Heritage Geographies: politics, uses and governance of the past

In the closing plenary session, the presidents of the IGU commissions that promoted the conference summed up what had emerged during the conference, highlighting the salient points of the current geographical debate on the theme of heritage. [...] This boosted a shared reflection on the role of the geographer and geography in the observation and interpretation of heritage as a complex idea, both with regard to preservation and enhancement issues – as well as management - and the processes of attribution of symbolic meaning including the related issues of power. [...] In the common space of discussion, different intellectual and human experiences came together, a real mosaic of trajectories that crossed in a rich and stimulating reflection, which was able to dwell on the friction points of the discipline, that is, on the need to become aware of its interpretative role and thus carve out the right space in the framework of social knowledge, starting from the rec. [...] In this epistemological reflection on the positioning of the disciplinethe various interventions, both in the plenary and the parallel sessions, took turns offering the listener a series of case studies useful for a sort of mapping of geographical reality, from different perspectives of analysis. [...] In this, the digital acceleration of recent years plays a role of extraordinary importance, due to new social behaviors determined by the pandemic from Covid-19, has recorded a further and unprecedented momentum, generating renewed assets geographically relevant because they affect the space, its representation and the limes (increasingly thin and problematic) between the physical space and the po.