Conservation as Social TransformationLilian Chee, Anastasia Dourida, Daniel Hilfiker

This session brings together three lectures from Zürich, Athens, and Singapore that rethink conservation as a social and collective practice. Rather than focusing only on buildings as objects of preservation, the evening explores how conservation and social use can be thought together to support community and create spaces that otherwise could not exist. Daniel Hilfiker, director of Raumbörse Zürich, presents a municipal institution that has successfully provided hundreds of affordable spaces to young people and residents for cultural, social, and creative initiatives. Raumbörse has enabled youth culture to continue to exist in arguably one of the most expensive cities in the world. Anastasia Dourida introduces Communitism Athens, an association that reactivates abandoned heritage buildings as cultural commons through collective use, artistic practice, and community care. Lilian Chee discusses the conservation campaign for a former school in Singapore, where alumni activism and feminist spatial research made visible the social value of the campus through memory, attachment, and shared experience.