Sustainability and Urban Conservation: the hazards and virtues of the tipping point

The idea of a tipping point is a useful one for urban conservation globally. Not only do cities function as locations where sustainable development must be achieved in order to address the simultaneous goals of environmental,... [ view full abstract ]

The idea of a tipping point is a useful one for urban conservation globally. Not only do cities function as locations where sustainable development must be achieved in order to address the simultaneous goals of environmental, economic and social well-being, but heritage systems themselves are experiencing new and complex pressures that invite questions about their future. The proposals put by many – including the Director-General of UNESCO – that ‘culture’ must be recognized as a ‘fourth pillar’ or ‘integrating factor’ in sustainable development are coupled with strengthened calls within heritage discourses for sustainable cities, community empowerment, bottom-up approaches and a democratization of what ‘heritage’ is and how it is constructed within contexts of globalization.

In many ways, the UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape or ‘HUL’ (2011) is an artefact of these trends. Like all international normative instruments, the HUL provides a rather generalized set of statements, which could be seen as either supporting better practices, or providing rhetoric for ‘lowering the standards’. The HUL has offered some new and potentially useful language and opened opportunities, particularly for city governments and citizens that want to rethink the challenging equation of sustainability and urban conservation.

There are some emerging examples of the incorporation of the HUL approach, including the work by the City of Ballarat in Victoria, Australia and it is notable that many of the cities that have joined the ‘HUL/urban heritage’ program as ‘pilot projects’ are located in the Asia-Pacific region. In part this is due to the promulgation of the ‘HUL’ by the Shanghai-based World Heritage Institute for Training and Research in the Asia-Pacific Region (WHITR-AP). This paper charts the growth of the HUL as an idea from its acceptance by UNESCO to its reception and implementation in these pilot project cities and in doing so it explores the conditions through which a perceived ‘tipping point’ has been reached.