New website of the WRENCH project

The WRENCH project, led by Dr. Marco Armiero* (ICREA Senior at the iHC-UAB), has launched its new website: https://webs.uab.cat/wrench/

The project is funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the Belmont Forum and will run until 2027. On the new website, you can find the ongoing survey, an interactive map, their latest results, as well as the team behind it.

Recent years have demonstrated the vulnerability of our societies. The COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the effects of climate change have shown the fragility of the world as we know it. It is within this context that WRENCH aims to address the effects of climate change on tangible and intangible heritage, while expanding the conventional understanding of heritage to include stories, narratives, and ephemeral legacies. Drawing on the UNESCO concept, WRENCH defines heritage as the collection of tangible and intangible legacies embedded in the landscape and the stories we tell about it, and our place within it. Tangible and intangible heritage can activate narrative devices that tell stories not only about the past, but also about the present and the future of the community. More than ruin, abandonment, or significant disruption, it is when heritage becomes mute, unable to tell any story, that it is lost forever. Since climate change is part of the story experienced by communities around the world, WRENCH conceives heritage both as something at risk and as something capable of telling a story about the risk we all face, and the stories of collapse and adaptation.

Interpreting heritage as a key ingredient of community identities and a pillar for community building, WRENCH proposes shifting from a user-driven approach to a living heritage approach. In other words, from a consumerist idea of heritage (something to be used by clients) to a civic idea of heritage (something to inhabit and shape). Based on this approach, WRENCH has the dual objective of (a) developing a transformative transdisciplinary methodology that involves environmental sciences, engineering, and humanities to investigate the impact of climate change on tangible and intangible heritage; (b) using heritage as a narrative tool to make the risks of climate change visible to a wider audience and explore how communities in the past have faced climate and environmental change.

*Dr. Marco Armiero is an ICREA Senior researcher at the Institute of the History of Science (iHC-UAB), and you can learn more about his research by clicking on his UAB research profile or his ICREA profile.