Think, for a moment, about your favorite city or town. Allow the image to fill your mind. Now hold it there. What did you come up with?
When I imagine my favorite city, I think of my hometown in northern California. I picture the small city library, ringing with activity as students flock to its refreshing shade after school. I remember countless drives to the high school, visiting favorite roads where best friends lived, and gathering with family to watch parades wind through the downtown in the dappled light of summer.
You likely have a similar memory. Perhaps it is of the public park where you played as a child or the neighborhood where you grew up. Maybe you thought of something more recent, of that building where you met your first love or the ancient halls of learning where you went to university.
Wherever it is, there is something in common about all our favorite places. They are imbued with our fondest memories; with our relationships to family, friends, and community; with our identity and our self-image. A “place” is more than a mere clod of earth. It is a living connection to the past.
Place and Heritage
In the heritage field, the concept of place encompasses all these attributes and more. Donovan Rypkema, an advisor to our organization, describes place as “the vessel within which the ‘spirit’ of the community is stored.” Community is the catalyst for making a place a product not just of individuals but of a society. Place transcends time for, regardless of its era, it is created in concord with human scale and human needs. Developing organically from the countless social relations that define it, place is a product of the people who built it, their environment, and their history.
We at Global Heritage Fund work to reveal the spirt of place that defines our many projects around the world. Through our projects, we restore sites and buildings to their former glory, working with a wide range of stakeholders to find long-term uses for historic places. We strengthen the connection between people and their spaces, ensuring the sustainability of our endeavors.
In the remote community of Archita, six hundred residents make their living in agriculture, livestock (mostly sheep), and working in the nearby city Sighisoara. Restoration work on historic parts of the village must include this wide range of stakeholders to find long-term uses for historic places.
This process of placemaking is at the heart of our work. To “make” a place is to imbue it with the communal spirit of the people who reside within it, but to “remake” a heritage site requires far more. Reaching back to the spirit of antiquity, we strive to reconcile the original uses of a place with the community’s modern needs and desires, creating a path forward for our built heritage that is both desirable and sustainable.
Placemaking and “Remaking” a Place
Historic buildings and sites are significant due to the deep connections people have with them. These connections are rooted in their cultural significance. This is the driving force behind why a location becomes a place and why a place becomes a cherished heritage site.
Take a Gothic cathedral. This structure was intended to create a bridge between the temporality of humanity and the perfection of divinity. It often took centuries and the passing of generations to build. Simply stepping foot inside such a place is electric, a connection with the living, the dead, and those yet to be. It is a simulacrum of eternity.
A Gothic cathedral, or temple built in the Cambodian jungle 1,000 years ago, or the overgrown ruins of a long-dead civilization in Colombia – what is it that connects them? They inspire. They uplift the human spirit. These heritage sites represent the collective history and identity of a people, and they belong to everyone therein. In this sense, identifying what makes a heritage site more than a mere attraction, what makes it a “place,” is essential to our work. Determining the essential qualities of a building or a site gives us insight into why it is important and how we can best conserve it.
How we go from these insights to a plan of action is the most difficult, and precarious, of all the actions we take as an organization. Each site is unique and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to preservation. The conservation, management, and development goals we create must be sensitive to the history of the place. More pressing, however, is the need to consider the people who reside in or around it. Our work has shown us that the fight for heritage preservation and enhancement is fundamentally a communal endeavor. From the beginning of every project, we base our work in the leadership of our multiple stakeholders, including local community boards to NGOs, private sector companies, and local and national governments. In this way, we address the root social and economic factors that frame human relationships with cultural heritage sites.
A new location does not become a place until it is infused with social and cultural significance co-created by its users. Similarly, an old place does not become relevant to its users until they, too, have forged their own link on the unbroken chain of eternity. Heritage is, after all, about interpreting history for the future and re-reading our past through our contemporary values.
Placemaking, Heritage, and Modern Development
“Placemaking” has long been used in real estate development to describe a community-oriented approach to designing the built environment. However, “placemaking” has critical components and growth areas that go beyond the design process. After construction has ended and the crews have gone home, the community that grows up within a place is left to develop its own social relations with and within the new project. The new location does not become a place until it is infused with social and cultural significance co-created by its users. This may go beyond the designers’, planners’, or developers’ expectations, underscoring why it is important to consider the community’s input in building and development practices at an early stage. This is essential to the placemaking process.
What makes a community a desirable place to live in? Obviously, key indicators like safety, school quality, and proximity to work opportunities are important material factors conducive to the success of a thriving community. What makes a community a place is the connection people have with it and with each other within it. This is an active, bidirectional process that does not happen immediately or in a planned manner. Rather, it is an organic development from the community.
The placemaking process is a unique opportunity for heritage sites and historic buildings to dovetail with modern development. Like open spaces, historic places can add value to real estate development and provide a stimulus and focal point for regeneration schemes, which create more homes and more jobs. The harmonious co-existence of the new and the old is the hallmark of a successful integration of heritage into modernity. A great example is the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Italy. Construction began on the main building in the 13th century, the second floor was finished by the 17th century, and the interior rooms have been continuously updated and improved until the modern day. The seat of government for the city of Siena, the Palazzo Pubblico has grown and changed with the city itself, a paradigm for balancing the scales between conservation and development.
In the UNESCO World Heritage site of Hampi, locals use the historic ruins for modern needs, showing that makes a community a place is the connection people have with it and with each other within it.
The critical part of this process is integrating the old with the new. Save for planned cities and districts, where each building can be integrated within a unified whole, a new development project is not isolated but is built within the constraints of its urban plan. At its best, the real estate industry works in concert with the built environment of a place, designing buildings that emerge naturally from the fabric of pre-existing urbanism. At its worst, the real estate industry does great violence to heritage and thus the essential nature of a place.
Modern architecture that is based upon new technologies of construction tends to reject historical contexts in order to invent something that is purely functional and new. You can see this very clearly in many modern Chinese cities, where mass urbanization has led to the widespread demolition of the old and vernacular. The triumph of generic, modern designs results in what one critic calls “one look for a thousand cities.” Such generic designs have changed the characters of cities – and not for the better.
The real estate industry must be careful when considering how development plans interact with pre-existing built heritage. It takes centuries to create a harmoniously integrated urbanism such as that of Beijing or, in the West, of Rome. It takes only one jarring building to disrupt it. To effectively incorporate the value of heritage into placemaking, the real estate industry needs to recognize that historic buildings and sites are the product of extended communal efforts involving a multitude of stakeholders. By embracing a community-oriented approach that draws upon local assets and inspiration, developers – like preservationists – can tap into the wellspring of communal creativity that gives heritage sites their appeal – and create places of long-lasting value.
Integrating Development
A quote often attributed to Gustav Mahler says that “tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” This means that the ways past eras have developed their cities are not consigned to the dustbin of history but are essential parts of our daily lives. Development should emerge out of the organic framework that already exists, building upon the past without being enslaved by it. In this win-win situation, we can conserve what is best in our places without sacrificing any of the benefits of modernity.
Local artwork shows the integration of historic buildings in Karachi with contemporary developments. The placemaking process is a unique opportunity for heritage sites and historic buildings to dovetail with modern development projects.
To return to the example of contemporary China, urban development was allowed to run roughshod over the historical fabric of many cities, and in place of a harmonious environment, a mishmash of discordant elements was thrown together. As is often the case, however, the communities fought back. Today, a broad range of stakeholders has realized the importance of heritage conservation in preserving the authenticity of place. Historical neighborhoods are now seen as desirable places to live precisely because they exemplify traditional forms and the values and aesthetics those forms represent. The people moving to these historic neighborhoods have chosen to maintain the forms of the past in concord with the methods of the present, improving their living conditions without demolishing the built heritage of their ancestors.
Place is something created over a very long time, and it is much easier to lose it than to get it back again. Happily, both the state and the market recognize the immense violence visited on their own heritage, making it much more difficult to green-light shortsighted development projects in the future. As modern China shows us, it is clear that conserving heritage has socio-economic viability. Incorporating conservation as a planning function can alleviate the conflicts of interest that emerge between those seeking to preserve their heritage and those wanting to maximize the real estate potential in urban areas. It is indeed possible, and even desirable, to have both.
However, given the rising economic pressures of real estate development, the conservation of built cultural heritage requires directional policies and incentives to achieve a certain balance. These measures would involve channeling real estate development demands and requirements as well as making conservation more meaningful for communities. Although such processes may be time-consuming, requiring long planning processes and community involvement, it is clear that these resources would ultimately be of benefit to all involved.
Nada Hosking, Director of Projects, Programs and Partnerships, and Kuanghan Li, Director of the China Heritage Program, contributed to this piece.