Valuing World Heritage Cities

Tanja Vahtikari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317002581
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Biblioteconomía y ciencia de la información

With its celebrated World Heritage List, UNESCO steers the global heritage agenda through the definition and redefinition of what constitutes heritage and by offering the highest-level forum for heritage professionalism. While it is the national governments that nominate sites for inclusion in the World Heritage List, and the intergovernmental World Heritage Committee that makes the final decision on inclusion or non-inclusion, it is the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) for cultural heritage that determines whether the necessary level of 'outstanding universal value' is met.

Focusing on the discourses of ICOMOS and their transmission to the local context, this book is the first in-depth historical analysis of the construction of heritage value in the context of cities illustrated through a case study of Old Rauma in Finland. The book contributes to the understanding of the discursive and constructed nature of World Heritage values as opposed to intrinsic values, critically scrutinizes the role of ICOMOS in making valuations concerning urban heritage, and sheds light on the interactions and tensions of universal and local (urban) perspectives in the practice of heritage valuation.

Valuing World Heritage Cities is the first in-depth historical analysis of the construction of heritage value in the context of cities in the transnational discourses of heritage. This unique and timely contribution will be of interest to scholars and students working in Heritage Studies, Cultural Geography, Urban Studies and Tourism.

1Introduction

With its celebrated Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972)¹ UNESCO steers the global heritage agenda by defining and redefining what constitutes heritage and by offering a high-level forum for heritage professionalism. World Heritage sites, as understood by UNESCO, are places that have “outstanding universal value.” While it is the national governments that nominate sites for inclusion in the World Heritage List, and while it is the intergovernmental World Heritage Committee which makes the final decision on inclusion or non-inclusion, it is the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) for cultural heritage that examines whether the level of outstanding universal value is met. During this process of establishing value, a place that had previously been recognized as locally and nationally significant is given an additional layer of meaning. When the official statement of outstanding universal value has been decided on, it becomes critical as to how this abstract notion of value is interpreted and used locally, and questions regarding World Heritage become particularly critical at any time of dissonance. For instance, World Heritage has produced conflicts in connection with many cities, including the Finnish city of Rauma, where plans to build a large shopping center on the buffer zone of Old Rauma, a World Heritage site since 1991, became openly debated in the mid-2000s.

This book explores the time-bound and multi-layered construction of outstanding universal value in the context of World Heritage inscribed cities during the nearly forty years of implementation of the World Heritage Convention (1972–2011). By discussing what has been valued as/in a World Heritage city, and why, it provides the first in-depth historical analysis of the construction of urban heritage values in the transnational discourses on heritage. While not entirely distancing the national level from the analysis, with regard to the various levels of heritage, this book focuses on the international and the local. The global aspect is approached primarily through analyzing the articulation of outstanding universal value by ICOMOS in its statements written regarding the qualities of World Heritage nominated cities. The local is represented by Old Rauma.

This book has three main objectives, all offering fresh viewpoints concerning the scholarship. First, it examines the agency of ICOMOS in the World Heritage valuation procedures, something which has been largely left unproblematized in earlier studies. The statements compiled by ICOMOS act as intermediaries between nationalist discourses on cultural significance articulated in the World Heritage nominations by states and the final decisions made by the World Heritage Committee. As such, they play a central role in the World Heritage valuation and decision-making framework. The statements by ICOMOS provide a classic case for the assessment of cultural significance and the assigning of meaning to heritage. As I will argue throughout, this is also how they should be treated, rather than as value-free “evaluations.”

Second, the book contributes to the understanding of the constructed nature of World Heritage values as opposed to intrinsic values, and to the discussion first initiated by Laurajane Smith concerning the hegemony of an internationally working “authorized heritage discourse,” privileging “monumentality and grand scale, innate artefact/site significance tied to time depth, scientific/aesthetic expert judgement, social consensus and nation building.”² I will ask what kind of social and cultural messages have been conveyed by ICOMOS in its articulation of outstanding universal value. Despite the centrality of values to all heritage work, there exist very few studies that elaborate on the complex processes of World Heritage valuation, and none that has a similar focus to this book with respect to the valuation practices of ICOMOS and the transmission of the concept of outstanding universal value to the local context.

An important contribution to today’s scholarship is the recent work by Sophia Labadi, which offers theoretical perspectives on outstanding universal value, and elaborates on the question of how states, in their World Heritage nomination dossiers, have understood outstanding universal value in regard to postnational histories, cultural diversity, sustainable development and authenticity.³ Along with Labadi, I share an interest in investigating the practical articulation of value as part of the World Heritage–related processes, but we approach the theme from two different angles – she from the point of view of States Parties and UNESCO, and I from the perspective of ICOMOS and the local community – and in relation to different categories of heritage – she focuses on religious and industrial heritage, and I on urban heritage. Labadi identifies values related to the history and development of properties, their architectural and aesthetic descriptions, and references to men from the middle and upper classes as dominant in the framework of national nomination dossiers.⁴ This offers a good point of reflection from which to explore whether or not ICOMOS, according to its own definitions, has departed from the articulation of values by states, which often use the Convention as a nationalist instrument.⁵ Equally, it enables a discussion of cities in comparison to other categories of heritage, evoking the question of whether the “urban” has formed a distinctive category as part of the World Heritage valuation process.

Since the 1970s, the perception of the concept of cultural heritage has undergone significant widening in professional conservationist and academic circles, as well as among the broader public.⁶ This has involved the more inclusive perspective as to what is to be considered a legitimate part of cultural heritage, as well as to increased reflection regarding (a broadening spectrum of) values, and, in the field of urban heritage and within the integrated conservation approach, the treatment of continuity, re-utilization and adaptation to the contemporary life of historic urban areas as part of their protection.⁷ As will be discussed in Chapter 3, these widening conceptualizations of heritage in society have also had a direct impact on the implementation of the World Heritage Convention. This raises the question of how ICOMOS, when assigning outstanding universal value, has responded to this evolving understanding. Has ICOMOS been successful in promoting pluralization of values and narratives? These questions are particularly relevant, as one of the key objectives of the World Heritage organization today is being in the forefront of the development of standards and practices in urban conservation.⁸

Sometimes the statements that ICOMOS makes are negative, when it is unable to establish the outstanding universal value which the States Parties have proposed in their nomination dossiers. These negative statements, together with the rejections by the World Heritage Committee, represent a theme that has been rarely discussed either by scholars or by the official World Heritage organization.⁹ UNESCO and ICOMOS have been reluctant to reflect on the matter out of discretion towards those states whose nominations have been rejected. From the point of view of the World Heritage community an ideal situation would be for there to be no rejections whatsoever, but for non-suitable candidates to not even be nominated at all by the states. Along the lines of this consensual approach, one of the objectives of an action plan proposed by ICOMOS in 2005, to allow States Parties to contribute to the development of the World Heritage List, was “to optimize the success of World Heritage nominations.”¹⁰ In this book ICOMOS’ negative statements concerning outstanding universal value of cities will be discussed along with its positive ones. An interesting question is how the discursive line has been drawn between successful and unsuccessful World Heritage nominations and between outstanding universal value versus ‘other’ value.

The third objective of the book is to shed light on the interactions and tensions of global and local perspectives and processes in the practice of heritage valuation. Whilst there are several studies that examine the globalizing effect of the World Heritage Convention within a local context,¹¹ these discussions do not take the concept of outstanding universal value as their point of departure. I will ask how outstanding universal value gets articulated and practiced locally subject to diverse interests within the context of the individual World Heritage city, Old Rauma. I argue that the construction of outstanding universal value does not end at the point of inscription on the World Heritage List: it continues after the designation at the local level between different groups (local but also translocal), and with regard to locally bound and historically constructed concepts of place and heritage. In this part of the research I emphasize the nature of heritage as a process which builds local identities and which involves actions and debates. Therefore, it seems pertinent to ask how the earlier meanings and practices of a place have become re-defined in the context of the World Heritage site. I will also ask what kind of value the outstanding universal value has represented when used locally, especially at a time of heritage dissonance, and which elements of the international discourse have been transmitted to the local level, and how and why. To what extent has outstanding universal value become part of the local understanding of a place and heritage? When in conflict, which levels of heritage have taken priority?

Heritage: multi-scale social and cultural construction

All environments are equally historical. Historians may select some of them according to the very narrow limits of their discipline and call them “historic,” but the difference between “historical” and “historic” is an historian.¹²

The above distinction by Peter Howard between historical and historic environments summarizes many key aspects related to heritage,¹³ which forms the key conceptual and theoretical point of departure in this research: its selectivity, its ‘presentness’ and time- and context-bound nature, and the central role played by experts in its definition and valuation. No past artefact becomes heritage self-evidently: while some places get remembered, produced and managed as heritage, others get demolished, or remain – consciously or unconsciously – hidden and forgotten. As pointed out by Jennifer Jordan, “[f]ew places bear the traces of their past unaided.”¹⁴ Selection gives heritage its ultimate worth. In the burgeoning literature on heritage which has appeared over the past three decades there has been wide acceptance of the view that heritage is constructed through various cultural and social processes.¹⁵ This view is also shared in this research. Heritage is more than the material remains of the historical process, or the act of conservation¹⁶ of these remains. Heritage is not a thing but a meaning, a process and a relationship with the past. As such it has a transformative nature.¹⁷

The gaze of heritage is directed towards the past but is always interpreted from the current perspective, for present and future purposes, and is infused with the concerns and uses of the present. This is the case whether we identify heritage primarily as professional conservation, an inheritance and an intergenerational relationship in the processes of collective memory and identity, as national patrimony aiming to situate the nation in a significant historical sequence, or as an economic resource for the marketing of place and for tourism. Equally, heritage formation is, for instance, closely related to issues of accumulation of knowledge or present land ownership and land use.¹⁸ Each period and each culture defines heritage from its own perspective. At the beginning of the twenty-first century “heritage has become a quasi human right,”¹⁹ and “a strategy for the future,” treated hand in hand with strategies related to human rights, sustainable development, climate change, and tourism.²⁰

In light of its ‘presentness,’ it is not surprising that heritage often serves as a dissonant, fragmenting and exclusive resource rather than a unifying and inclusive one. It is contested along several axes: public/private, cultural/economic, temporal and spatial.²¹ The inherent dissonance of heritage also relates to its creation by interpretation, to its association with values and valuation, and to the fact that it is always valued, interpreted and ‘owned’ by someone. Consequently, there are power issues involved, and one further arena of contestation can be identified as existing between expert and non-expert values. Whilst wider community participation in the cultural heritage field is increasingly encouraged today, the heritage truths are still often produced under the control of heritage experts and expert institutions.²² Clearly, World Heritage cities represent no less contested resources than any other form of heritage. Quite the contrary, it may be argued that World Heritage is especially laden in this area.

Central to the idea of heritage is ‘value.’²³ No society preserves something it does not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Intrinsic value, uncontestable expertise: ICOMOS, UNESCO and outstanding universal value
• 3 Catching up with “the spirit of the moment”
• 4 World Heritage cities: which urban pasts? Whose urban histories?
• 5 World Heritage cities: what urban futures?
• 6 Outstanding universal value and the local narrative of place and heritage: Old Rauma
• 7 Conclusions
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index