This book offers a heterogeneous enquiry into the historical contexts and policies that conditioned the emergence and institutionalisation of cultural heritage assets, focusing mostly on geographies shaped by Portuguese influence and using as an operational tool the concept of landscape. Assessing related discourses and practices, which reveal comparative dynamics, this volume deals with history as a basis for understanding the different and shared realities in each country and region, and politics (and policies) taken as a repertoire of action to tackle the problems and challenges associated with cultural heritage, that is, those identified and contested as such. The topics addressed by each chapter are diverse and crucial: contested heritage; social justice; heritage as performance; industrial colonialism; tourism and heritage; heritage management and preservation; conservation, heritage, and landscape.

The Patrimónios (Heritages) — UNESCO Chair on Intercultural Dialogue on the Heritage of Portuguese Influence — and the homonymous PhD course, promote integrated interdisciplinary cooperation and research about the assets that, from the point of view of active cultural heritage (architecture, arts, geography, history, landscape, urbanism), entail convergences in recognising the values common to the communities where Portuguese forms of presence have existed, or still exist. Its focus is not the latter but the variety of cultural outcomes it has generated in the world, recognising the role of the other, the co-constitution and multi-directional of North-South and South-South relations, the consequences of movements and processes of violent subjugation implicit in the phenomena of emigration and colonisation, as well as new or renewed forms of post-colonial domination.