Edward Denison

MoHoA - Modern Heritage of Africa / Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene

Join us for a lunch lecture by Edward Denison who is a Professor of Architecture and Global Modernities at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL). Lunch will be provided before the lecture. Please register in advance

Confronting the existential paradox that modern heritage is simultaneously of modernity and yet threatened by its consequences, the global collaborative, MoHoA (Modern Heritage of Africa / Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene), was established in 2020 to advocate for equitable approaches to modern heritage in response to an age of planetary crises. Entangled in the roots of these crises are centuries-old cultures of extraction and domination that have caused modern histories and experiences of the global majority to be overlooked, marginalized, or exiled from the modern canon. In 2023, following multiple workshops and two international conferences, MoHoA published and presented to UNESCO, The Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage. By acknowledging the role of inequitable and unsustainable processes and practices that gave rise to and often characterized modernity – slavery, imperialism, colonialism, and fossil fuel dependence – The Cape Town Document is a decentring and restitutive framework for equitable and sustainable heritage futures.

Edward Denison is Professor of Architecture and Global Modernities at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) where he is Director of the MA Architecture and Historic Urban Environments. His research is motivated by historiographical inequity and sustainability, particularly in response to modernity and decoloniality. He has published over 20 books has twice been awarded the RIBA President’s Medal for Research, first in 2016 for his work on the successful UNESCO World Heritage Nomination of Asmara (Eritrea) and in 2017 for his research on Japan’s imperialist Ultra-Modernism in Manchuria. He has collaborated on UNESCO World Heritage Nominations for Asmara (Eritrea, inscribed 2017), Kaunas (Lithuania, inscribed 2023), the Beijing Axis (China), and Gdynia (Poland). In 2020, he cofounded the global collaborative, MoHoA (Modern Heritage of Africa / Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene), responsible for the decentring policy document: The Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage (2023).