Cultural heritage

About: Cultural heritage is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 28201 publications have been published within this topic receiving 273875 citations. The topic is also known as: cultural assets & cultural goods.

Conceptualising the subjective authenticity of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Abstract: Authenticity is a significant concept in the heritage field. However, the connotations of authenticity and its relevance to Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) need further consideration. Th...

Mayas and Tourists in the Maya World

Abstract: In 1992, an agreement was signed by the governments of five Latin American countries: Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico, to join forces in the promotion of international tourism in the Maya zone. This elaborate and costly project, called the Maya World, promises the visitor "something for all tastes" in the way of cultural experiences and leisure pursuits. Such large-scale tourist projects raise many questions concerning the underlying motivations for the development and the impact that they will have on the peoples and environments of the regions. Essentially, the Maya World tourist project can be seen as a newly constructed cultural landscape, based on design features from the existing cultural landscapes of the 29 Maya cultures of the region, imbued with new meanings that make them significant to a target market, the international tourist. This paper examines the construction of the Maya landscape in a Yucatec Maya town in Mexico and compares aspects of this Maya world to that develo...

Historic urban landscapes : framing the integration of urban and heritage planning in multilevel governance

Abstract: Urban development and heritage management have often been positioned as opposing powers in the management of historic urban landscapes. Heritage is seen as one of the ‘usual suspects’ of local grass-roots opposition to urban development, while development pressures are perceived as endangering heritage. In heritage theory and supranational policy, the trend is to recommend a holistic, integrated and multidisciplinary management of resources, by means of a new approach in heritage management: the landscape approach. In this context, landscape is defined as an inclusive and comprehensive platform that cannot be understood or managed except through an approach that embraces all its components. An urban application of this landscape approach is the historic urban landscape (HUL) approach, which is promoted by the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape. It provides the principles as well as guidance on implementing a landscape approach in national and subnational policy. Heritage management as a cultural practice has long been primarily about conserving the fabric of the past for future generations. As such it was more concentrated on the tangible and aesthetic dimensions of heritage. Instead, the historic urban landscape approach is considered holistic- and development-minded. It is not about allowing (or disallowing) transformation in itself, but about establishing and guiding the nature of the transformation. It addresses the future quality of the urban landscape and the relationships forming it. It positions heritage as an active change agent in the process of urban management. However, implementation on the national or subnational level proves to be a great challenge. The main aim of this thesis is to raise understanding of the integration of urban and heritage planning in multilevel governance, and in particular to explore ways to best reveal the relations between supranational and subnational policy. Heritage management is often subject to multilevel governance. A substantial body of laws, principles and policy guidelines, ranging from supra- to subnational levels are developed in this context. There is, however, a lack of systematic methods for comparative policy research in the field of cultural heritage. This hinders an understanding of policy transfer (vertical and horizontal) on a scale that goes beyond the case study, which then interferes with the feedback loop back into the supranational policies. In this research, a domain dependent taxonomy of heritage was identified in supranational policies. The taxonomy was used to develop a method of cross-referencing taxonomy, which was applied in a policy analysis tool. This tool can be used to analyse, classify and compare subnational urban and heritage policy policies. It facilitates the systematic identification of heritage concepts in policy. The tool was tested in Amsterdam by means of a series of three focus group interviews, held to introduce, apply and validate it. The results confirm the tool’s utility to cross-relate policies in multilevel governance. It allowed the interviewees to assess and reflect upon their policies and decide whether to revise them, in a constructive and evidence-based manner. While further research is needed to refine and optimize the taxonomy and its application in the policy analysis tool, it already promises to have applications beyond its initial aims. Vertical and horizontal comparison of policy provides input for evidence-based heritage planning and policy. The wider field of heritage significance and impact assessments could also benefit from exploring the application further.

The concept of ‘outstanding universal value’ in the World Heritage Convention

Abstract: The basic criterion for inclusion of a property on the World Heritage List is that of ‘outstanding universal value’, as defined in the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention. The paper demonstrates ...

Cultural and heritage tourism: the great debates.

Abstract: [Extract] Recent decades have seen an explosion of interest in the past embracing everything from fossils and furniture to folklore and faiths: ...No longer are only aristocrats obsessed with ancestry, only the super-rich collectors of antiques, only academics antiquarians, only a culturedmin01ity museum-goers; millions of ordinary folk now search out their roots, mobilize to protect beloved scenes, cherish their own and other people's mementoes, and dote on media versions of history. (Lowenthal,1993, p. 3). In these eloquent statements Lowenthal describes two simple but critical features of heritage - growth and change. Arguably growth and change are characteristics of virtually all aspects of late twentieth-century life. Throughout this book many authors attempt to describe succinctly and analyse critically growth and change in many aspects of society and particularly tourism. The challenge for this chapter is to do the same for cultural and heritage tourism. This author's response to this challenge will be to chart the debates, describe the rival social representations of heritage and cultural tourism and identify the gaps in existing academic discussions of this particular form of tourism.