The act of identifying, protecting, restoring, and reusing buildings, districts, and built landscapes of historic and cultural significance is, at its best, a reflective and consequential process of urban and socio-economic reform. It has the potential to reconcile conflicting memories, meanings, and cultural tensions, bridging and expanding the perceived boundaries of multiple disciplines towards bigger aspirations of city-making and social justice.
How and where do such aspirations overlap and differ across nations and societies across the world? In places with different histories, governance structures, regulatory stringency, and populist dispositions, who are the specific players, and what are the actual processes that bring about bigger and deeper change beyond just the conservation of an architectural or urban entity of perceived value?
This collection of scholarly articles by theorists, academics, and practitioners explores the global complexity, guises, and potential of heritage conservation. Going from Tokyo to Cairo, Shenzhen to Rome, and Delhi to Moscow, this volume examines a vast range of topics - indigenous habitats, urban cores, vernacular infrastructure, colonial towns, squatters, burial sites, war zones, and modern landmarks. It surfaces numerous inherent issues - water stress, deforestation, social oppression, poverty, religion, immigration, and polity, expanding the definitions of heritage conservation as both a professional discipline and socio-cultural catalyst. This book argues that the intellectual and praxis limits of heritage conservation - as the agency of reading, defining, and intervening with built heritage - can be expansive, aimed at bigger positive change beyond a specific subject or object; plural, enmeshed with multiple fields and specializations; and empathetic, born from the actual socio-political realities of a place.
About the Author: Vinayak Bharne is Adjunct Associate Professor of Urbanism and Heritage Conservation at the University of Southern California, USA, and Principal and Director of Design at the architecture and urban design firm Moule & Polyzoides, USA. His books include The Emerging Asian City: Concomitant Urbanities & Urbanisms (2012), Rediscovering the Hindu Temple: The Sacred Architecture and Urbanism of India (2012), and Zen Spaces & Neon Places: Reflections on Japanese Architecture and Urbanism (2013).
Trudi Sandmeier is the Director of Graduate Programs in Heritage Conservation and an Associate Professor of Practice in Architecture at the University of Southern California, USA. Her work centers on the conservation of the recent past and efforts to make visible the impact of underrepresented constituencies on the historic built environment.
