Search results
World Heritage Convention The focus of the inquiry will now shift to World Heritage and to the temples of Abu Simbel and other sites. Focusing on World Heritage means that the inquiry’s questions about the past and its history, memory, and heritage will now be given precise coordinates: why, then, identify, examine, document, protect, preserve, mediate, and also develop World Heritage? Is it not a Sisyphean – an absurd or meaningless – task to try to protect and preserve World Heritage for the unlimited future? So, why even bother to define a special category
discussed in this concluding chapter in order to round up my inquiry, but they will be reviewed in the reverse of the order in which they were first presented. It was noted that World Heritage, with Abu Simbel as an example, does not at first sight fit in with a postmodern interpretation of the present, since World Heritage is a category for protection and preservation geared to creating structure, unity, wholeness, and universalism. World Heritage as a phenomenon is one of many expressions of a globalisation; but it includes national and local places, where diversity
Heritopia explores the multiple meanings of the past in the present, using the famous temples of Abu Simbel and other World Heritage sites as points of departure. It employs three perspectives in its attempt to understand and explain both past and present the truth of knowledge, the beauties of narrative, and ethical demands. Crisis theories are rejected as nostalgic expressions of contemporary social criticism. Modernity is viewed as a collection of contradictory narratives and reinterpreted as a combination of technological progress and recently evolved ideas. The book argues that while heritage is expanding, it is not to be found everywhere, and its expansion does not constitute a problem. It investigates the World Heritage Convention as an innovation, demonstrating that the definition of a World Heritage site succeeds in creating a tenable category of outstanding and exclusive heritage. The book introduces the term “Heritopia” in order to conceptualise the utopian expectations associated with World Heritage. Finally, it points to the possibilities of using the past creatively when meeting present-day and future challenges.
2005 film). Consequently, the campaign has generated both technical innovations and existential reflections. Abu Simbel and the campaign also play a prominent role in the story of the adoption in 1972 of the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage , or, in short, the World Heritage Convention (WHC 1972; cf. Lutyk 1987 : 6ff; Säve-Söderbergh 1987 : 220f; 1996: 217f; World Heritage Information Kit , 2008: 7f). Here, for the first time, traces of the past are recognised as a universal heritage and therefore a common
European cities are composed of landscapes of world heritage and, at the same time, are urban registers of colonial amnesia. 1 Thereby, I mean with Françoise Vergès that the agency of those who built them and those who keep them clean today ( 2019 : 3) is not part of the ‘official’ urban history. Neither are their identities or biographies commemorated in the urban space. The European city is thus constituted by two histories: one of them is known, commemorated and celebrated worldwide, while
complex flows of life they generate. Plenty of mangroves were being pulled up to make space for more sprawling mansions. This had now become a serious environmental and political problem. In 2009 UNESCO resolved to add the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve to its list of World Heritage sites ‘in danger’. ‘Management challenges and threats that impact on the integrity of the property’, read the World Heritage warning, included ‘overharvesting of marine resources, coastal development, tourism, industrial development and
2018 the ISA signed a contract with Poland that applies to an area of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that includes the ‘Lost City’ hydrothermal field. This is a rare and unusual ecosystem, discovered only in 2000, that is recognised as an Ecologically and Biologically Significant Area by the CBD and identified by UNESCO as a potential world heritage site. Scientists have warned that any mining in this area
natureculture continues to inspire the contemporary poets whose work is discussed below. The nomination document (Lake District National Park Partnership 2016 , hereafter referred to as Nomination Document ) for inscription of the English Lake District on the World Heritage list cites three overlapping reasons why this landscape should receive international recognition: the Lake District's continuing distinctive agro-pastoral traditions based on local breeds of sheep including the
This book analyses the use of the past and the production of heritage through architectural design in the developmental context of Iran. It is the first of its kind to utilize a multidisciplinary approach in probing the complex relationship between architecture, development, and heritage. It uses established theoretical concepts including notions of globalism, nostalgia, tradition, and authenticity to show that development is a major cause of historical transformations in places such as Iran and its effects must be seen in relation to global political and historical exchanges as well as local specificities. Iran is a pertinent example as it has endured radical cultural and political shifts in the past five decades. Scholars of heritage and architecture will find the cross-disciplinary aspects of the book useful. The premise of the book is that transposed into other contexts, development, as a globalizing project originating in the West, instigates renewed forms of historical consciousness and imaginations of the past. This is particularly evident in architecture where, through design processes, the past produces forms of architectural heritage. But such historic consciousness cannot be reduced to political ideology, while politics is always in the background. The book shows this through chapters focusing on theoretical context, international exchanges made in architectural congresses in the 1970s, housing as the vehicle for everyday heritage, and symbolic public architecture intended to reflect monumental time. The book is written in accessible language to benefit academic researchers and graduate students in the fields of heritage, architecture, and Iranian and Middle Eastern studies.
1980s to the turn of the millennium. In 1980, Castlefield was designated a Conservation Area and, in 1982, Britain’s first Urban Heritage Park. Liverpool Road Station itself, along with surrounding Victorian-era buildings, were eventually transformed into the Science and Industry Museum. In 2005, a World Heritage Site bid was drafted; but, by then, investment in heritage was on the wane as the city authorities saw high-rise development as a more valuable mode of regeneration. The result was the abandonment of the World Heritage Site bid in favour of the construction