Conservation Theory and Practice

• It is about the consequences on conservation theory and practice resulting from contemporary global trends.
• It includes the increasing involvement in the field by the general public.
• It includes the broader social, economic and political roles that cultural heritage are being called upon to play in contemporary society.
• States that alongside traditional heritage places, a new paradigm for heritage sites has emerged.
• The values no longer rest entirely on material culture, but on intangible concepts for which traditional conservation practice often is neither effective nor applicable.
• Reflects upon the role of the World Heritage Convention.
• Puts forward several innovative ideas and potential research topics to bridge cultural heritage management and sustainable development.
• Conservation of heritage sites fitting the characteristics of this new paradigm requires a re-examination and expansion of the field's theoretical foundations.
• Calls for the development of a new set of tools for their adequate protection.

Introduction

• The cultural heritage community has been repeatedly alarmed by an increasing number of interventions, projects and management approaches that challenge established conservation approach and that at times even appear to erode the integrity and authenticity of heritage places over the past ten years.
• The evolution of the role that heritage plays in society, the appropriation of heritage by communities and the growing acceptance of heritage as a public commodity.
• This also brings about deep changes in the way that the government and the public sector perceive and use their heritage resources.
• The signs that a new heritage paradigm has emerged include:
• official recognition as heritage of sites where there is little or no material fabric to preserve.
• requirement to manage social processes that are deemed integral to the significance of the place.
• characterization of heritage places as tools for poverty reduction by development agencies.
• growing acceptance of facsimile reconstructions as valid equivalents of originals long gone.
• pandemic of façadism that continues to gut thousands of individual buildings in historic cities in both Europe and the Americas.
• aggressive and excessive rejuvenation and adaptive use of historic buildings through excessive replacement-in-kind.
• extreme anastylosis of archeological ruins justified as interpretation to make archeological sites more attractive and intellectually accessible.
• burgeoning urbanization around cultural sites in Asia at the expense of traditional or vernacular neighborhoods.
• race to capture tourism without proper preparation to receive them or the ever-expanding tourism infrastructure that erodes their setting.
• High-rise buildings and aggressively discordant new constructions are becoming a regular part of the World Heritage Committee's agenda
• The Dresden Cultural Landscape was removed from the World Heritage List by the World Heritage Committee in 2009
• This occurred when construction of a bridge across the Elbe River was determined to have irreversibly undermined its outstanding universal value.
• The heritage conservation community is increasingly finding that the professional toolkit and the doctrinal foundation on which it has relied for decades relies for an ethical practice are insufficient to effectively deal with these new demands which are often perceived as threats.
• Well-intentioned efforts to understand the situation and to produce viable solutions have so far yielded disappointing results.
• Have been focussed on one or another narrow aspect of the problem, both in terms of professional approach and cultural context.
• The integral and holistic approach that is needed can only be provided by ICOMOS because it is the only heritage institution with a multi-disciplinary base that represents all regions and all cultures of the world.

Background

• The growing understanding of the nature of cultural heritage and of the role it plays in society is largely due to years of advocacy work by ICOMOS and the international cultural community.
• During the 19th and most of the 20th century, the heritage conservation community developed under the assumption that all values attributed to places rested on the material evidence of the place.
• Alois Riegl in his seminal work Der moderne Denkmalkultus explored how the acceptance of different sets of values inevitably leads to vastly different objectives and results in conservation in 1903.
• The Venice Charter established that only two types of values were accepted for heritage designation: historic and aesthetic in 1964.

New Heritage Community

• The adoption by ICOMOS in 1982 of the Florence Charter for the conservation of historic gardens: For the first time heritage conservation specialists were being guided not to preserve historic fabric, but to manage a process in a place whose character was defined by living organisms with a defined life and death cycles.
• Focus on the conservation of material fabric was once again modified by the ICOMOS Charter for the conservation of vernacular heritage in the mid-1990s.
• Recognized for the first time that authenticity is a relative concept that depends on its socio-historic context in the Nara Document(ICOMOS, 1994).
• The range of values attributed to heritage places has expanded to reflect its new social role as well as the many ways in which it is appreciated by stakeholding communities whose voices had not been given major consideration in the past.
• Advent and access of these previously unrecognized stakeholder communities to the cultural and political arenas was first recognized in ICOMOS by Australia ICOMOS in its Burra Charter (Australia ICOMOS, 1999).
• Official recognition of the heritage of groups has led has led not only to a numerical explosion in heritage inventories, it has also been accompanied by qualitative changes in the form of new categories of heritage places that reflect more universally the heterogeneous way in which places can link cultural groups to their ancestral past, to explanations of the present and to their understanding of the cosmos.
• The dispersal of values between material and intangible vessels increasingly comes at the expense of the historic fabric of the place.
• What this means is that the Sydney Opera House's interiors may be altered and changed in accordance with the conservation plan and the Utzon Principles (2002), without any alteration to its overall significance as long as those changes respond to the demands imposed by the constantly evolving technology of musical and performing arts presentations.

The Challenge

• The values attributed to a heritage place are not an immutable constant, but rather that they evolve in respect to both time and space.
• In the context of heritage, values are a vaguely shared set of intangible concepts that simply emerge from and exist in the ether of the communal public consciousness.
• The task has always been protecting and preserving the material vessels where values have been determined to reside.

New Paradigm

• The values of the emerging heritage paradigm most often rest on intangible vessels, for which the existing conservation toolkit is of little assistance.
• In San Francisco's Chinatown, the cultural value resides not on the building morphology or the urban characteristics of the place; they reside, rather, on the long-standing presence of a healthy Chinese ethnic community.
• The new paradigm also includes the places of memory, where associations with historic events or individuals took place but left no specific or distinctive physical marks, and where the value resides in keeping the memory of the person or event.
• Pioneer days of the 19th and 20th centuries when Valladier, Stern, Viollet-le Duc, Ruskin, Schinkel, Beltrami, Dehio and so many others were experimenting with a myriad of contradictory approaches to the conservation of material culture.
• It took 150 years to reach consensus on what constituted an ethical approach to material conservation through the adoption of the Venice Charter in 1964.