Heritage, Cities and Sustainable Development

Preface

Francesco Bandarin

Director, World Heritage Center of UNESCO (2000–2010) and Assistant Director-General of UNESCO for Culture (2010–2018)

In November 2011, the General Conference of UNESCO adopted a new normative text, the Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape. This is the first UNESCO Recommendation on Historic Cities after the 1976 Nairobi Recommendation concerning the Safeguarding of Historic and Traditional Settlements and their Role in Contemporary Life. Eight years after the adoption of the new Recommendation, it is time to look at the first results of its implementation.

This book is a contribution to the analysis and reflection that is going on today at UNESCO and in several research and urban heritage management circles. Urban conservation, a practice defined at the end of the nineteenth century and included in the practice of urban planning in the mid-twentieth century, today plays an important role in the world of cultural heritage. Indeed, if we limit our attention to the World Heritage List, urban heritage now appears as one of the most important, if not the most important, of all heritage categories. Urban conservation gained an important dimension in the second half of the twentieth century, first in Europe, then in many other regional contexts, when the concept was gradually introduced into legislation and urban planning practices.

Ultimately, we can say that today’s historic cities are better preserved, protected, managed in national and local contexts than in the past, but have lost many of their traditional functions. No doubt, the strength of the markets has largely overcome the original intentions of planners ←9 | 10→and politicians and today the historic cities are under intense pressure of transformation, because of new phenomena, such as gentrification or tourist use.

Without a doubt, the modern practices on which urban conservation is based suffer from their derivation from the principles of monument ←10 | 11→conservation. In the 1964 Venice Charter, the founding document of modern conservation, the focus is almost exclusively on the monument and its restoration. In fact, it was this limitation that prompted ICOMOS to formulate a specific complementary charter for urban conservation in 1987, the Washington Charter, a document that substantially enriches the international toolbox in this area.

Chapter 1

Heritage, Cities and Sustainable Development. Challenges and Opportunities between Theory and Practice

Cécile Doustaly

Agora, University of Cergy-Pontoise

“Heritage is a key resource to make cities and human settlements

more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.”

(UNESCO, Historic Urban Landscape Recommendation, 2011)

In the last decades, urban development and heritage paradigms have shifted greatly. Worldwide destructions of heritage have brought to light its social and economic role for societies. This volume analyses how the latter have intersected, leading to a growing call for sustainability. This broad approach understands heritage policies, conservation and management as local, national and global issues which reflect the strain between idealism and pragmatism, theory and practice.

Due to faster urbanisation and population growth, human settlements have faced an array of swift changes, with half of the world population now living in urban areas (as opposed to 15 % in 1900). Since the 1980s, cities have become global players ever increasing in size, flux, power and complexity. New forms of capitalism mean a multiplicity of public, private and voluntary actors are involved in this new model of multileveled polycentric governance based on transnational networks. ←13 | 14→As new strategic platforms competing for change, cities supported the rebirth of urban centres and the development of culture and tourism, central to their identities, attractivity and development. However, they have faced increasing economic, social and spatial inequalities. In the Western world, this was exacerbated by reduced public budgets following the 2008 crisis. In emerging countries, booming cities have led to uneven economic growth and hardships, posing major threats to urban conservation, such as slums, lack of infrastructure, environmental issues. Holistic and progressive forms of governance are explored worldwide to prioritise “human and planetary flourishing”¹.

In the same period, the heritage field has gone through a democratisation process in terms of values, assets, producers and publics, allowing more cultures and communities to gain recognition. Through this process, cultural heritage, traditionally equated with national identity, has also become a strong vessel for territorial and global imaginaries. Growing interest and concern have been raised for urban heritage, approached broadly as “urbanity”, favouring “the values of the city, [more] than the city itself”². The acceleration of the new global urban era has been associated with theoretical and practical challenges and more sustainable models of urban heritage production and consumption are being called for East and West.

The concept of sustainable development has emerged as the main foundation for current international cooperation frameworks. The reference text defines it as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” and resting on three pillars: environmental protection, economic growth and social equity. While natural heritage was associated to environmental sustainability, cultural heritage and landscapes were tied to social development and the preservation of community values. It is only recently that heritage has been approached in policy circles as a non-renewable resource deserving protection, UNESCO playing a major part in culture being integrated in sustainability frameworks³.

Shifting attitudes to the link between heritage and development can be identified. Initially, development was judged a threat to heritage as stated emphatically in UNESCO’s World Heritage (WH) convention: “the cultural heritage and the 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”. The Convention only quoted tourism and development once, to warn against the dangers of “large-scale public or private projects or rapid urban or tourist development projects” and did not refer to their potential social and economic benefits. Conversely, especially in cities, the heritage conservation called for by UNESCO was seen as a hindrance to economic, social and urban development⁴. In a second phase, urban heritage came to be considered as a resource for socio-economic development, allowing for poverty alleviation in many parts of the world. Only the negative impacts of development were treated as a threat, notably for properties included in the WH list whose prestige, visitors and revenues increased rapidly. Chapters in this volume illustrate how such developments were often carried out with insufficient consideration for long term impacts.

Can heritage and development be reconciled through a new sustainable paradigm? What are the avenues to provide the conditions for local inhabitants to preserve their traditional environments while retaining cities open to visitors and economic development? What methodologies can encourage commonality between conflicting values, discourses and practices?

To answer these questions, this volume provides international comparisons of urban heritage policies that often considered heritage both as a threat and a resource for development, illustrating why cultural components are increasingly considered a pre-requisite to devise sustainable urban planning and policies. If global issues in the field and converging practices can be identified, specific national and local challenges also need to be studied and addressed. The contextualized case studies provide a complement to existing literature by focusing on ←15 | 16→long-term evolutions in relation to the international framework. They bring together inputs from sociology, anthropology, political, urban and area studies, cultural policy, planning and architecture. In taking a holistic approach encompassing both theory and application across a variety of disciplines, they consider where methodological pitfalls lay and how sustainable policies might be successfully implemented in contemporary cities and settlements around the globe: from China, to Cuba, Chile, Ecuador, France, the United Kingdom and Peru. Case studies intentionally tackle both WH inhabited historic towns (included in the WH list from 1978 to 2003), buffer zones and other types of urban landscapes such as villages and unlisted sites (see table 2 below).