The Historic Urban Landscape

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the intellectual developments in urban conservation. The authors offer unique insights from UNESCO's World Heritage Centre and the book is richly illustrated with colour photographs. Examples are drawn from urban heritage sites worldwide from Timbuktu to Liverpool to demonstrate key issues and best practice in urban conservation today. The book offers an invaluable resource for architects, planners, surveyors and engineers worldwide working in heritage conservation, as well as for local authority conservation officers and managers of heritage sites.

This book uses the Historic Urban Landscape - the most recently codified notion of international urban heritage conservation - to demonstrate why it is necessary to demarcate history from cultural heritage and what consequences the increasing popularity of the latter have on history. It also demonstrates how the history of cultural heritage can be constructed as a historical problem. First, the conceptual history of urban heritage preservation – based on the standard setting instruments of international organizations – reveals the fundamental elements of the current concept of urban heritage. Second, this concept, as worded in the HUL approach, is investigated through the analysis of Vienna, which played a crucial role in the establishment of HUL. These examples are used to to show how the evolution of cultural heritage can be constructed as a historical problem.

This volume focuses on the implementation of the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL approach), designed to foster the integration of heritage management in regional and urban planning and management, and strengthen the role of heritage in sustainable urban development.Earlier publications and research looked at the underlying theory of why the HUL approach was needed and how this theory was developed and elaborated by UNESCO. A comprehensive analysis was carried out in consultation with a multitude of actors in the twenty-first-century urban scene and with disciplinary approaches that are available to heritage managers and practitioners to implement the HUL approach.This volume aims to be empirical, describing, analyzing, and comparing 28 cities taken as case studies to implement the HUL approach. From those cases, many lessons can be learned and much guidance shared on best practices concerning what can be done to make the HUL approach work.Whereas the previous studies served to illustrate issues and challenges, in this volume the studies point to innovations in regional and urban planning and management that can allow cities to avoid major conflicts and to further develop in competitiveness. These accomplishments have been possible by building partnerships, devising financial strategies, and using heritage as a key resource in sustainable urban development, to name but a few effective strategies.For these reasons, this volume is primarily pragmatic, linked to the daily work and challenges of practitioners and administrators, using specific cases to assess what was and is good about current practices and what can be improved, in accordance with the HUL approach and aims.

Historic Urban Landscape is a new approach to urban heritage management, promoted by UNESCO, and currently one of the most debated issues in the international preservation community. However, few conservation practitioners have a clear understanding of what it entails, and more importantly, what it can achieve. Examples drawn from urban heritage sites worldwide – from Timbuktu to Liverpool Richly illustrated with colour photographs Addresses key issues and best practice for urban conservation

"Addresses key issues and best practice for urban conservation Authors able to offer unique insight from UNESCO's World Heritage Centre Examples drawn from urban heritage sites worldwide -- from Timbuktu to Liverpool Richly illustrated with colour photographs."-- Résumé Wordcat.

How do we value historic urban landscape in order to intervene within it as designers? This is the central question posed in this volume, and is tackled by its 16 essays which investigate different facets of value as bases of building and design practices on a range of spatial scales and brought about by a variety of historical circumstances. While the modernist metanarrative of universalism propagated functionalism and, through it, biological and psychological motives of design activity, contemporary building practices are based on more complex and diverse patterns of values that range from cultural to market-driven. Researched, reconstructed and critically assessed, the different case studies brought together here reveal the many possible shades of the ‘importance of place’ with which architects, urban planners and city officials work today in the Southern European context. Marked in recent decades by social and political transition and economic hardship, the reality of this region’s cities caused repeated revisions of value-systems in all spheres of public life, making it, thus, a particularly intriguing context to observe in these terms. In this sense, these essays will be of interest to university scholars in architecture, art history, urbanism and planning, in addition to practicing designers and public officials who encounter problems of value-definitions in their everyday working tasks related to the shaping and management of contemporary urban space.

"The Routledge Handbook on Historic Urban Landscapes in Asia-Pacific sheds light onto the balancing act of urban heritage management, focusing specifically on the Asia-Pacific regions in which this challenge is imminent and in need of effective solutions. Urban heritage, while being threatened amidst myriad forces of global and ecological change, provides a vital social, cultural, and economic asset for regeneration and sustenance of liveability of inhabited urban areas worldwide. This six-part volume takes a critical look at the concept of Historic Urban Landscapes, the approach that UNESCO promotes to achieve holistic management of urban heritage, through the lens of issues, prospects, and experiences of urban regeneration of the selected geo-cultural context. It further discusses the difficult task that heritage managers encounter in conceptualizing, mapping, curating, and sustaining the plurality, poetics, and politics of urban heritage of the regions in question. The connective thesis that weaves the chapters in this volume together reinforces for readers that the management of urban heritage considers cities as dynamic entities, palimpsests of historical memories, collages of social diversity, territories of contested identities, and sites for sustainable liveability. Throughout this edited collection, chapters argue for recognizing the totality of the eco-cultural urban fabric, embracing change, building social cohesion, and initiating strategic socio-economic progress in the conservation of historic urban landscapes. Containing thirty-six contributions written by leading regional experts, and illustrated with over 200 black and white images and tables, this volume provides a much-needed resource on historic urban landscapes for students, scholars and researchers"--

Based on her extensive experience in the urban communities of Los Angeles, historian and architect Dolores Hayden proposes new perspectives on gender, race, and ethnicity to broaden the practice of public history and public art, enlarge urban preservation, and reorient the writing of urban history to spatial struggles. In the first part of The Power of Place, Hayden outlines the elements of a social history of urban space to connect people's lives and livelihoods to the urban landscape as it changes over time. She then explores how communities and professionals can tap the power of historic urban landscapes to nurture public memory. The second part documents a decade of research and practice by The Power of Place, a nonprofit organization Hayden founded in downtown Los Angeles. Through public meetings, walking tours, artists's books, and permanent public sculpture, as well as architectural preservation, teams of historians, designers, planners, and artists worked together to understand, preserve, and commemorate urban landscape history as African American, Latina, and Asian American families have experienced it. One project celebrates the urban homestead of Biddy Mason, an African American ex-slave and midwife active betwen 1856 and 1891. Another reinterprets the Embassy Theater where Rose Pesotta, Luisa Moreno, and Josefina Fierro de Bright organized Latina dressmakers and cannery workers in the 1930s and 1940s. A third chapter tells the story of a historic district where Japanese American family businesses flourished from the 1890s to the 1940s. Each project deals with bitter memories—slavery, repatriation, internment—but shows how citizens survived and persevered to build an urban life for themselves, their families, and their communities. Drawing on many similar efforts around the United States, from New York to Charleston, Seattle to Cincinnati, Hayden finds a broad new movement across urban preservation, public history, and public art to accept American diversity at the heart of the vernacular urban landscape. She provides dozens of models for creative urban history projects in cities and towns across the country.