The Historic Urban Landscape and the Geography of Urban Heritage

by

Dennis Rodwell

The following is the pre-publication text of:

Author Dennis Rodwell

Title The Historic Urban Landscape and the Geography of Urban Heritage

Submitted 26 July 2018

Publication The Historic Environment: Policy and Practice

Publisher Taylor and Francis

Language English

Published December 2018

Bibliographical details

The final published version of this text may be found as follows:

Link to the published article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17567505.2018.1517140

To cite the published article: Dennis Rodwell (2018) The Historic Urban Landscape and the
Geography of Urban Heritage, The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice, 9:3-4, 180-206

Published online: 4 October 2018

 The Historic Urban Landscape and the Geography of Urban Heritage
Dennis Rodwell

Abstract
This article reflects on the extent to which the commitment set out under Article 5 of the
1972 UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural
Heritage ‘to adopt a general policy which aims to give the cultural and natural heritage a
function in the life of the community and to integrate the protection of that heritage into
comprehensive planning programmes’, is reflected in the ambition and interpretation of the
2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape. It questions the degree
to which that Recommendation’s evolution and formulation addresses the longstanding
failure to interpret and position the broad spectrum of values of urban heritage within the
mainstream of urban planning policy and practice. In the context of today’s over-arching
global priorities, this article concludes by advocating greater engagement with United
Nations agendas, including the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

Key words
Cultural heritage, historic urban landscape, urban geography, urban ecosystem, harmonious
co-existence, authorised heritage discourse, dynamic continuity, sustainable development.

Introduction
The earlier co-authored pair of articles in this journal, the ‘The Geography of Urban
Heritage’ and ‘The Governance of Urban Heritage’,1 examined the disconnection between a
heritage community whose comfort zone has been circumscribed by a focus on selected
components of the architectural heritage – be they individual monuments and buildings or
designated urban areas – and the mainstream of urban planning policy and practice upon
which their survival and successful integration into contemporary life depends. They
especially commended an expansion in the perception of the values that the heritage
community ascribes to urban heritage coupled with the nurturing of relationships with the
broad discipline of geography, comprehending human and urban geography, the elemental
domains of urban and regional planning.2

This author has researched, published and practised in the broad field of urban
heritage since the early 1970s: opening with close involvement in the setting up of the
Edinburgh New Town Conservation Committee concurrently with a series of comparative
study tours preparatory to publications celebrating European Architectural Heritage Year

1
Ripp, M. and Rodwell, D. ‘The Geography of Urban Heritage’, in The Historic Environment: Policy &
Practice, 2015, 6(3), 240-276. Ripp, M. and Rodwell, D. ‘The Governance of Urban Heritage’, in The Historic
Environment: Policy & Practice, 2016, 7(1), 81-108.
2
Ripp, M. and Rodwell, D. ‘The Geography of Urban Heritage’, in The Historic Environment: Policy &
Practice, 2015, 6(3), 241.
1975;3 subsequently with a succession of assignments for the UNESCO World Heritage
Centre and Division of Cultural Heritage, 1998 onwards, foreshadowing the historic urban
landscape initiative,4 and prior to the drafting of the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation.5
Assignments directed at supporting the implementation of holistic approaches in the
management of historic cities have included in Sibiu, Romania (2001–08; also the subject of
an earlier article in this journal),6 and Asmara, Eritrea (2004 onwards);7 and posts within
municipal government have challenged the author with the realities of established sectoral
management practices.8 This article is written primarily from the perspective of a practitioner
in the field.

Issuing from this, the present article aims to:

• Position the UNESCO historic urban landscape initiative within a timeline of its
antecedents;
• Interrogate limitations in the initiative’s provenance, drivers and terminologies in the
context of exemplars in practice; and
• Stimulate reflection on the approach’s ability to contribute effectively as an
integrative support for sustainable urban management in this twenty-first century.

Timeline of antecedents to the Historic Urban Landscape approach

Early twentieth century antecedents

Through the twentieth century, a series of initiatives unfolded aimed at articulating a cross-
disciplinary approach to the management of historic cities in harmony with their natural
environments. Against the background of strong counter-tendencies, foremost the claims of
the Modern Movement in architecture and town planning, these initiatives opened well.

In Scotland, France and India, the polymath Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) pioneered
an evolutionary and sociological approach to the study and practice of town planning,9

3
Rodwell, D., ‘Conservation legislation: A European survey’, in European Heritage (ed. Sir James Richards),
Phoebus Publishing Company, 1975 (issue five). Rodwell, D. ‘Conservation legislation’, in Sherban
Cantacuzino (ed.), Architectural Conservation in Europe. London: Architectural Press, 1975.
4
Rodwell, D., ‘The Achievement of Exemplary Practice in the Protection of our Built Heritage: The Need for a
Holistic Conservation- and Sustainability-Orientated Vision and Framework’ in: UNESCO, Management of
Private Property in the Historic City-Centres of the European Cities-in-Transition, proceedings of UNESCO
international seminar, Bucharest, April 2001. UNESCO: Paris, 2002, 127–53.
5
Rodwell, D. and van Oers, R., ‘Summary Report of the Regional Conference of Countries of Eastern and
Central Europe on “Management and Preservation of Historic Centers of Cities inscribed on the World Heritage
List”’. UNESCO: Saint Petersburg, 2007. Rodwell, D., ‘Paris Planning Meeting 2008 – Summary Report:
UNESCO Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Historic Urban Landscapes’. UNESCO: Paris, 2008.
Rodwell, D. ‘Historic Urban Landscapes: Concept and Management’, in van Oers, R, and Haraguchi, S. (eds),
Managing Historic Cities (World Heritage Papers 27), 99–104. UNESCO: Paris, 2010. UNESCO.
Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape. UNESCO: Paris, 2011. Accessed 16 June 2018.
https://whc.unesco.org/uploads/activities/documents/activity-638-98.pdf
6
Rodwell, D. ‘Comparative approaches to urban conservation in Central and Eastern Europe: Zamość, Poland,
and Sibiu, Romania’, in The Historic Environment: Policy and Practice, 2010, 1(2), 116–142 (131).
7
Rodwell, D. ‘Over-arching Urban Planning and Building Conservation Guidelines for the Historic Perimeter
of Asmara, Eritrea’, Mission Report for the Cultural Assets Rehabilitation Project. Asmara: Cultural Assets
Rehabilitation Project, 2004 (unpublished). Rodwell, D. ‘Asmara: Conservation and Development in a Historic
City’, in Journal of Architectural Conservation, 2004, 10(3), 41–58.
8
Ripp and Rodwell, “The Governance of Urban Heritage”, 83–85.
9
Rodwell, D. Conservation and Sustainability in Historic Cities, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007, 30–33.
defined the city as an urban ecosystem, and extolled civic survey followed by conservative
surgery: ‘diagnosis before treatment’.10 Civic survey embraced (as a minimum) the
distinctive geology, geography, climate, social and cultural development, economic life, and
existing manmade and natural environment of a city. Conservative surgery signified inter alia
the retention of all structures and neighbourhoods capable of rehabilitation, complementing
them with the careful insertion of new structures and functions (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Lawnmarket, Old Town, Edinburgh. Dating from the seventeenth century,
the renovation and partial re-construction of these adjoining tenements in the 1890s
formed part of Sir Patrick Geddes’ evolutionary and sociological approach to the
regeneration of the Old Town through conservative surgery. © Dennis Rodwell

Propounding the importance of cultural identity and diversity, Geddes expressed the
inter-disciplinary nature of town planning beyond the design-led professions, relating
architecture to historical context of place, people and cultural traditions, and spatial form to
social processes. ‘We now start with the idea that cities are fundamentally to be preserved
and lived in; and not freely destroyed, to be driven through, and speculated upon.’11
Recognising that the well-being of the human species depends on achieving a new post-
industrial equilibrium between people and their natural environment, Geddes attracted a

10
Geddes, P. Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics,
with an introduction by Percy Johnson-Marshall. London: Ernest Benn, 1968, 244 (first published, London:
Williams and Norgate, 1915). Tyrwhitt, J. (ed.). Patrick Geddes in India. London: Lund Humphreys, 1947.
Meller, H., Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner. London: Routledge, 1990. Haworth, R.
‘Patrick Geddes’s Concept of Conservative Surgery’ in Architectural Heritage XI, 2000, 37–42.
11
Geddes, writing in 1919. Quoted in: Meller, H. Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner,
London: Routledge, 1990, 263.
devoted group of disciples during his life-time and continues to be evoked as an inspiration.12
Numerous of his ideas remain at least as relevant today as when he propounded them a
century ago.

In Italy, the architect-planner Gustavo Giovannoni (1873–1947), credited with

coining the term urban heritage, and the concept of living conservation in the sense of
functioning, insisted on the need to combine the attributes of scientist, artist and humanist.13
His prolific published output focused on the inter-relationship between the modern and the
historic city on all levels, arguing for the need to understand and work with the respective,
complementary qualities and opportunities of each. Concluding with the principle of mutually
supportive and harmonious co-existence, Giovannoni foresaw the historic area of a city as a
vibrant, closely interlinked component of its new, enlarged form, performing an essential and
distinctive socio-economic role in the daily life of its citizens (Figure 2).14 Importantly in the
architectural and urban conservation interest, he made no distinction between the recognised
monuments and the modest vernacular architecture that inter-linked them, perceiving the two
as inseparable parts of a whole, neither being complete without the other, whether physically
or functionally.

Figure 2 Urbino, Italy. Gustavo Giovannoni’s ideas for living conservation and the
mutually supportive and harmonious co-existence of the old and new parts of cities
were notably taken up in Urbino in the decades following the Second World War. ©
Dennis Rodwell

Giovannoni was a seminal figure in determining the scientific basis for the restoration
of historic buildings, the adaptation of historic cities and areas, and the course of urban
planning in Italy in the years between and following the First and Second World Wars. His
ideas resonated across much of southern and central Europe.

12
Johnson, J. and Rosenburg, L., Renewing Old Edinburgh: The enduring legacy of Patrick Geddes.
Edinburgh: Argyll Publishing, 2010.
13
Rodwell, D. Conservation and Sustainability in Historic Cities, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007, 33–36.
14
Giovannoni, G. L’urbanisme face aux villes anciennes, with an introduction by Françoise Choay, Paris: Seuil,
1998 (first published as Vecchie città ed edilizia nuova, Rome: UTET Libreria, 1931). Giovannoni first set out
the principal elements of his thesis in a set of papers that were published in 1913 under the title Vecchie città ed
edilizia nuova: il quartiere del Rinascimento in Roma.
 Although it is not clear what direct or indirect connection existed between Giovannoni
and Geddes, they shared a similar evolutionary approach to cities allied to harmonious co-
existence – more apposite and multi-faceted concepts than layering (see below). Together,
they constitute an important benchmark for today’s historic urban landscape approach.

Later twentieth century preamble

In 1972, the parallel UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural
and Natural Heritage (the 1972 Convention)15 and Recommendation Concerning the
Protection, at National Level, of the Cultural and Natural Heritage (the 1972
Recommendation),16 were the first international documents to symbolise the inter-
dependence of cultural and natural heritage. Article 5 of the 1972 Convention, which is not
specific to world heritage and harmonises with the 1972 Recommendation, exhorts state
parties:

To ensure that effective and active measures are taken for the protection, conservation and
presentation of the cultural and natural heritage situated on its territory […] and […] to adopt
a general policy which aims to give the cultural and natural heritage a function in the life of
the community and to integrate the protection of that heritage into comprehensive planning
programmes’.17

In 1975, the Council of Europe’s European Charter of the Architectural Heritage,18

complemented by the Declaration of Amsterdam,19 betokened a progression from the focus
on monuments and sites in the 1931 Athens and 1964 Venice Charters.20 Introducing the
concept of integrated conservation and promoting adaptation to contemporary life together
with social continuity, the 1975 European Charter recognised that the future of the
architectural component of Europe’s cultural heritage depended on the weight attached to it
within the framework of urban and regional planning.

The policy emphasis at the time and subsequently, however, on the selective
designation and protection of heritage assets coupled with ignorance of the multiple values
attributed by citizens to the spectrum of urban heritage beyond delimited cultural ones,
undermined the achievement of integrated conservation in the urban context.21 Socio-cultural
and economic continuity in communities does not rhyme with the selective protection and
survival of material fabric.

15
UNESCO, Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, UNESCO,
Paris, 1972. Accessed 16 June 2018. http://whc.unesco.org/archive/convention-en.pdf
16
UNESCO, Recommendation Concerning the Protection, at National Level, of the Cultural and Natural
Heritage, UNESCO, Paris, 1972. Accessed 16 June 2018. http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-
URL_ID=13087&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
17
UNESCO. Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (also known
as the World Heritage Convention), Paris: UNESCO, 1972, Articles 5 and 5(a).
18
Council of Europe. European Charter of the Architectural Heritage. Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1975.
Accessed 16 June 2018. http://www.icomos.org/en/charters-and-texts/179-articles-en-
francais/ressources/charters-and-standards/170-european-charter-of-the-architectural-heritage.
19
Council of Europe. Declaration of Amsterdam. Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1975. Accessed 16 June 2018.
http://www.icomos.org/en/charters-and-texts/179-articles-en-francais/ressources/charters-and-standards/169-
the-declaration-of-amsterdam
20
The Athens Charter for the Restoration of Historic Monuments (the Athens Charter), adopted at the First
International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments, Athens, 1931. International
Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites (the Venice Charter), adopted at the
Second International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments, Venice, 1964.
21
Ripp, M and Rodwell, D. ‘The Geography of Urban Heritage’, in The Historic Environment: Policy &
Practice, 2015, 6(3), 240-276.
 The contradictions were explicit in Sherban Cantacuzino’s introduction to
Architectural Conservation in Europe,22 an influential publication of the self-same 1975
European Architectural Heritage Year. Firstly, in quoting Sir Peter Shepheard, architect and
landscape architect: ‘The first principle of conservation is to keep the good parts of cities and
rebuild the bad parts’.23 Secondly, selectively quoting Roy Worskett, appointed Bath city
architect and chief planning officer in the aftermath of The Sack of Bath,24 in affirming the
belief ‘that “the starting point in a historic town must be its historic quality and visual
character”, and not secondary [author’s italics] social, economic or even ecological
arguments’ (Figure 3).25

Figure 3 Bath, England. View northwards down the designed eighteenth century
landscape of Prior Park towards the city centre and Lansdown Hill. The emphasis on
the visual character of historic cities, expressed in the introduction to the 1975
publication Architectural Conservation in Europe, echoed the static, historicist
approach to the beauty and character of landscapes and sites in the 1962 UNESCO
Recommendation (see below). © Dennis Rodwell

Such sentiments were typical of their time and remain embedded in the predominantly
Western-derived doctrinal texts of immovable heritage that inform the generality of policy
and practice today, whether of individual buildings and monuments or entire urban areas. The
truism – central to the works and teachings of both Patrick Geddes and Gustavo Giovannoni
– that ‘a historic city is at one and the same time a physical place and a human space; its
authenticity is a compound of manmade and associated natural elements coupled with a
complex mix of human activities’,26 has shoots that are emerging in the heritage community,
but is a legacy that has been hard to shake off (Figure 4).27

22
Cantacuzino, Sherban (ed.). Architectural Conservation in Europe. London: Architectural Press, 1975.
23
Cantacuzino, Sherban (ed.). Architectural Conservation in Europe. London: Architectural Press, 1975, 3.
24
Fergusson, A. The Sack of Bath. Salisbury: Compton Russell, 1973.
25
Cantacuzino, 1975, 4.
26
Rodwell, D. 'The Social Aspect of Urban Revitalisation’, in Biuletyn Informacyjny, 2012, 19(4), 27.
27
Burman, P. and Rodwell, D. ‘The Contribution of the United Kingdom to European Architectural Heritage
Year 1975’, in Falser, M. and Lipp, W (eds.) A Future for Our Past: The 40th anniversary of European
Architectural Heritage Year (1975–2015). Berlin: Hendrik Basler, 2015, 262–275.
 Figure 4 Market day in the Münsterplatz, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. The
quotation in this sentence was directed at challenging the historicist and
monumentalist approach to the conservation of historic cities, including that open air
markets in the public realm compromise their architectural character.28 © Dennis
Rodwell

The progressive narrowing of perceptions, which may be attributed to the post-

Enlightenment disciplinary fragmentation that accelerated through the twentieth century,
highlights a fundamental set of disconnections and discordances. The human factor is the key
omission. A city without citizens is mere scenery. Urban heritage cannot be disassociated
from urban planning any more than from human society and culture, economic and ecological
considerations.

It is symptomatic that the literature and practice of urban geography barely recognise
urban heritage except as raw material and a marketing tool for tourism, development and
regeneration, and gentrification.29 Reference is embraced to memory, but heritage has no
core, contemporary societal role.30 For as long as the heritage community continues to regard
its remit as highly selective, the urban geographer will assume that urban heritage’s relevance
is limited; as will politicians, policy makers and society in general.

The Historic Urban Landscape initiative

Twenty-first century progression

In the face of a challenge that cannot be over-stated, recent international reflections have
sought to redress the legacy of latter-day discordances and omissions. The Integrated
Territorial Urban Conservation (ITUC) programme of the International Centre for the Study
of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), established in 1994,

28
The specific prompt was the case of Zamość, Poland. See: Rodwell, D. ‘Comparative approaches to urban
conservation in Central and Eastern Europe: Zamość, Poland, and Sibiu, Romania’, in The Historic
Environment: Policy and Practice, 2010, 1(2), 116–142 (131).
29
Pacione, M. Urban Geography: A Global Perspective. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009 (3rd edn).
30
Hall, T, and Barrett, H. Urban Geography. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012 (4th edition).
kick-started the process.31 To a limited extent (ITUC’s ambition was broader; this is implicit
their respective titles), it served to presage the 2005 UNESCO Vienna Memorandum “World
Heritage and Contemporary Architecture – Managing the Historic Urban Landscape” (the
2005 Memorandum).32 To a greater extent, it anticipated the 2011 UNESCO
Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (the 2011 Recommendation),33 and the
contemporaneous (but largely dissociated) International Council on Monuments and Sites
(ICOMOS) Valletta Principles for the Safeguarding and Management of Historic Cities,
Towns and Urban Areas.34

Notwithstanding its roots in what Laurajane Smith has termed the authorised heritage
discourse – an elitist discourse that ‘constitutes the idea of heritage in such a way as to
exclude certain actors and interests from actively engaging with heritage’, framing audiences
as passive recipients and creating significant barriers to ‘the social and cultural roles that it
may play’35 – the 2011 Recommendation reflects a qualified paradigm ‘shift from an
emphasis on architectural monuments primarily towards a broader recognition of the
importance of the social, cultural and economic processes in the conservation of urban
values’.36 Coordination, however, between UNESCO and its two advisory bodies for cultural
heritage (ICCROM and ICOMOS) has not always been manifest;37 and between the cultural
heritage bodies and the advisory body for natural heritage, the International Union for
Conservation of Nature (IUCN), hitherto largely wishful thinking and absent in practice.38

Expectation

The expectation raised by the historic urban landscape approach is that it will signal ‘an
innovative way to preserve heritage and manage historic cities’.39 This binary objective
cannot be realised from a starting point of the authorised heritage discourse. To this author, it
implies a major paradigm shift, not a qualified one; namely that the management of historic
cities today will embrace the compendium of values that citizens attribute to urban heritage,
position them in the mainstream of urban planning policy and practice, and frame them in the
context of overarching twenty-first century environmental and societal agendas (Table 1).40
Cultural heritage does not sit in a ring-fenced box. It is a component of the wider human and
natural environment, a reality that it is implicit in the early twentieth century antecedents
discussed above.

31
Jokilehto, J. ‘Integrated Territorial and Urban Conservation, ITUC, Programme: Phase I (1994–1998)
Summary Report’, Rome: ICCROM, 1999.
32
UNESCO, Vienna Memorandum on World Heritage and Contemporary Architecture – Managing the
Historic Urban Landscape, Paris: UNESCO, 2005.
33
UNESCO, Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, Paris: UNESCO, 2011.
34
ICOMOS, Valletta Principles for the Safeguarding and Management of Historic Cities, Towns and Urban
Areas, Paris: ICOMOS, 2011.
35
Smith, L. Uses of Heritage. London/New York: Routledge, 2006, p.44.
36
UNESCO, Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, Paris: UNESCO, 2011, para 4 (Introduction)
37
Bandarin, F. and van Oers, R. The Historic Urban Landscape: Managing Heritage in an Urban Century,
Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. This book does not, for example, acknowledge the ICCROM ITUC
initiative (initially co-ordinated by Jukka Jokilehto; later by Herb Stovel); and the 2011 ICOMOS Valletta
Principles were openly drafted in competition with the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation.
38
Labadi, S. UNESCO, Cultural Heritage, and Outstanding Universal Value: Value-based Analyses of the
World Heritage and Intangible Cultural Heritage Conventions. Lanham (Maryland) and Plymouth (UK):
AltaMira Press, 2013. Rodwell, D. ‘Discordances in the Application of the 1972 World Heritage Convention: Is
it Fit for Purpose in the 21st Century?’ in The Historic Environment: Policy and Practice, 2014, 5(3), 300–303.
39
UNESCO. 2011. Records of the General Conference, 36th session Paris, 25 October – 10 November 2011.
Volume 1: Resolutions. Paris: UNESCO, 50–55 (50). Available at:
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002150/215084e.pdf [Accessed 18 November 2017].
40
Ripp and Rodwell, 2015; Ripp and Rodwell, 2016.
___________________________________________________________________________

o Community – all social values and relationships, especially everyday ones by inhabitants;
tools include social and cognitive mapping at all levels.41
o Resource – in multiple senses, including material and environmental capital/embodied
energy as well as financial.
o Usefulness – including ongoing, adaptability, creative re-use; together with resource,
related to the ‘3Rs’ of sustainability – reduce, reuse and re-cycle.
o Cultural – broadly defined; especially as recognised and appreciated by inhabitant
communities through meaning and processes of engagement rather than just ‘things’.42
___________________________________________________________________________
Table 1 Encapsulation of the multiple values attributed to urban heritage by citizens,
reinforced by twenty-first century agendas of sustainability and climate change. © Dennis
Rodwell

Paradoxically, and with considerable foresight, ingredients for this were anticipated
by the Countess of Dartmouth in her foreword to the self-same 1975 publication
Architectural Conservation in Europe cited above. Prompted by the 1973 oil crisis, she
predicted

… the end of the throw-away society. Recycling is the fashionable word. […] This sudden
turnabout in a carefree world of easy destruction is helpful to conservation. No longer is it just
an emotional issue to want to save old buildings. It is both economical and essential.43

This envisioned that architectural conservation would become subsumed as a core

objective within what would later be popularised as sustainable development, with mutation
of the concept of heritage management into resource management. Further, that heritage and
its conservation would cease to be a privileged province. This anticipated the mainstreaming
of cultural (and natural) heritage as a core constituent of urban and territorial planning, not
distinguished as a discrete and optional ‘add-on’ that can be dispensed with at any time for
reasons of financial or political will or expediency.

This requires a transformation in attitudes within the heritage sector to embrace

manifold other disciplines and interests, including sociologists, environmentalists,
economists, housing specialists, property owners and developers, and decision-makers
generally.44 As a pre-requisite for this, the heritage sector needs to synchronise the language
it employs with cross-sectoral partners, and to focus on the positive aspects of urban heritage:
opportunities and benefits; not, as has too often been portrayed, constraints and prejudice.

To a degree, the text of the 2011 Recommendation and its subsequent interpretation
have sought to respond to this challenge. Two vital questions, however, arise.

First, what advance does the historic urban landscape approach offer over Geddes
and Giovannoni’s shared evolutionary and sociological approach to a city in its entirety as an
urban ecosystem?

41
Smith, J. ‘Marrying the old with the new in historic urban landscapes’, in van Oers, R. & Haraguchi, S. (eds).
Managing Historic Cities (World Heritage Papers 27), Paris: UNESCO, 2010, 95–52.
42
Smith, L. 2006.
43
Cantacuzino, 1975, 1–2.
44
Ripp and Rodwell, 2015; Ripp and Rodwell, 2016.
 Second, to what extent does the language that the approach employs communicate
effectively outside a small and predominantly academic circle and is historic urban
landscape the appropriate label for this?

Provenance

At the turn of the new millennium, an escalating number of major new development
proposals came to the attention of the World Heritage Committee that were perceived as
sufficiently conflictual to threaten the status of cities inscribed on the UNESCO World
Heritage List. The high-rise Wein-Mitte development in Vienna was the specific prompt for
the 2005 Memorandum, hence the focus in its title on contemporary architecture and its
coincidence with the launch of the historic urban landscape initiative.45

This UNESCO provenance has afforded important advantages, especially in the

profile that it has provided. At the same time, the inter-governmental essence of UNESCO
together with its procedural mores imposes constraints. The Preamble to the 2011
Recommendation recalls the ‘corpus of UNESCO [and ICOMOS] standard-setting
documents, including conventions, recommendations and charters … on the subject of the
conservation of historic areas’, and desires ‘to supplement and extend the application of the
standards and principles laid down in existing international instruments’46 – a significant
referential limitation.

Underscoring the initiative is the conception that it is sufficiently innovative to herald

a sea change in the approach to managing historic cities. Notwithstanding, the drafting of the
2011 UNESCO Recommendation was not accompanied by any analysis or audit of existing
policies and practices beyond advancing the aspirations articulated in homologous texts.47

This, an inevitability given its provenance,48 has substantially qualified its usefulness.
Not least in the European context, where the Recommendation is not seen as adding value to
established methodologies; historical examples of best practice have not been identified; and,
in critical cases, not understood and reinforced.

At the scale of Paris – host-city to the UNESCO Headquarters and World Heritage
Centre – strategic planning at the city-region level furnishes an instance of this (Figures 5 and
6). Cited in chapter 10 of UNESCO World Heritage Papers 27 as an exemplar of polycentric
(compared to monocentric) urban expansion and development49 – the epitome of Gustavo
Giovannoni’s principle of harmonious co-existence – this is questioned in the Introduction to
the same publication;50 it does not accord with layering, the term favoured term in the 2011
Recommendation. Furthermore, Geddes and Giovannoni, pioneer theoreticians and
practitioners of holism, receive only passing and incomplete mentions in the 2012 book, The

45
Bandarin, F. ‘Foreword’, in van Oers, R, and Haraguchi, S. (eds), Managing Historic Cities (World Heritage
Papers 27), 3.
46
UNESCO 2011, Preamble.
47
van Oers, R. ‘Managing cities and the historic urban landscape initiative – an introduction’, in van Oers, R. &
Haraguchi, S. (eds). Managing Historic Cities (World Heritage Papers 27), Paris: UNESCO, 2010, 7–18.
48
This author was involved at the inception of World Heritage Papers 27, and unsuccessfully promoted the
need and benefit of such an audit. Inter-governmental organisations such as UNESCO are reticent in citing good
practices found in one state party that risk offending another.
49
Rodwell, D. ‘Historic Urban Landscapes: Concept and Management’, in van Oers, R, and Haraguchi, S.
(eds), Managing Historic Cities (World Heritage Papers 27), 99–104. Also, Rodwell, 2007, 59–63.
50
van Oers, 2010, 16.
Historic Urban Landscape: Managing Heritage in an Urban Century,51 published to promote
the UNESCO initiative.

In 1960 In 2006, with the post-war business quarter of

La Défense visible on the horizon; established
in 1958 beyond the boulevard périphérique.
Figures 5 and 6 Paris, view westwards from the tower of Notre Dame de Paris. The
Paris skyline in 2006 epitomises harmonious co-existence between the historic and
newer quarters of a metropolitan city. Failure today, in the face of political and other
pressures, to comprehend and reinforce the distinctive three-dimensional and
functional characteristics of the city intra muros, risks major subversion of this
exemplar of Gustavo Giovannoni’s principle. © Dennis Rodwell

The provenance is also ambiguous. Launched under the World Heritage Cities
programme (established by the World Heritage Committee in 2001), the evolving historic
urban landscape approach was intended to be interpreted and implemented to embrace urban
settlements worldwide, not just delineated historic quarters and cities inscribed on the
UNESCO World Heritage List or in the processes of nomination. Well over half a decade
later, however, the 2011 Recommendation has neither been integrated into Operational
Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention (except as an item listed
in the bibliography),52 nor centred as a mainstream programme within the UNESCO family.

A further challenge is presented by the 1972 World Heritage Convention’s reliance on

the word property,53 allied as it is to the differing interpretations placed on the word
conservation between the cultural and natural heritage sectors. The starting point for the
effective communication of the values of urban heritage in this twenty-first century is not
monuments, groups of buildings or sites, it is human habitat – ‘historic towns which are still
inhabited’.54 This is what citizens and their elected representatives prioritise; cultural heritage
container and defined manifestations follow from this.

Whereas in the environmental/ecological sense, conservation is focused on habitat, in

the cultural heritage sense, established conservation theory and practice employ discrete
meanings that underplay it. It is indicative that the only natural property to have been struck
from the World Heritage List is the Arabian Oryx Sanctuary, Oman (inscribed, 1994; delisted,

51
Bandarin, F. and van Oers, R. The Historic Urban Landscape: Managing Heritage in an Urban Century,
Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
52
UNESCO. Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention, Paris:
UNESCO, 2017.
53
UNESCO 1972a,
54
UNESCO 2017, Annex 3, para 14(ii).
2007), on the not unreasonable premiss that the population of Arabian Oryx and other
threatened species in the site had suffered an irreversible decline.55 No equivalent decline in
the human population numbers or socio-cultural mix of urban settlements – whether resulting
from the pressures of tourism, gentrification, or other factors – has, to date threatened the
status of any cultural properties on the World Heritage List. Such non-alignment is not
helpful to the implementation of the 2011 Recommendation.

Drivers and terminologies

Academia

The drivers for the promotion and articulation of the historic urban landscape initiative
together with the precursor instruments cited in the Preamble to the 2011 Recommendation,
are strongly biased towards academia. Of the binary objective cited above, only the first (to
preserve heritage) can claim a haven in academia; the second (the management of historic
cities) is largely dissociated from it. In practice a local municipal function, the management
of historic cities is primordially a political and administrative undertaking, one that can vary
widely in application both within and between state parties.

Values, attributes and significance

In the cultural heritage field, academia employs concepts and terms which work well within
the heritage community but which encounter significant challenges when communicated
outside. Key words including values, attributes and significance, need to be handled with
caution.

Beyond the heritage community, value rhymes with monetary value; and significance
is a ranking term. In the United Kingdom, for example, heritage designations attract a
premium. Research conducted by the London School of Economics and the real estate
company Savills has concluded that the added capital and rental value, the heritage premium,
of properties located in conservation areas can vary upwards between 25 and 50 percent,56 a
recipe for gentrification, social segregation and exclusion: a significant challenge in the face
of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

Correspondingly, it is hardly surprising that World Heritage Sites, inscribed for their
outstanding universal value – ‘an aristocracy of sites’ as Gustavo Araoz, immediate past-
President of ICOMOS, has characterised them57 – should prove magnets to multifarious
financial and development interests that threaten their ‘protection, conservation, presentation
and transmission to future generations’.58

Layering

The concept of layering, mentioned previously, is a particular trap into which the 2011
Recommendation falls. Outside the heritage community (if not also within it), layering is

55
UNESCO World Heritage List: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/654
56
Ahlfeldt, G.M., Holman, N. and Wendland, N. ‘An assessment of the effects of conservation areas on value.’
London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2012. Accessed 16 June 2018.
https://content.historicengland.org.uk/content/docs/research/assessment-ca-value.pdf Day, G. ‘Interactive map:
the value of our built heritage.’ London: Savills, 2016. Accessed 16 June 2018,
http://www.savills.co.uk/blog/article/211355/residential-property/interactive-map--the-value-of-our-built-
heritage.aspx
57
Quoted in Rodwell, D. ‘World Heritage and the World’s Resources’, in Context 121, 2011, 41.
58
UNESCO 1972a, article 4.
synonymous with separate layers: over-laying by superimposition. It does not manifest
harmonious co-existence: mutual respect for discrete typologies and their contemporaneous
functional continuity. Nor does it self-evidently comprehend the transmission of social
values, attributes and significance – subsuming family and community, and without
prioritisation and ranking – in the regeneration of urban neighbourhoods (Figure 7).

Figure 7 Nelson, Lancashire, England. Notwithstanding its conservation area status,

the Whitefield district of this nineteenth century former industrial town, comprising
terraced housing constructed for cotton-mill workers whose descendants had largely
relocated, was destined for land clearance. A national campaign – spearheaded by
SAVE Britain’s Heritage and the Victorian Society – prevented its demolition and
stimulated its regeneration.59 The district has proved well-adapted to the extended
family lifestyle of post-1945 immigrant communities from the Indian sub-continent.
The concomitant engagement with a wide cross-section of interests substantially
beyond the confines of the traditional heritage sector, including anthropologists and
politicians, attests to the spectrum that the sector must comprehend if the ambition of
the 2011 Recommendation to engage with urban settlements worldwide is to be
realised. (© Dennis Rodwell)

‘Historic urban landscape’

To audiences who are not conversant with the intended word usages, the term historic urban
landscape itself poses several challenges. The lack of consensus over the term as well as
difficulties in its translation into differing cultural and linguistic contexts has been widely
noted.60

The word landscape is not, for example, employed consistently in UNESCO texts.
The static, historicist approach of the 1962 UNESCO Recommendation Concerning the
Safeguarding of the Beauty and Character of Landscapes and Sites (the 1962

59
Adam Wilkinson, Pathfinder (London: SAVE Britain’s Heritage, 2006). Elizabeth Robinson, ed., “The
Victorian Terrace: An Endangered Species Again?”, The Victorian 21 (2006). Mark Hines, Reviving Britain’s
Terraces: Life after Pathfinder (London: SAVE Britain’s Heritage, 2010).
60
Including in Bandarin and van Oers 2012, citing Christina Cameron, 96. Also, Bianco, S. ‘Historic cities in
the 21st century: core values for a globalizing world’, in van Oers, R. & Haraguchi, S. (eds). Managing Historic
Cities (World Heritage Papers 27), Paris: UNESCO, 2010, 27–33.
Recommendation),61 sits uncomfortably with the dynamic approach intended in the 2011
Recommendation; and the circular definition cited in the glossary of terms in the latter – ‘the
landscape approach is a framework for making landscape-level conservation decisions …’ –
is a tautology that does not communicate convincingly.

The inclusion of the word historic in the term, with its implication of a cut-off point,
proved especially contentious in discussions leading to the drafting of the 2011
Recommendation and has reinforced ambiguity.62 To an Italian, where a city is barely
considered historic if it post-dates the Roman Empire, the word has a different meaning
compared to a (European) Antipodean. A fragmented view of time in heritage studies
commensurate with layering, separates traditional and modern societies and divides societal
and individual memories.

Does, therefore, historic urban landscape communicate as synonymous with

continuous processes and dynamic continuity? Or, as interpreted in Kingston, Jamaica (for
example),63 is it simply employed as a brand name for a closely delineated historic urban
district? Or, as a United Kingdom reviewer of the UNESCO World Heritage Papers 2764
proffered, is urban landscape just another term for the British townscape65 – a term that
Gordon Cullen defined as the art of coherent three-dimensional composition,66 corresponding
with the static, visual approach in the 1962 UNESCO Recommendation, but far removed
from Patrick Geddes’ elucidation of urban ecosystem? It is no coincidence that application of
the 2011 Recommendation has shown excellent potential for theoretical engagement and
practical implementation in regions and nations that are more open to innovation and not
fettered by established usages.67

Authenticity and integrity

A cardinal term in the lexicon of the heritage community and conditional under the UNESCO
Operational Guidelines,68 authenticity is described in The Historic Urban Landscape (2012)
as a ‘utopic aspiration’,69 and in Annex 3 of the Operational Guidelines as ‘problematical’ in
the context of ‘historic towns which are still inhabited’.70 Although the 1994 Nara Document
on Authenticity sought to articulate authenticity from an inclusive, global perspective,71 its
incorporation into the Operational Guidelines (from 2004 onwards) is handicapped by cross-
referencing it to the ‘cultural values … recognized in the nomination criteria’,72 ones that are

61
UNESCO. Recommendation Concerning the Safeguarding of the Beauty and Character of Landscapes and
Sites, Paris: UNESCO, 1962.
62
Bandarin and van Oers 2012, 197–198.
63
Presentation by Patricia Green, Jamaica National Heritage Trust, under the title ‘Downtown Kingston
Historic Urban Landscape: Towards the Declaration of the Historic District as a National Monument’ at the
conference ‘Heritage, Cities & Sustainable Development’ held in Paris, 30-31 May 2013.
64
van Oers, R. & Haraguchi, S. (eds). Managing Historic Cities (World Heritage Papers 27), Paris: UNESCO,
2010.
65
Kindred, B. Book review of ‘Managing Historic Cities’ in Journal of Architectural Conservation, 2012
18(2), 100–101. Rodwell, D. ‘Rethinking heritage’, in Context 127, 2012, 29–31.
66
Cullen, G. Townscape, London: Architectural Press, 1961. Rodwell, 2007, 20–21.
67
For example: Pérez, J.R, and Martinez, P.G. ‘Lights and shadows over the Recommendation on the Historic
Urban Landscape: ‘managing change’ in Ballarat and Cuenca through a radical approach focused on values and
authenticity’. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2018, 24:1, 101-116.
68
UNESCO 2017, paras 79–86.
69
Bandarin and van Oers, 2012.
70
UNESCO 2017, Annex 3, para 14(ii).
71
Nara Document on Authenticity, 1994. In: Petzet, M. and Ziesemer, J. (eds). 2004. International Charters for
Conservation and Restoration. ICOMOS, Paris, 118–121. Available at
http://openarchive.icomos.org/431/1/Monuments_and_Sites_1_Charters.pdf [Accessed 10 August 2015].
72
UNESCO 2017, para 82.
condensed from the authorised heritage discourse in order to demonstrate outstanding
universal value.

Authenticity is only mentioned once in the text of the 2011 UNESCO

Recommendation, and not defined.73 The Nara Document does not address integrity, and the
2011 Recommendation only relates that term to urban fabric.74 Both concepts have proved
especially challenging to a cultural heritage community conditioned to viewing urban
heritage through selective lenses. For both concepts to be interpreted successfully in historic
cities today – being places ‘which, by their very nature, have developed and will continue to
develop under the influence of socio-economic and cultural change’75 – the lenses must be
wide-angle, inclusive, and embrace historic cities both as physical places and human spaces.
Article 5 of the 1972 UNESCO Convention anticipates this; the urban geographer is the
essential ally for this.76

A positive interpretation of authenticity and integrity coupled with harmonious co-

existence is furnished in the case of Regensburg,77 where the guiding principle of the
Heritage as Opportunity (HerO) European exchange programme (2008–11) was that historic
urban landscapes need to be considered as living organisms which can only survive if all their
functions are addressed equally (Figure 8).78

Relationship to core agendas of our time

This article posits the view that the UNESCO historic urban landscape initiative is rooted in
the authorised heritage discourse;79 consequently, that relationships between urban heritage
and core societal and environmental agendas of our time are not inherent to it.

In discussions prior to the finalisation of the seventeen 2030 Sustainable Development

Goals,80 sectoral representations sought to establish a discrete role for culture, on the
mistaken premiss that culture can be articulated as a stand-alone concept. In the event, in
what this author views as a seriously missed opportunity, the heritage community is largely
focused on Goal 11, ‘Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and
sustainable’; in particular, target 11.4, ‘Strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the
world’s cultural and natural heritage’.

The seminal report Culture: Urban Future – Global Report on Culture for
Sustainable Urban Development,81 launched at the Third United Nations Conference on
Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III; the adoption of the New Urban

73
UNESCO 2011, para 24.
74
UNESCO 2011, para 17.
75
UNESCO 2017, Annex 3, para 14(ii).
76
Ripp and Rodwell, 2015 and 2016.
77
Ripp and Rodwell, 2015, 253–254. Dengler-Schreiber, K. & Hans-Schuller, C. 2010. Vom Aschenputtel zum
Welterbe: Das Bamberger Modell (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet).
78
Ripp, M. & Bühler, B. ‘The "HerO" Fast Track Network: Cultural Heritage as Opportunity’, in European
Commission, Directorate-General for Regional Policy. Regions for Economic Change – Networking for Results,
Brussels: European Commission, 2009, 16–17.
79
Smith, L. Uses of Heritage. London/New York: Routledge, 2006,
80
United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, 2015. Accessed,
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/topics/sustainabledevelopmentgoals
81
UNESCO. Culture: Urban Future – Global Report on Culture for Sustainable Urban Development. Paris:
UNESCO, 2016. Accessed, 16 July 2018, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002459/245999e.pdf
Agenda)82 held in Quito, Ecuador, October 2016, is central to an ambitious vision that
positions the role of culture, from cultural heritage to cultural and creative industries, as both
an enabler and driver of the environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainable
development. It does, however, take a prescribed view of culture, cultural heritage and
creative industries.

Figure 8 Regensburg, Bavaria, Germany. From the 1970s onwards, integrated

conservation of the historic core has been coordinated with modern development in
the expanding city – a further exemplar of harmonious co-existence, not layering. The
historic centre has retained social balance as well as its traditional mix of small-scale
independent artisan shops and workshops – maintaining authenticity and integrity,
and traffic calming measures render the city’s streets safe for all users. © Dennis
Rodwell

82
UN-Habitat (2016), “New Urban Agenda adopted at Habitat III”; available at: https://unhabitat.org/new-
urban-agenda-adopted-at-habitat-iii/; also: http://habitat3.org/the-new-urban-agenda/ (both accessed 24 April
2018).
Culture and cultural heritage

Culture and cultural heritage, whether categorised as tangible or intangible, are no more a
‘product’ that should be selectively identified, packaged and branded than nature and natural
heritage. The underlying generic concept of culture embraces what any given society has
(material possessions and objects), thinks (traditions and beliefs), and does (behavioural
patterns including recreations) together with how it relates to and interacts with its natural
and manmade environment.83

This resonates with the broad definition of culture articulated by UNESCO in 1982:

In its widest sense, culture may now be said to be the whole complex of distinctive spiritual,
material, intellectual and emotional features that characterize a society or social group. It
includes not only the arts and letters, but also modes of life, the fundamental rights of the
human being, value systems, traditions and beliefs.84

Isaiah Berlin expressed the characteristics of cultural distinctiveness as follows:

The ways in which men live, think, feel, speak to one another, the clothes they wear, the
songs they sing, the gods they worship, the food they eat, the assumptions, customs, habits
which are intrinsic to them – it is these that create communities, each of which has its own
‘lifestyle’. Communities may resemble each other in many respects, but the Greeks differ
from Lutheran Germans, the Chinese differ from both; what they strive after and what they
fear or worship are scarcely ever similar.85

Physical and intellectual access and ownership of culture is not delimited and
exclusive. In this over-arching sense, there is no greater degree of culture in a historic city
centre, especially where overtaken by tourism and/or gentrification, than in a socially stable
but statistically deprived post-industrial inner city district.

Successive European Capitals of Culture have displayed a series of inclusive

interpretations of culture – innovative or ‘shocking’, depending on one’s point of view: from
Liverpool, UK (2008), the culture of sport (especially football), popular music and
entertainment (Figure 9); through Turku, Finland (2011), the culture of work; to the
programme planned for Plovdiv, Bulgaria (2019), the vibrant (but ‘horrifying’ to some)
culture of the Romani district of Stolipinovo.86 Such broadening interpretations challenge the
differentiation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture that is implicit in orthodox discourses on
culture (Figure 10).

The notion of one-way cultural outreach that one finds in certain historic cities today,
where selected areas have been inscribed on the World Heritage List and where citizens in the
hinterland are perceived to require to be ‘educated’ about the culture and cultural heritage that

83
Williams, R. Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. London: Fontana (revised and enlarged
edition), 1988, 87-93 (first published 1976). Williams, R. Culture. London: London: Fontana, 1981. Eagleton,
T. The Idea of Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
84
UNESCO, Mexico City Declaration on Cultural Policies. UNESCO: Mexico, 1982.
85
Berlin, Isaiah, ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, reproduced as chapter 1 in Berlin, Isaiah (2013), The Proper Study
of Mankind, London: Vintage, 1–16. Also available at: http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9983.pdf
[Accessed 18 November 2017].
86
European Capital of Culture, ‘Selection of the European Capital of Culture in 2019 in Bulgaria: The
Selection Panel’s Final Report’, Sofia: European Capital of Culture, 2014, 6. Available at:
https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/creative-europe/sites/creative-europe/files/files/ecoc-2019-report-
bulgaria_en.pdf [Accessed 18 November 2017].
relates solely to the inscribed parts,87 is anathema to any ambition ‘to adopt a general policy
… to give the cultural and natural heritage a function in the life of the community and to
integrate the protection of that heritage into comprehensive planning programmes’.88

Figure 9 Liverpool, England: Statue of the Beatles at the Pier Head epitomising the
culture of popular music in the city. © Dennis Rodwell

Figure 10 Genoa, Italy: a port city redolent with both the historical compass and
dynamic continuity of culture: from high Renaissance through the vibrancy of sailor-
town ‘low-life’. © Dennis Rodwell

87
For example, Liverpool Maritime Mercantile City and the Old and New Towns of Edinburgh. The process of
‘top-down – bottom-up’ moderation of heritage values in any given community is described in Ripp and
Rodwell, 2016, including at 20.
88
UNESCO. Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (also known
as the World Heritage Convention), Paris: UNESCO, 1972, Articles 5 and 5(a).
 Understood and interpreted as an inclusive concept, culture falls to be interpreted as
the cornerstone of sustainable development, not simply an enabler. As such, the dynamics of
cultural heritage in societies are directly associated with all seventeen of the 2030 Sustainable
Development Goals.89 Beyond Goal 11, for example, as determinants in Goals 2 (zero hunger
through improved nutrition and promoting sustainable agriculture), 6 (clean water and
sanitation through sustainable management), 13 (combating climate change and its impacts),
and 15 (life on land, through protection of ecosystems and sustainable land management).
This is not to downplay orthodox perceptions of culture and cultural heritage. Rather, to
position their role at the centre ground of today’s global agendas, greatly expanding upon the
type of connections made by Lady Dartmouth back in 1975.90

Creativity and Creative Industries

Just as culture, heritage and cultural heritage have assumed limited meanings in support of
sectoral interests, so have the concepts of creativity and creative industries. This is
exacerbated by the notion of a creative class, a socio-cultural distinction that would exclude
from its numbers many of the most brilliant innovators and inventors in history, such as
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), the social outsider and self-taught polymath of the
Renaissance, most famous as a painter but primarily a man of science and engineering,91 and
Sir Richard Arkwright (1732–92), the unschooled son of a tailor, self-made founder of the
factory system and father of the Industrial Revolution.

Creativity is applied imagination; imagination is unlimited. The conditions under

which creativity flourishes cannot be circumscribed. Top-down creative strategies and
cultural strategies should be considered contrivances, contradictions in terms. They exclude
majority sections of any given community that do not fit into pre-defined categories and are
rejected as uncreative or uncultured.92 Examples that may be cited include the small-scale
local crafts that thrive in abundance across much of south-east Europe and beyond (Figure
11); and the French culture of l’artisanat, such as the boulangerie or chocolatier (Figure 12).
They contribute substantively to the segregation and inequalities in what Richard Florida,
author in 2002 of The Rise of the Creative Class,93 has termed The New Urban Crisis.94

89
United Nations, 2015.
90
Cantacuzino, 1975, 1–2. Also, Rodwell, D. Conservation and Sustainability in Historic Cities.
91
Isaacson, W. Leonardo da Vinci: the Biography. London: Simon & Schuster, 2017.
92
Rodwell, D. ‘Heritage as a Driver for Creative Cities’, in Wiktor-Mach, D. and Radwański, P. (eds), The Idea
of Creative City. Skopje: European Scientific Institute, 2014. 11–26. Available at:
http://eujournal.org/files/journals/1/books/Cracow 2013.pdf [Accessed 18 November 2017].
93
Florida, R. The Rise of the Creative Class, New York: Basic Books, 2002. Revised as The Rise of the
Creative Class Revisited, New York: Basic Books, 2012.
94
Florida, R. The New Urban Crisis, New York: Basic Books, 2017.
Figure 11 Ödemiş, Turkey, a typical Anatolian town that boasts a cross-section of
artisanal crafts, including metal working (illustrated) and shoe making, that do not fit
the authorised discourse on creative industries. © Dennis Rodwell

Figure 12 Chocolatier in the Marais quarter, Paris. © Dennis Rodwell

Case study: Asmara, Eritrea
A practical case with which this author has been closely involved is Asmara, the capital of
Eritrea in the Horn of Africa. It is offered here by way of a concluding example as indicative
of the range of real-life issues for which an inclusive attitude to culture and cultural heritage
can advance the binary objective of preserving heritage and managing historic cities. It
subsumes indications of the range of partnerships that the heritage community needs to
consolidate in order to position itself at the heart of effective implementation of the 2011
UNESCO Recommendation beyond mere aspiration.

The objective of a 2004 assignment, immediately antecedent to the launch of the

historic urban landscape initiative, was to prepare over-arching urban planning guidelines for
the ‘historic perimeter’ of Asmara – covering an area of approximately 4 square kilometres –
in the context of the city as a whole (the historic perimeter represents about 5 per cent of the
total area of the city), coordinating specialist studies already prepared and in hand, all to the
objective of promoting an integrated approach to heritage protection and sustainable urban
development.95 The mission was undertaken within the framework of the Cultural Assets
Rehabilitation Project (CARP), an initiative of the Eritrean government and people supported
by the World Bank.

Figure 13 Asmara, Eritrea. Young citizens. Comprehending the human needs and
aspirations of the inhabitants of this multi-ethnic, multi-faith city was central to the
tangible-intangible heritage ethos that drove the 2004 mission. © Dennis Rodwell

95
Rodwell, D. ‘Over-arching Urban Planning and Building Conservation Guidelines for the Historic Perimeter
of Asmara, Eritrea’ Mission Report for the Cultural Assets Rehabilitation Project, 2004; unpublished. Rodwell,
D. ‘Asmara: Conservation and Development in a Historic City’, in Journal of Architectural Conservation, 2004,
10(3), 4, 41–58.
 A major determinant was understanding and respect for Asmara’s complex, inter-
related and evolving tangible and intangible cultural heritage traditions, embracing
indigenous cultures, the colonial and Modernist era, and the city’s status as the capital of a re-
emerging nation (Figure 13).

The factors embraced by this Mission included:

• Water supply and sanitation

• Food supply and markets.
• Housing supply and quality serving the city’s diverse communities and varied
lifestyles.
• Traffic and transportation within the historic perimeter and across the metropolitan
area.
• Land and building uses, building heights, urban morphology and design issues
appropriate to different locations in the historic perimeter and wider city (Figure 14).
• Incompatible land and building uses (summarised as large-scale office buildings and
hotels, retail stores and shopping complexes, depots and warehouses, and large-scale
workshops, factories and heavy industry). .
• Vacant land and underused plots and buildings, and their suitability for development,
including for recreational, other community uses, and public art.
• Over-arching historic building conservation guidelines allied to the need for training
and related capacity-building initiatives.
• Identification of the need for an integrated city-region masterplan together with
subjects for ongoing detailed studies, including: socio-economic data collection;
review of legislative, regulatory and administrative systems; support for community
engagement; and the city’s tourism potential.

Figure 14 Asmara, Eritrea. The city skyline is dominated by the towers and spires of
its churches and the minarets of its mosques. The relationship between land and
building uses and urban morphology formed a core part of the guidelines for an
integrated approach to heritage protection and sustainable urban development for the
city. © Dennis Rodwell
 A main driver for this assignment was to position basic human needs alongside social
processes, considerations of tangible and intangible cultural heritage in their inclusive
definition, and relationships with the wider natural environment: promoting an evolutionary
and sociological approach to the city in its entirety as an urban ecosystem.

The assignment animated ongoing reflections by the Eritrean Government and the
Municipality of Asmara. It was immediately followed up by the drafting of the Tentative List
submission to UNESCO, and informed the nomination and management plan for the
inscription of ‘Asmara: a Modernist City of Africa’ at the 2017 session of the World Heritage
Committee.96

Conclusion
The 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape has been driven by
the ambition to chart a major new course for urban heritage, transitioning from an orthodoxy
of international instruments that date from the third quarter of the twentieth century into the
significantly changed perceptions and priorities of the first quarter of the twenty-first,
encapsulated in the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

This article has sought to challenge residual orthodoxy and stimulate reflection on the
extent to which ongoing reliance on established definitions and terminologies can respond
adequately to the binary objective of signalling ‘an innovative way to preserve heritage and
manage historic cities’. It does so against the backdrop of the commitment entered into by all
state parties under Article 5 of the 1972 UNESCO Convention, a commitment that is not
limited to World Heritage.

The article argues that for the integration of the protection of cultural and natural
heritage into comprehensive planning programmes requires a loosening of delimiting
definitions of culture, and recognition that the cultural heritage community needs to embrace
a wider range of cross-sectoral partnerships than the author has witnessed to date. This
process has begun, inspired in part by the 2011 Recommendation, and reinforced by parallel
United Nations agendas including Habitat III and the New Urban Agenda.

A particular handicap both to the drafting and the implementation of the 2011
Recommendation is the absence of any audit of existing policies and practices in the field.
This is beginning to be addressed, and the forthcoming publication Reshaping Urban
Conservation: The Historic Urban Landscape Approach in Action, 97 promises to go
some way towards this.

Cultural heritage is not ring-fenced; it forms an integral part of the wider human and
natural environment. The principal missing link at the professional level is between the
heritage community, the broad discipline of geography and the domains of urban and regional
planning, through which any set of policies – rather than ‘a general policy’ – needs to be
negotiated, alongside the upscaling of the inter-disciplinary skills to implement them.

96
‘Asmara: a Modernist City of Africa’ World Heritage Site: UNESCO webpage with links to all documents:
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1550
97
Roders, P.R. and Bandarin, F.(eds.). Reshaping Urban Conservation: The Historic Urban Landscape
Approach in Action. Singapore: Springer, 2019.
Biography

Dennis Rodwell, architect-planner, works internationally in the field of cultural heritage and
sustainable urban development, focused on the promotion and achievement of best practice in
the management of the broadly defined historic environment. Previously a principal in private
architectural practice, he has also served in local government posts as architect, conservation
officer, urban designer, principal planner and project manager. He has been rapporteur and
author to UNESCO and ICOMOS events and publications focused on the Historic Urban
Landscape initiative. He writes and publishes widely on the theme of conservation and
sustainability in historic cities. Further information including a bibliography of publications
may be found on: www.dennisrodwell.co.uk