Routledge Companion to Global Heritage Conservation

Vinayak Bharne, Trudi Sandmeier, Vinayak Bharne, Trudi Sandmeier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317332923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Historic Preservation in Architecture

The act of identifying, protecting, restoring, and reusing buildings, districts, and built landscapes of historic and cultural significance is, at its best, a reflective and consequential process of urban and socio-economic reform. It has the potential to reconcile conflicting memories, meanings, and cultural tensions, bridging and expanding the perceived boundaries of multiple disciplines towards bigger aspirations of city-making and social justice.

How and where do such aspirations overlap and differ across nations and societies across the world? In places with different histories, governance structures, regulatory stringency, and populist dispositions, who are the specific players, and what are the actual processes that bring about bigger and deeper change beyond just the conservation of an architectural or urban entity of perceived value?

This collection of scholarly articles by theorists, academics, and practitioners explores the global complexity, guises, and potential of heritage conservation. Going from Tokyo to Cairo, Shenzhen to Rome, and Delhi to Moscow, this volume examines a vast range of topics – indigenous habitats, urban cores, vernacular infrastructure, colonial towns, squatters, burial sites, war zones, and modern landmarks. It surfaces numerous inherent issues – water stress, deforestation, social oppression, poverty, religion, immigration, and polity, expanding the definitions of heritage conservation as both a professional discipline and socio-cultural catalyst. This book argues that the intellectual and praxis limits of heritage conservation – as the agency of reading, defining, and intervening with built heritage – can be expansive, aimed at bigger positive change beyond a specific subject or object; plural, enmeshed with multiple fields and specializations; and empathetic, born from the actual socio-political realities of a place.

Part I

Globalizing the conservation discourse

Editors’ introduction

Heritage conservation, globally considered, is a polarized discourse. Although recommendations, charters, and other national and international documents on heritage conservation continue to emerge, political realities often result in varying degrees of efficacy. Alternative practices are emerging that embrace the realities of these political ambiguities and also seek to address related goals such as social justice and equity. International heritage conservation agencies also now grapple with new methods to engage with non-traditional constituencies and engage community participation for the stewardship of both natural and cultural resources.

Such alterations have several important practical implications in the conservation of regional heritage, including poverty mitigation through employment and small business opportunities. In several instances, regional offices of international organizations are now collaborating with local governments, community-based institutions, and non-government organizations (NGOs) to effectively manage resources for conservation and development. While formal practices continue to shape the conservation rubric, simultaneous informal approaches from around the world have helped generate increased creativity and an expanded conversation globally.

The purpose of this volume’s first part is to frame the global heritage conservation discussion by providing a broad overview of its global overlaps versus region-specific issues, processes, and practices. The chapters in this part provide scholarly reviews of important charters and treatises while posing a number of important questions: What is the place and role of World Heritage and other charters on the global stage, and how do they situate themselves in various societies? How does conservation change from affluent to poorer nations, and grapple with social inequities and political inefficiencies? How does it react to unpredictable circumstances such as natural disasters?

UNESCO World Heritage designation is one of the most popular global conservation programs, with 1092 sites listed in 167 countries. The first chapter of this volume, “Re-examining World Heritage and sustainable development” by Sophia Labadi, critically analyses this program. Uncontrolled development remains one of the most significant threats affecting World Heritage sites, but only as recently as 2012 did the World Heritage Committee recommend the preparation of guidelines on the integration of sustainable development issues within conservation and management strategies. This chapter examines the processes that led to the preparation and adoption of the first policy on World Heritage and Sustainable Development. It reviews the official references to sustainable development as well as the various unsustainable trends that continue to affect World Heritage properties and argues for an increased awareness of this policy and its implementation mechanisms.

Numerous policy documents have emerged to broaden the scope of heritage to specifically deal with historic towns and cities. The second chapter “Re-conceptualizing ‘historic urban landscapes’” by Kalliopi Fouseki, analyzes the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation for the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) in relation to the Acropolis Museum at the historic center of Athens. Fouseki argues that HUL is predominated by an emphasis on ‘materially’ and ‘visually’ oriented heritage aspects, with its approach still remaining object-centric and less people-oriented. She argues that the ‘object’ in discussion is larger in that it is not a single site or building but a whole area and calls for the recommendation to adopt a more holistic approach towards heritage.

Interestingly, most cultural properties on the UNESCO World Heritage List have endured without policy until the last century or so. While UNESCO identifies natural hazards and physical deterioration as factors endangering the survival of heritage today, explicit attention to risk management processes such as reduction, readiness, response, and recovery at the global level has grown only since the late 2000s. The third chapter, “Earthquakes and afterlives: heritage conservation and seismicity” by Elizabeth Aitken Rose engages in this discussion. It focuses on resources accorded to heritage sites through statutory and non-statutory frameworks and citizen action and reveals that although heritage is valued and protected to varying degrees, measures are perennially underfunded and undermined by a prevailing private property ethos. It argues that even as a relatively stable and wealthy democracy, New Zealand has yet to achieve an appropriate formula for securing heritage and its people from natural disaster.

Conservation efforts are even more challenging in the context of impoverished and politically unstable nations torn between provincial rifts, sectarian conflicts, and ethnic fissures. In such places, the very consensus on what constitutes heritage representations remains ambiguous and unclear. The fourth chapter “Beyond nostalgic appeal: the means and measures dictating heritage management trends in Pakistan” by Anila Naeem and Noman Ahmed engages in this topic. Using select case studies, it explores prevailing public and private sector practices, and their impact on the well-being, or otherwise, of heritage resources. It reflects on the compromised authenticity of heritage sites and disregard for internationally accepted standards. It calls out the dire need to re-establish a broader purview in acknowledging Pakistan’s heritage traditions that while popular, are overlooked in administrative routines.

In the wake of such institutional underperformance, the fifth chapter, “Formal order out of informal chaos: a Latin American dialogue between the official practice of heritage conservation and the concept of self-organization” by Jaime Correa examines some of the alternative and innovative processes of urban and socio-economic reform in Cuba, Colombia, Chile, Guatemala, and Mexico. His study highlights the extraordinary improvements in the practice of heritage conservation that are emerging in regard to the autonomous transformations of historic centers, peripheral neighborhoods, and shantytowns. This chapter calls out the paradox between top-down strategies and bottom-up tactics and suggests that order and organization can also arise from disorder and chaos through a spontaneous process of self-organization.

1.1

Re-examining World Heritage and sustainable development

Sophia Labadi

Introduction

The World Heritage Convention, adopted in 1972 by UNESCO, is one of the most popular global programmes on heritage conservation and management. As of April 2017, the World Heritage List has 1052 sites located in 165 countries. This almost universal programme has promoted principles of heritage conservation and management globally. UNESCO has adopted and implemented key concepts that have been the driving force of the United Nations, as one of its specialized agencies. This is the reason why the World Heritage Convention has been the leading force behind promoting and ensuring the recognition of heritage as a driver and enabler of sustainable development.

Yet, the unsustainable management and conservation of World Heritage properties regularly make headlines around the world. What can explain this seemingly contradictory situation? What efforts have recently been made to ensure that the Convention can be better aligned with up-to-date sustainable development principles and tools? What are the challenges that might prevent the World Heritage system from truly becoming a sustainable development instrument?

To address these questions, this chapter focuses first on detailing and analysing the sustainable dimensions of the text of the Convention and the official references to this concept. A second section details some of the most common unsustainable development trends that have affected World Heritage sites since the 1980s. Finally, this chapter details a pioneer initiative: a policy that aims to integrate a sustainable development perspective into the processes of the convention, as well as the challenges that might prevent the full implementation of this policy.

Introducing World Heritage to sustainable development

‘Sustainable development’ is often thought to have emerged in 1988 with the Brundtland report and its now widely accepted definition that sustainable development is ‘Development that meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED, 1987: 45). However, the origins of this concept date to an earlier period, notably during the UN Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972, which saw the creation of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) (Drexhage and Murphy, 2010: 7). At this conference, drafts for a potential Convention on the protection of ‘World Heritage’ were prepared for discussion by IUCN (the World Conservation Union), UNESCO, and the United States. A resolution was also adopted which stated that a convention on World Heritage should be adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO. The Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (henceforth World Heritage Convention or The Convention) was subsequently adopted on 16 November 1972 by the General Conference of UNESCO (Bandarin and Labadi, 2007: 29).

The text adopted by UNESCO reflects a number of ideas related to sustainable development and/or sustainability. First, the Convention was adopted because uncontrolled development was becoming one of the most significant threats affecting heritage sites. This is clearly highlighted in the preamble of this convention which stresses:

The cultural heritage and natural heritage are increasingly threatened with destruction not only by the traditional causes of decay, but also by changing social and economic conditions which aggravate the situation with even more formidable phenomena of damage and destruction.

(UNESCO, 1972)

This preamble clearly refers to the process of rapid industrialization and urbanization of the 1960s and 1970s that led to the destruction of a number of heritage sites. Implicit reference is made to the international campaign to salvage the two Abu Simbel Temples in Egypt dating from the reign of Pharaoh Ramesses II in the 13th century BC. These temples were moved in 1968 onto an artificial hill to protect them from being submerged after the construction of the Aswan High Dam.

The second idea reflects the principle of intergenerational equity, detailed in Article 4 of the World Heritage Convention, which recognizes that heritage should be identified, protected, and transmitted to future generations. This idea echoes the definition of sustainable development from the Brundtland report, provided at the beginning of this section. The principle of intergenerational equity was already at the core of heritage conservation during the 19th century, if not earlier. Ruskin, for instance, writing about historic buildings, highlighted that ‘We have no right whatever to touch them. They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us’ (Ruskin, 1849: 245).

Finally, the Convention implicitly refers to the notion of community development. Jones and Silva (1991: 1–21) consider community development as including collective actions, problem solving, and community building, such as the ability for individuals to participate freely in the life of their communities and to build and express their own cultural identity. Article 5 of the Convention clearly recognizes the important role often played by cultural heritage in the life of individuals and communities and in strengthening cultural identity. This concept of individual and community development is quite removed from the notion of infrastructural and economic development, which too often excludes individuals and communities.

The Convention refers thus to the protection of heritage against unsustainable development projects, in order to strengthen individual and collective identities and for the benefits of future generations. This can be considered a pioneering text as it reflects this emerging notion of sustainable development and sustainability. Despite the pioneer dimension of the Convention, quite ironically, sustainable development became officially associated with the process of identifying and managing World Heritage properties for the first time in the Budapest Declaration of 2002. The Budapest declaration expresses the need to:

Ensure an appropriate and equitable balance between conservation, sustainability and development, so that World Heritage properties can be protected through appropriate activities contributing to the social and economic development and the quality of life of our communities.

(UNESCO, 2002: 4)

This approach to sustainable development denotes a change from the original text of the Convention, as it is in line with the more recent reflections on sustainable development, developed at the 1992 Rio summit and the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (UNEP, 1992; United Nations, 2002). Heritage is no longer considered a hindrance to development but more as a contributor to economic and social well-being. This reflects the three pillars of sustainable development (environmental, social, and economic pillars), defined at this 2002 World Summit, as well as the idea that these pillars are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. The Budapest declaration led to a greater recognition of World Heritage as a tool for sustainable development. For example, the 2005 revised version of the Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the Convention states that ‘the protection and conservation of the natural and cultural heritage are a significant contribution to sustainable development’ (UNESCO, 2005: para. 6). This document further recognizes that World Heritage properties ‘may support a variety of ongoing and proposed uses that are ecologically and culturally sustainable’ (para. 119). This 2005 version of the Operational Guidelines further notes the importance of community participation and recognizes local community members as key stakeholders (para. 12). Yet, this declaration and the official documents did not provide any guidance on how to ensure that World Heritage properties contribute to sustainable development. This reflects the difficulty of moving from theory to practice and in finding new models of development (Matthews and Hammill, 2010: 1119). The next section details the issues with the concept of sustainable development and highlights some of the unsustainable trends that have plagued the conservation and management of World Heritage properties.

Continuing unsustainable development trends

This section discusses three continued unsustainable trends that have affected World Heritage sites: marginalization of local communities, unsustainable economic development, and unsustainable tourism. Local communities stand a...