Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Submission by ICOMOS
December 15, 2015
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Is the Indicator based on sound methodology and is the methodology behind the
indicator (data sources, method of computation, treatment of missing values,
regional estimates, etc.) well documented and readily available? Is the indicator
recommended by a well-established and recognized peer review mechanism or
through international mechanisms?
Does the indicator expressly correlate to the broader aims of SDG Goal 11, to make
cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable?
Does it recognize the inter-linkages of natural and cultural heritage, implicit in the
text of Target 11.4 and explicit in contemporary heritage policy and philosophy?
Does it operate at a landscape or regional scale, recognizing the pervasive and
multifaceted nature of heritage, including tangible and intangible, movable and
immovable, natural and cultural.
The current proposal is Share of national (or municipal) budget which is dedicated to
preservation, protection and conservation of national cultural natural heritage including World
Heritage sites. As we wrote in the UN-NGLS consultation in March, we believe a different
approach would better address the four key tests we have outlined. Also, ICOMOS notes the
current draft seems to have a typographical error. Presumably, it was intended to read protection
and conservation of national cultural and natural heritage.
ICOMOS writes in support of the following Indicator for Target 11.4:
the percentage of urban areas supported by development and financing governance
frameworks that include the safeguarding of natural and cultural heritage.
Such an Indicator would use existing methodologies to establish a baseline definition for
inclusion of the safeguarding of natural and cultural heritage into metropolitan or urban regulatory
and legal development and financing governance frameworks. These reflect an assessment of the
effectiveness of governance tools, as community engagement, knowledge and planning regulatory
systems and financial tools on the safeguarding of heritage. Progress towards Target 11.4 would
then be measured in terms of increases in the number (measured by means of population covered,
square miles covered or another suitable metric) of urban areas supported by an effective
development governance framework, that is to say, ones that meant the baseline definition of being
inclusive of the safeguarding of heritage.
The ICOMOS proposal focuses on spatial and process variables, versus economic/financial
ones. ICOMOS believes this is justified in view of the multi-dimensional manner in which heritage
safeguarding supports Goal 11. This approach also creates more synergy with the other Targets of
Goal 11 and the New Urban Agenda expected to be adopted as part of the UN Habitat III process.
Financial expenditure is a reducing tool of heterogeneity/complexity/multidimensionality, because
it transforms all aspects into one dimension. While ICOMOS prefers an approach that is more
multi-dimensional, ICOMOS does agree that financial mechanisms are extremely important. The
ICOMOS proposal recognizes this by including as a baseline requirement the incorporation of
incentives for heritage safeguarding within broader development governance tools. Thus, key to
our proposal is the reference to development and financing governance frameworks.
What follows is an explanation of the ICOMOS proposal with reference to each of the four
key tests outlined above.
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Methodology
The ICOMOS proposal is based on research collected by UN Habitat and others and on
national and sub-national assessment tools already in use and being developed by the World Bank
and the Asian Development Bank. For example, the approach draws on the concept of country
environmental analysis (CEA) found in the Asian Development Bank's 2003 Environmental
Assessment Guidelines. (Available online at http://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/institutionaldocument/32635/files/environmental-assessment-guidelines.pdf). The CEA assesses, at a policy
level, a country's Regulatory and Institutional Framework that includes a review of its
environmental standards, regulations, enforcement, mechanism and instruments. It makes this
assessment against identified environmental issues that are most important to a country's
development strategy. The ICOMOS proposal utilizes this approach to assess existing governance
frameworks against the issue of the safeguarding of natural and cultural heritage.
One finds similarities in the World Bank's draft Environmental and Social Procedure,
which requires the Bank, as part of its due diligence, to evaluate countries' Environmental and
Social Frameworks, that is those aspects of the countrys policy, legal and institutional framework,
including its national, subnational, or sectoral implementing institutions and applicable laws,
regulations, rules and procedures, and implementation capacity, which are relevant to the
environmental and social risks and impacts of development. (Available online at
http://consultations.worldbank.org/Data/hub/files/consultation-template/review-and-updateworld-bank-safeguardpolicies/en/materials/clean_draft_es_procedure_final_draft_for_consultation_july_1_2015.pdf),
The review requires an assessment of the Country's overall legal framework in service of
determining the extent to which that framework addresses the risks and impacts of development
and enables the project to achieve objectives materially consistent with World Bank's
Environmental and Social Safeguards (ESSs), including the World Bank policy on the
safeguarding of cultural heritage.
The starting point for application of the proposed Indicator would be a determination by
national authorities of the urban development and finance framework (national, regional, subregional) relevant to its urban areas. Five elements could be used as part of a baseline for
establishing whether heritage safeguarding had been included in the relevant framework:
Inclusion of natural and cultural heritage safeguarding elements in development standards,
regulations, enforcement, mechanism and instruments.
Existence of financing tools for heritage safeguarding as part of broader schemes of
development finance.
Existence of heritage capacity and capability within development and development
finance agencies.
Existence of mechanisms for cross-sectoral coordination of heritage policies and actions
with other development and finance functions.
Opportuinty for public consultation in heritage-related decision-making.
The following references support these elements:
REPORT
YEAR
2002
20042005
UN
HABITAT
REPORTS
REFERENCE TO HERITAGE
Good governance should preserve
the urban environment and the
cultural and historical heritage of
cities
with the growth of Cultural
Heritage Tourism, more cities in
developing countries were
investing in the conservation of old
historic buildings and thus tapping
into their cultural capital
20062007
20082009
RECOMMENDED ACTIONS
RELATED SUSTAINABLE
DIMENSIONS
Integration of heritage
conservation on urban
planning
20102011
20122013
STATE
OF
ASIAN
CITIES
2011
STATE
OF
EUROP
EAN
CITIES,
2013
Local UN
HABITAT
REPORTS
STATE
OF LAC
CITIES
2012
STATE
OF
ARAB
CITIES
2012
STATE
OF
AFRICA
N
CITIES
2013
UIMC
2001
URBAN
MANAGE
MENT /
PERFOR
MANCE
To ensures civic
participation by all in the
social, political and cultural
spheres
Conservation policies
Integration of conservation
in planning strategies.
Development programs
including the conservation
of cultural (tangible)
heritage
Launching plans to
rehabilitate and promote
urban heritage
Establishment of heritage
conservation and
management offices
An important component of a
sustainable society is the general
well-being of its citizens
Empower local
communities
Foster citizen participation
in local planning and
decision-making processes
ECI,
2000
PWC,
2011
URBAN
COMPETI
TIVENESS
Table 2 BEST PRACTICES BASED ON THE CONSERVATION OF CULTURAL HERITAGE (Blue cases are WHS)
REPORT
YEAR
2002
BEST PRACTICE
1. Crosstown 116, redesign of the 116th
Street corridor from
Hudson to the East River
2. Ciutat Vella Project:
Revitalization Of The
Historic Centre Of
Barcelona, Spain
UNHABITAT
REPORTS
4. Zanzibar, Tanzania:
preserving the historic
Stone Town
5. Kathmandu, Nepal:
restoring a centuries-old
water supply system
20042005
6. Santiago de Chiles
strategic plan
7. Havanas 1998
2001 strategic plan
20062007
INNITIATIVE
8. Enhancing
Partnership In
Planning: The Case
Of Mega-Project
Management In
TheNetherlands
9. Improving urban
planning and
monitoring in the
city of Aleppo
20082009
20102011
11. Bogots
Declaration of
Cultural Rights
STATE
OF
EURO
PEAN
CITIES
, 2013
STATE
OF
LAC
CITIES
2012
STATE
OF
ARAB
CITIES
2012
SOCIAL, ECONOMIC:
developing approaches to the regularization
of informal settlements, streamlining
procedures for the delivery of urban services
and improving financial management.
URBAN
MANA
GEME
NT /
PERFO
RMAN
CE
STATE
OF
AFRIC
AN
CITIES
2013
UIMC
2001
Adaptive reuse
Restoration
Community participation on
heritage activities
SOCIAL, ECONOMIC
The foregoing tables adapted from Guzman Molina, P.C. (Paloma), WORLD HERITAGE
CITIES AND SUSTAINABLE URBAN DEVELOPMENT, Bridging global and local levels in
monitoring the sustainable urban development of World Heritage cities (2015).
Additional References [Online]:
Asian Development Bank (ADB) (2001). Urban Indicators for Managing Cities (UIMC).
Available at: http://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/30020/urban-indicatorsmanaging-cities.pdf
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), (2011). Cities of Opportunities Report. Available at:
https://www.pwc.com/mx/es/publicaciones/archivo/2014-05-cities-of-opportunity.pdf.
The World Bank (WB) & Environmental Resource Management, (2008). Global Cities
Indicators Facility (GCIF). Available at:
http://www.cityindicators.org/Deliverables/Final%20Indicators%20Report%203_21_08_4-232008-924597.pdf.
2.
Target 11.4 calls for making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and
sustainable by strengthening efforts to protect and safeguard the worlds cultural and natural
heritage.
The development of an Indicator for Target 11.4 must start from an understanding of the
ways in which the safeguarding of heritage link to urban inclusiveness, safety, resilience and
sustainability. This in turn requires an understanding of the term cultural heritage. The term
should not be exclusively associated with extraordinary sites such as Historic Monuments or
World Heritage sites even though such sites retain their exceptional iconic status but rather
should be understood as including cultural landscapes, historic cities, and sites of
memory. Moreover, contemporary practice extends the concept of heritage beyond tangible
heritage, to the intangible dimensions of heritage as well. This means the capital of knowledge
derived from the development and experience of human practices, and from the spatial, social and
cultural constructions linked to it.
Cultural heritage, as thusly understood, comprehends not only a collection of monuments
but humanitys historical, cultural and social memory, preserved through authenticity, integrity
and sense of place, thus forming a crucial aspect of the development process. In both its tangible
and intangible forms, heritage fosters socio-economic regeneration and is a crucible of creativity,
a driver of 21st century economies. It is also a key element of resilience, from bio-cultural
knowledge and its role in climate change adaptation, to the sustainable model for urbanization
offered by traditional, dense development patterns. Perhaps most critically (in the face of climate
change, potential future resource scarcity, rapid urbanization and other trends), cultural heritage
with its value for identity strengthens social cohesion and social well-being and enhances the
livability of cities. In short, heritage is both an enabler and a driver of sustainable development
and it was for these values that it was included in Goal 11.
One of the most comprehensive efforts to address the role of cultural heritage in urban
development is the ICOMOS Symposium entitled Heritage, a driver of development held in
Paris in 2011. This meeting was held in anticipation of the UN Conference on Sustainable
Development (the Rio+20 Conference) and attended by nearly 1,200 heritage experts from over
100 countries. The meeting resulted in a doctrinal text in heritage known as the Declaration of
Paris on Heritage as a Driver of Development (the Paris Declaration). The International
Congress "Culture: Key to Sustainable Development" convened by UNESCO in Hangzhou
(China) in 2013 was a foundational event in these discussions. The Habitat III Issue Paper on
Urban Culture and Heritage provides another valuable contribution to these questions and to other
issues around culture, heritage, and urban sustainability. This work has yielded an enormous
diversity of practical approaches and solutions designed to leverage heritage in service of urban
resilience, safety, inclusiveness and sustainability.
From these, the following conclusions can be drawn:
Heritage has the power to strengthen communities where citizens associate the historic
environment with a shared identity, attachment to place and everyday life, including people
who are minorities, disadvantaged or socially excluded.
Traditional settlements, with their lasting cultural identity and socio-economic traditions,
raise the awareness and pride of citizens in local history and culture no matter where they
originate or how they may be adapted.
The mix of public and private spaces found in traditional settlements engenders social
cohesiveness and interaction by providing common spaces for diverse groups to interact.
Historic cities are by nature functionally and socially mixed, supporting a wide range of
complementary activities, and embody multiple cultural values. Historic cities were
vibrant, convivial, inspiring and have proved to be supremely adaptable to incremental and
harmonious change.
People are at the heart of heritage conservation policies and projects. Good governance and
transparency are key to a sense of ownership of heritage, which allows heritage to
strengthen the social fabric and enhances social well-being.
Public spaces like historic parks or plazas are often key to historic parts of towns, or
adjacent to historic monuments.
Historic towns, districts, and the historic parts of the cities are valuable for their uniqueness
and sense of place. They help to attract tourism, employment and local investment,
fostering the sustainable development of the city. They also engender curiosity and in so
doing, build an understanding and acceptance of others values, history and traditions.
In designing the Indicator for Target 11.4, it is also important to consider the key ways in
which heritage can make cities and human settlements more inclusive. Some examples include:
Culture based livelihoods have the potential for small and micro enterprises empowering
local communities and contributing to poverty alleviation.
Enables people to draw on and build on local and knowledge for their livelihoods and
problem solving rather than privileging external education and knowledge alone. They
offer a diversity of solutions to a wide range of problems.
Heritage, both tangible and intangible, thus contributes to the goal of making cities and
human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable in a myriad of ways, including by
strengthening sense of belonging and of identity of local communities; by promoting social
cohesion, inclusion and equity; and as a model of sustainable, traditional settlement patterns.
These processes are heterogeneous, complex and multi-dimensional. The challenge for the
Indicator for Target 11.4 is to design a metric that expresses a meaningful correlation between
these urban goals and heritage safeguarding. ICOMOS believes that measuring increases in the
number of cities and settlements that are taking steps to incorporate heritage safeguarding into
broader development and development finance governance frameworks offers an effective model
for doing so.
3.
The recognition of the inter-linkages of natural and cultural heritage provided by Target
11.4 are critical to harnessing the power of heritage, culture and nature-based solutions for
sustainability. The Indicator selected should be agile enough to measure not only increases in the
safeguarding of natural or cultural heritage but also in the effectiveness of governance tools at
increasing the integration of natural and cultural heritage safeguarding. In the co-joining of
cultural and natural heritage, Target 11.4 of course finds a ready antecedent in the World Heritage
Convention, among international laws, that natural and cultural heritage. This co-joining is
consonant with emerging best practice in the heritage field. A growing body of experience has
demonstrated that in many landscapes, natural and cultural heritage are inextricably bound together
and that the conservation of these resources would benefit from more integration. Protected natural
landscapes and cultural landscapes, for example, share much common ground: both are focused
on landscapes where human relationships with the natural environment over time define their
essential character. In the World Heritage context, there has been much work done to stimulate the
development of new methods and strategies to better integrate nature and culture.
4.
Landscape-Scale
A concern with the current, proposed Indicator (share of budget dedicated to the
preservation, protection and conservation of heritage including World Heritage sites) is the risk of
reducing the consideration of heritage to expenditure on conservation of monuments and protected
areas only. We believe the focus should be on the incorporation of cultural and natural heritage
into development, planning and development finance governance frameworks at a landscape
(regional) scale.
As discussed above, in order to explore how heritage operates at a landscape scale and how
heritage informs spatial development strategies and policies that effectively create equitable,
compact, connected, and socially inclusive cities, the idea of heritage must be understood in its
broader, modern sense.
Nowadays, as more and more people abandon small towns and the countryside, migrating
to large conurbations, urban development has been alternating between authoritarian policies and
anarchic planning that have already had serious, even catastrophic results. A key function of
heritage is to inform a focus on more balanced form of spatial development. This will be achieved
at regional development level. This is where lessons from our heritage, associated with best
participatory practice, will again be valued as a framework for new spatial development:
continuation of time-honored boundaries and settlement patterns.
There is an enormous diversity of practical approaches and solution designed to leverage
traditional settlement patterns and planning methods in service of making cities more inclusive
and equitable based on the references cited above. Such patterns are not only a key element for the
revitalization of historical core areas of cities and towns but are also of great importance to the
urbanization of the world, for their capacity to inform and guide new spatial development. In
order to leverage this accumulated wisdom, the following elements should be included in overarching spatial development strategies:
Promote and revive the value of historical settlement patterns, landscape forms and
traditional building techniques, while protecting the integrity of the historical urban fabric
in new spatial development and redevelopment.
Expand the use and availability of fiscal tools, such as tax incentives, to attract investment
both in core historic areas and the surrounding areas. These economic development
strategies and financial tools will provide a framework for revitalization and development
of the city.
Promote the integration of new development within the traditional street, public space,
architectural elements and cultural heritage patterns.
Use rules, regulations and financial incentives to discourage urban sprawl in the rural
countryside and encourage the revitalization and reuse of existing infrastructure.
Consider the historical urban-regional linkages when adapting historic and traditional
settlements to other areas.