Contemporary Architecture in the Historic Environment

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Conservation Policy
van Oers, Ron. 2006. "Preventing the Goose with the Golden Eggs from Catching
Bird Flu–UNESCO's Efforts in Safeguarding the Historic Urban Landscape."
Paper presented at the 42nd Congress of the International Society of City and
Regional Planners (ISoCaRP) "Cities between Integration and Disintegration,"
Istanbul, Turkey, September 14-18, 2006". http://isocarp.org/app/
uploads/2015/02/Istanbul-2006-_TXT_Ron-van-Oers.pdf
In this article, van Oers criticizes the creation of new iconic buildings in urban
World Heritage Sites as a way of generating economic redevelopment of the
area. The author argues that the development of a building that, by its own
nature, works against the surrounding context would harm the characteristics
elevating that site to World Heritage status. Consequently, it would undermine
the capacity of generating economic redevelopment through an increase in tourism
activities, which is a commonly observed phenomenon following World
Heritage designation. As an alternative to this policy of urban redevelopment
through iconic buildings, van Oers proposes the adoption of the concept of integrated
conservation of historic urban areas. He explains that this concept was
developed in the 1970s in response to the failure of modern urbanism and the
need for reconstruction in the postwar period. Integrated conservation was a
concept for urban policies related to the shift toward context-based architecture
in the 1970s. The author traces the evolution of integrated conservation from
the Declaration of Amsterdam (1975) until the 21st century. (A.P.A.G.)
van Oers, Ron, and Sachiko Haraguchi, eds. 2010. Managing Historic Cities =
Gérer les villes historiques. World Heritage Papers 27. Paris: UNESCO World
Heritage Centre. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001896/189607m.pdf
This publication is a collection of 10 papers presented during meetings organized
by UNESCO on urban conservation principles after approval of the
Vienna Memorandum in 2005. In the introduction, Ron van Oers makes a critical
analysis of previous international policies that addressed the preservation of
historic cities in order to set the context in which the Vienna Memorandum and
the papers included in this publication were created. According to van Oers, one
of the main issues that supported the development of the Vienna Memorandum
was the new set of factors currently causing change in historic cities. He argues
that these factors had not been effectively addressed by previous policies. In
general, the papers explore the concept of the Historic Urban Landscape and
emphasize that conservation should take into consideration that continuous evolution
is an intrinsic characteristic of urban sites. Some papers analyze current
policies, such as Jukka Jokilehto’s paper on international policies for the protection
of historic urban landscapes. Other papers focus on methodologies for identification
and management of significant values in urban areas. For example,
Hal Moggridge’s paper presents a methodology to identify the most significant
characteristics of views in a Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) in order to protect
them from new development. Of particular interest is Robert Adam’s paper,
which criticizes the Vienna Memorandum for perpetuating the modernist idea
that new buildings should never be based on styles of previous eras. (A.P.A.G.)
Contemporary Architecture in the Historic Environment: An Annotated Bibliography - Getty Conservation Institute - 2015