5th International Biennial Conference concludes in Bhubaneswar

Bhubaneswar: The 5^th International Biennial Conference on heritage and culture concluded here on Saturday.

The last session of the conference organized by Odisha government, Indian Heritage Cities Network and UNESCO, looked at livelihood and heritage. The main points that came out of this presentation were that livelihood is essential to sustainable development.

Through the various presentations, issues related to livelihood and heritage were brought to the forefront. These include the major gap between the artisan and final product, lack of organisation and lack of voice and how to be able to scale up the industry.

In the closing statement, IHCN chairman Dr M. Ramachandran said he was looking forward to continuing interactions between the state through an MOU in order to take heritage goals forward as Odisha is a goldmine of hundreds of monuments those are of national and international importance.

Minja Yang, former director UNESCO, New Delhi and at present President and Professor, Raymond Lemaire International Centre for Conservation (RLICC), KU Leuven, Belgium also assured that there would be a publication that would be brought out detailing our proceedings of the conference.

Students’ team from Chitkara School of Planning and Architecture, Punjab won the architecture students competition at the 5^th International Biennial Conference on heritage and culture.

It can be noted that during the Day II of the conference began with an interesting session on the resilience of historic cities chaired by Rohit Jigyasu, trustee IHCNF.

The panel consisted of several interdisciplinary experts who all spoke about this fairly new concept in heritage from varying perspectives using case example both from the country and across the globe.

The second session chaired by Minja Yang was touching upon world heritage cities as cities.

The session included excerpts from heritage management plans from the city of Jaipur which was the first to be formulated in the country and looked at the case example of Chandigarh as being notified as a world heritage site for gaining recognition through its modern heritage.

The session ended with reconstruction efforts that were undertaken for Pathan durbar post the 2015 earthquake that hit Nepal.