Abstract
In the context of the broadening understanding of urban heritage, including the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape and related United Nations agendas such as the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda, this article questions the relevance of limited-focused impact assessments as a tool for the holistic management of complex urban sites in the 21st century. The article identifies pitfalls in the use of such assessments, illustrating this principally with two cases in which retrospective assessments were undertaken post-inscription in an attempt to address conflicting interests: the visual impact study for Dresden Elbe Valley, inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2004 and delisted in 2009; and the three impact assessments for Liverpool Maritime Mercantile World Heritage Site, also inscribed in 2004, and placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger continuously since 2012. The article identifies critical missing elements that are inherent in discrete assessments, and provides indicators for practical tools with relevant applicability.
Highlights
Background andContext20th Century TimelineIn the early part of the last century, the canonical texts on cultural heritage focused on the preservation of monuments and sites, and were often embedded in the institutional frameworks of archaeology, historic buildings and memorials.Concurrently, the issue of urbanism came to the fore in the Athens Charter of 1933 (Le Corbusier 1955, 1973; Erder 1986), produced as a result of the Fourth International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM)
The all-embracing ‘nature’ with its planning and design approaches reached out to ‘culture’ with Urban Biospheres and Urban Protected Areas, without any reciprocity. This is changing with the greater acceptance of sustainable development5, the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (UNESCO 2011) and the 2016 UN-Habitat New Urban Agenda (United Nations 2016), and the evolution of a more comprehensive and proactive attitude to the role of cultural heritage
The studies show that only by putting urban heritage in the broader context will the benefits of culture be appreciated
Summary
In the early part of the last century, the canonical texts on cultural heritage focused on the preservation of monuments and sites, and were often embedded in the institutional frameworks of archaeology, historic buildings and memorials. The all-embracing ‘nature’ with its planning and design approaches reached out to ‘culture’ with Urban Biospheres and Urban Protected Areas, without any reciprocity This is changing with the greater acceptance of sustainable development, the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (UNESCO 2011) and the 2016 UN-Habitat New Urban Agenda (United Nations 2016), and the evolution of a more comprehensive and proactive attitude to the role of cultural heritage. The need to extend the heritage assessment beyond the single monument into the living city has highlighted the necessity of evaluating the dynamics of change, and the role of continuity in the generation of planning alternatives together with the management of sectorial decision-making processes (Ripp and Rodwell 2016) These evolving planning processes were previously accompanied by a lack of transparency that is being addressed through community empowerment, demanding a more up-front and proactive tool. The 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, UN-Habitat New Urban Agenda, United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) Resilient Cities, and the many European Union directives have yet to provide a coherent monitoring platform as they gather information on evolving quantitative indicators
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