Netherlands

Founding Secretary of Europa Nostra’s Industrial and Engineering Heritage Committee (IEHC)

Growing up at his grandfather’s shipyard in Rotterdam and destined to become the fourth generation of shipbuilding naval architects, Rienko Wilton’s career followed a different path. He obtained a Master’s degree in Contemporary History of the Balkans and the Middle East at the University of Amsterdam and served as a Beirut based Middle East Correspondent for the Dutch and Belgian media in the 1970s. He joined the Dutch Diplomatic Service in 1982 and held postings in The Hague, Canberra, Bonn (as Cultural Attaché), Stockholm and Valletta (as Ambassador).
Wilton joined Europa Nostra as a volunteer in 2006. He was the driving force behind the creation of Europa Nostra’s IEHC in 2008 and served as its Secretary until 2016. The IEHC has been active in various fields: not only in trying to save endangered industrial heritage (Berliner Gaslight, Colbert Swing Bridge, Dieppe (France) and Venice’s Arsenale, for example) but also in advising at political level (Industrial Heritage Report for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, for example).
Since 2009, Rienko Wilton has been an Assessor for the Jury of the European Heritage Awards / Europa Nostra Awards and was its representative at Local Award Ceremonies in the Netherlands. In 2011, Wilton was appointed member of Europa Nostra’s Audit Committee. In that same year, he was a member of the Organising Committee of Europa Nostra’s Annual Congress in Amsterdam. For the last nine years, Rienko Wilton has coordinated the organisation of excursions to industrial heritage sites in the cities that have hosted Europa Nostra’s Congresses, namely Istanbul, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Athens, Vienna, Oslo, Madrid, Turku and Paris.

Council Member of Europa Nostra.

A professional architect (McGill University), Laurie Neale wrote her Master’s thesis (Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, University College London) on the effects of our urban architecture and spaces on individual behaviour and social interaction through the theory and methods of Space Syntax. Living in Europe (The Hague, Brussels), she has worked for fifteen years on the safeguarding of cultural heritage at Europa Nostra: as manager of the EU Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Awards; as head of Communications; as head of the Heritage in Danger programme; and as member of its advisory Council since 2012. She has been an expert evaluator of cultural heritage projects and advisor for a number of European and International stakeholders (EEA+Norway Grants FMO, ASEF, Europeana …). She served on the Netherlands National Commission to UNESCO’s Thematic Group Post-Conflict Middle-East & North Africa, and is a member of ICOMOS Nederland.
Also living in Montreal Canada, Laurie is engaged with local and national heritage and sustainable city communities while pursuing a Fine Arts degree in sculpture at Concordia University. She works in multiple disciplines and materials (metal, wood, stone, fibres …) and focuses on conveying messages of social-spatial dialectics.

Lilian Grootswagers-Theuns is the owner of Erfgoed.nu, she advises governmental institutions, cooperations and private owners in heritage related issues. Specialty: monument legislation, grants, research, religious heritage issues, conversion, spatial planning and re-use and redesign of heritage. Erfgoed.nu goal is to give heritage buildings a purpose in nowadays society. Therefore an integrated approach is a necessity. She is a council member (honorary secretary) of FRH Future for Religious Heritage, a non-faith European-wide organisation on places of worship based in Brussels. She was the representative of FRH in the structured dialogue between the European Commission and the cultural sector during the EYCH 2018. She represents FRH in the European Commission Cultural Heritage Group as of 2019.. She is a member of the European Heritage Alliance since its foundation in 2011. She is Vice-Chair of task force Toekomst Kerkgebouwen, a national and independent citizen’s movement in the Netherlands aiming to re-establish religious buildings as living elements of the urban and rural landscape and communities.

She is the author and publisher of several guidelines and handbooks on re-use of listed buildings, as well as a guest lecturer of HAN University of Applied Sciences: Repurpose and Monuments Module Cooperation (2011). She is the author of guidelines for religious heritage Gelderland (2009) “Oren van Steen” (2011) and “Future of our built history, guidelines for re-use” (2014). She is board member of Erfgoedlab, a not-for-profit organisation, a “delivery room” for new ideas, and initiatives in the field of heritage which have a national impact. The laboratory drives innovative projects in the heritage sector and ensures these projects are embedded in the sector and are able to run independently after the pilot phase. Some examples are the Dutch “Erfgoedstem”- The National Monumentencongres and the Monumentenmonitor. Actual project is the pilot of the European Heritage Tribune, which is also supported by Europa Nostra. She was one of the initiators of the first Open Churches Days in Noord Brabant in 2017, which resulted in a new foundation Openkerkendag and expands its activities this year to Noord Brabant and Zeeland. Furthermore she has been granted the Brabant Bokaal by the Prince Bernhard Foundation in 2014, for her voluntary and innovative work in the field of religious heritage. As of 2014 she is one of the 21 Brabantse Hoeders, special protectors of the cultural heritage in the province.