice, and both the physical and the social challenges of transformation processes were addressed. It became clear that many of the decisions requiring sensitive solutions in the transformation process that has brought Beykoz Kundura to its present state, a process that has spanned some 15 years and is still ongoing, involve problems frequently encountered on an international scale as well. On the second day, the conference focused on the social impacts of industrial heritage transformations, with discussions on community engagement and on methods for ensuring participatory conservation.

Immediately after the conference, on October 16, the kick-off meeting of the CONSIDER Project took place. Run by Kadir Has University, the project is titled Sustainable Management of Industrial Heritage as a Resource for Urban Development and aims to develop creative methods for the sustainable preservation of industrial heritage over the next four years. Supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Program, the project counts among its partners universities, municipalities, city councils, heritage sites and civil society organizations from different countries around the world. One of the project’s aims is to create a city-scale route of Istanbul’s industrial heritage buildings, just like the one in the Ruhr region, and, by defining common criteria, to establish ways of documenting and assessing the heritage values of these buildings.

* You can visit our exhibition, organized by the association that looks at the past of Beykoz Kundura, one of Istanbul’s most important industrial heritage buildings, from the present, the Kundura Hafıza Cultural Heritage Preservation Association, titled “Kundura’s Memory: A World Fit into a Factory”, free of charge by filling out the visitor form.

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