Since the stan in 2002 the Department of Culture Studies (Tema Kultur och santhälle, Tema Q) has been a site for broad interdisciplinary cultural research and is today a leading research environment within this expanding field. The essays by Manias Legoer tied together under the title Historic Rehabilitation of Industrial Cities: Cases from North American and Swedish Cities in this volume tackle vital aspects of urban planning and cultural heritage, with emphasis on the preservation and reshapjng of the industrial cultural heritage. Today, this heritage is a prime rallying point for cultural policy and urban planning, where those who plan or develop urban spaces have no prescience of cultural dynamics or aspects. It is, among other things, this that is highlighted in the present volume.

Gathered in the way they are in this volume the essays display a comparative approach to questions on urban planning and cultural policy, comparing strategies of rehabilitation of industtial cities especially in Sweden and the United States. In this way, the rehabilitation of the industtial city of Norrköping is contrasted to equivalent processes in Baltimore Maryland and Durham in North Carolina, in the north and south of the United States respectively. As these cases show, heritage is not simply inherited, but constantly constructed and renewed. Thus, the preservation of heritage is always part of the production of something new. Besides, historic restoration and cultural conservation leave their own marks and traces on the sites of heritage. Another question concerns the attempt to convert life into heritage, or as in the cases explored in thisvolume: how to make places of industtial heritage into "living" places. In this sense, the understanding of history is confronted with the contemporary use of places and buildings. As shown in this volume, the outcome of this dialectic is commouly the result of local policies and dynamics. In this way, the dialectic between national cultural policies and local practices in the reconstruction of places and buildings, as well as cultural values, is also displayed in the volume.

The questions dealt with in this gathering of essays will probably become more and more relevant with the growth of what might be designated as a heritage-inflected economy and urban planning. The Department of Culture Studies (Tema Q) will continue to explore these questions and they are also highlighted in other research projects at the department. This continuation will be possible thanks to a grant from the foundation Forskning och framtid, edified in collaboration between Linköping university, the municipality of Norrköping and the local business world. And this grant has also been a prerequisite for the publication of the present volume.