The Concept of Pervading Authenticity: Contribution to Historic Urban Landscape approach

Abstract

The article focuses on the notion of Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) introduced by the UNESCO in 2005 and 2011 responding to the expanding understanding of cultural heritage and the urgent call to reconcile heritage preservation and contemporary urban developments and re-introduce heritage as a driver of urban and overall societies development. The analysis of the fundamental and recent literature on the theoretical grounding and the applications of HUL had revealed numerous benefits of this concept including the integration potential, acknowledgement of intangible dimensions of heritage and the values of contemporary architecture; however, several challenges and conflicts were identified as well: the challenge of the search of valuable historical patterns, the questions of what extent of change of historic environment is acceptable, and the underlying tension between the call to conserve the existing valuable historical fabric and the urge to employ heritage as the driver for high quality future development. The research suggests that the understanding of the notion of authenticity plays the fundamental role in the success of the HUL approach and, after reviewing the contemporary ideas on heritage authenticity, introduces permanent pervading authenticity, which would allow searching for valuable development patterns based on kairos time instead of chronos in the frame of the HUL concept.