Reconnecting the City

The Historic Urban Landscape Approach and the Future of Urban Heritage

Francesco Bandarin, Ron van Oers, Francesco Bandarin, Ron van Oers

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118383964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Civil Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Historic Urban Landscape is a new approach to urban heritage management, promoted by UNESCO, and currently one of the most debated issues in the international preservation community. However, few conservation practitioners have a clear understanding of what it entails, and more importantly, what it can achieve.

• Examples drawn from urban heritage sites worldwide – from Timbuktu to Liverpool
• Richly illustrated with colour photographs
• Addresses key issues and best practice for urban conservation

SECTION 1
The Layered Dimension of Urban Conservation

1
Archaeology: Reading the City through Time¹

Tim Williams

Senior Lecturer, Institute of Archaeology, University College London, UK

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

Walter Benjamin

Introduction

Cities are undergoing massive transformations, creating irreversible demands on limited archaeological resources. During these processes, it is often difficult to reconcile the interests of development with archaeological research and heritage conservation, which is a particularly pressing issue in the context of urban growth and regeneration. In a world where ‘the future of humanity is irrevocably linked to the city’² we might argue that it has been so for millennia – there is a need for urban archaeology and development to be seen as complementary strands of an approach to creating vibrant twenty first century urban communities. Heritage, and specifically archaeology, has a crucial role to play in helping to produce resilient cities, capable of sustaining and developing their inhabitants.

Advances in promoting dialogue between government agencies, planners, development companies, heritage professionals and international agencies currently are threatened by a combination of rapid urban growth, financial crises and decentralised decision-making. Whilst these problems are differently expressed in different parts of the world, there are many areas of common interest to those concerned with the study and care of the historic fabric of the world's cities.

Almost all cities are the result of complex processes of layering through time. These processes have both contributed to the shaping of the physical landscape inhabited today and also, much more subtly, created an atmosphere of use, a demarcation of physical and social space, and an experience of the sense of the city.³ Archaeology offers a unique source of information on how urban societies have been conceived and sustained. Whilst the study of towns cannot be divorced from the study of wider settlement landscapes, urban archaeology has a distinct identity: it involves both the study of past urban systems and the practice of field research within modern cities. The main contribution that archaeology makes to the study of towns is through its description of spatial and temporal change. Archaeological research has developed a greater awareness of the social and temporal dimensions of space,⁴ and the potential of morphological analyses⁵, but the study of how urban spaces were navigated and experienced requires much greater attention.

Against this backdrop, the concept of Historic Urban Landscape seeks to recognise the layering of values present in any historic city.⁶ UNESCO's Historic Urban Landscape initiative led to the Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape.⁷ This specifically highlighted the ‘time dimension’ to managing historic cities (indeed, the fact that most of the world's cities have historic antecedents), and also implicitly recognised that archaeological methods are a primary source of knowledge that needs to be integrated with management practice. The development of a landscape approach reflects the growing emphasis upon holistic approaches to heritage management.⁸ These have sought to move archaeological resource management away from reactive interventions, fighting over the future of individual sites when they are threatened, towards a long-term engagement with urban policies and practices, and integrating archaeological issues with urban planning, conservation and development processes. By understanding and exploring the archaeology of our cities we can contribute so much more. This also raises questions about the balance between preserving archaeological remains in situ and excavating them to enable the knowledge gained from the process to contribute to contemporary interpretation.

This paper explores these issues with the aim of defining research areas and tools that will assist in the integration of archaeological thinking into contemporary urban management.

Problems and Issues

Over-simplistic Dichotomy between Preservation and Development

With the world turning into a global village, urban encroachment is one of the major factors endangering historic cities, and the pressure of economic development is seen as one of the underlying causes of this daunting threat.⁹

This common portrayal places urban heritage, and particularly buried archaeological resources, as being in opposition to the needs of twenty-first century communities. Archaeology is perceived not as an asset, but rather as an obstruction or hindrance. There will often be conflicting values placed upon any given space: the archaeological knowledge of buried or exposed remains, versus the economic value of the space for reuse, being an obvious example. And very real tensions do exist: as McGill states ‘there has rarely been a time like the present when new development has been so necessary’¹⁰ while ‘conservationists, on the other hand, have vociferously argued that the archaeological heritage is a finite resource that is rapidly diminishing due to development’.¹¹ It is also portrayed as rare that these elements can work together: ‘municipalities … are more focused on urban development to support economic growth and job creation’.¹² They may be, but again by over-simplifying the tensions we do little to explore the solutions.

Values are much more complex, and looking for a more holistic approach, beyond the apparently oppositional elements, can reveal more common ground between stakeholders: the desire to create a sense of place, the attempt to create a distinctive impact on the built urban environment, the aim to draw people into navigating and engaging urban space, etc., all facets to which archaeology and historic fabric can, and should, make a significant contribution. Archaeology also needs to be bolder with its contribution – we have the ability to engage with powerful narratives of place, and through these with community engagement.

Heritage conservation is often criticised as ‘monument-centric’, concentrating on individual historic buildings to the exclusion of their context. This is often because the connection between buildings and their urban landscape is poorly understood or articulated.¹³ This lack of integration is exemplified in the Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape which only mentions archaeology twice (and both of these in the glossary). In the Edinburgh World Heritage Site Management Plan there are references to archaeology, giving some idea of the city's archaeological potential, and espousing that buried archaeology is an integral and vital part of the World Heritage Site and that its conservation, promotion and interpretation are objectives.¹⁴ But this is not actually followed through: there is no mention of archaeology under threats/risks, sustainability, measuring the state of conservation, or implementation. This is fairly typical: archaeology is recognised as a characteristic of place, but not really as a contributor to it, and certainly not as something to be actively used to create a sense of place (see the case study in Box 1.1).

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Box 1.1 Beirut, Lebanon

Beirut has witnessed the contestation of preservation versus development, with major arguments between conservationists and developers, and archaeologists seen as ‘colluding’ with the developers to remove extensive areas of remains to facilitate the development process. There is no doubt this is true, one function of archaeological recording is to document archaeological evidence ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Contributors
• About the Companion Website
• Introduction: Urban Conservation and the End of Planning
• SECTION 1: The Layered Dimension of Urban Conservation
• SECTION 2: Building the Toolkit
• Conclusion: The Way Forward: An Agenda for Reconnecting the City
• Index
• End User License Agreement