HAVE WE VALUED OUR CITIES ENOUGH? Values bind us together which makes our communities stronger and united. Communities are built upon our tolerance and understanding of the value of our ties, and ties pave our cities towards a bright future. The structure of this book is constructed around the concept of “value”. It contains a collection of readings about the Challenges we face in Cities, Culture, and Heritage. The book is divided into three Parts. The first part focuses on aesthetical values; the second contains articles on cultural values in cities, and the third part is a specialized theme on water values and urban areas. Collectively, the 12 chapters discusses findings, approaches, methodologies, and provide new ways of understanding values in old and new cities. This collection of essays and contributors is concerned with underlying issues such as architectural values, heritage and the city, urban identity, conservation and preservation, water values, and climate issues. Each part contains several chapters to enable cross-reference and comparison. This book is a useful collection of academic resource which discusses some questions and issues that cities have to face.

The act of identifying, protecting, restoring, and reusing buildings, districts, and built landscapes of historic and cultural significance is, at its best, a reflective and consequential process of urban and socio-economic reform. It has the potential to reconcile conflicting memories, meanings, and cultural tensions, bridging and expanding the perceived boundaries of multiple disciplines towards bigger aspirations of city-making and social justice. How and where do such aspirations overlap and differ across nations and societies across the world? In places with different histories, governance structures, regulatory stringency, and populist dispositions, who are the specific players, and what are the actual processes that bring about bigger and deeper change beyond just the conservation of an architectural or urban entity of perceived value? This collection of scholarly articles by theorists, academics, and practitioners explores the global complexity, guises, and potential of heritage conservation. Going from Tokyo to Cairo, Shenzhen to Rome, and Delhi to Moscow, this volume examines a vast range of topics – indigenous habitats, urban cores, vernacular infrastructure, colonial towns, squatters, burial sites, war zones, and modern landmarks. It surfaces numerous inherent issues – water stress, deforestation, social oppression, poverty, religion, immigration, and polity, expanding the definitions of heritage conservation as both a professional discipline and socio-cultural catalyst. This book argues that the intellectual and praxis limits of heritage conservation – as the agency of reading, defining, and intervening with built heritage – can be expansive, aimed at bigger positive change beyond a specific subject or object; plural, enmeshed with multiple fields and specializations; and empathetic, born from the actual socio-political realities of a place.

This volume looks at sustainable protection and sustainable use of cultural and natural heritage, particularly in view of the current challenges of the 21st century. For more than 40 years the World Heritage Convention has regulated the protection of the cultural and natural heritage of humankind, particularly in that heritage shall be protected if it is threatened by modern development. The international community has also adopted sustainability and sustainable development, as objectives to facilitate the protection of cultural and natural heritage. Sustainable heritage protection and use must therefore be preserved in the face of the global challenges it faces and must be perceived in terms of societal, political and corresponding economic paradigms.

Water is vital for life, and its availability has been a concern for mankind throughout the ages. Its presence has always been ascertained in a variety of ways and the development of human society everywhere is connected with various forms of water management. Man also needed to manage water to find protection from its dangers and the need for that is increasing. In the coming decades, the impact of climate change is expected to intensify floods and droughts, affect groundwater resources, raise sea levels, increase pollution and enhance the frequency and magnitude of disasters. Societies around the world are challenged to adapt to these threats to ensure water security, economic prosperity and environmental and cultural sustainability. This book deals with the heritage of water management and the use that was made of water, as well as the impact of water management on heritage. An example of the former may be an ancient irrigation system in the Filipines or in the Middle East that still functions today, while the latter may reflect the importance of maintaining groundwater levels for the preservation of organic remains on archaeological sites or of wooden piles underneath standing buildings. In either case the papers in this book reflect the dynamic nature of water, and hence the equally dynamic relation between water management and heritage. This publication follows up on a Heritage and Water conference in Amsterdam, the first of its kind. Its main purpose is to credibly present the importance and value of heritage and historical experience for water and sustainable development, and vice versa, present the importance of water management for the protection of heritage. It presents evolving insights and concepts about Water and about Heritage from a variety of disciplines, policy and public perspectives illustrated with cases studies and aims to connect decision makers with experts such as engineers, archaeologists, historians, geographers, ecologist and landscape architects

In a world where half of the population lives in cities and more than 90 percent of urban growth is occurring in the developing world, cities struggle to modernize without completely losing their unique character, which is embodied by their historic cores and cultural heritage assets. As countries develop, cultural heritage can provide a crucial element of continuity and stability: the past can become a foundation for the future. This book collects innovative research papers authored by leading scholars and practitioners in heritage economics, and presents the most current knowledge on how heritage assets can serve as drivers of local economic development. What this book tries to suggest is a workable approach to explicitly take into account the cultural dimensions of urban regeneration in agglomerations that have a history and possess a unique character, going beyond an approach based solely on major cultural heritage assets or landmarks. The knowledge disseminated through this book will help stakeholders involved in preparation, implementation, and supervision of development investments to better assess the values of cultural heritage assets and incorporate them in urban development policies.

Bringing together leading conservation scholars and professionals from around the world, this volume offers a timely look at values-based approaches to heritage management. Over the last fifty years, conservation professionals have confronted increasingly complex political, economic, and cultural dynamics. This volume, with contributions by leading international practitioners and scholars, reviews how values-based methods have come to influence conservation, takes stock of emerging approaches to values in heritage practice and policy, identifies common challenges and related spheres of knowledge, and proposes specific areas in which the development of new approaches and future research may help advance the field.

With disappearing music venues, and arts and culture communities at constant risk of displacement in our urban centers, the preservation of intangible cultural heritage is of growing concern to global cities. This book addresses the role and protection of intangible cultural heritage in the urban context. Using the methodology of Urban Legal Anthropology, the author provides an ethnographic account of the civic effort of Toronto to become a Music City from 2014-18 in the context of redevelopment and gentrification pressures. Through this, the book elucidates the problems cities like Toronto have in equitably protecting intangible cultural heritage and what can be done to address this. It also evaluates the engagement that Toronto and other cities have had with international legal frameworks intended to protect intangible cultural heritage, as well as potential counterhegemonic uses of hegemonic legal tools. Understanding urban intangible cultural heritage and the communities of people who produce it is of importance to a range of actors, from urban developers looking to formulate livable and sustainable neighbourhoods, to city leaders looking for ways in which their city can flourish, to scholars and individuals concerned with equitability and the right to the city. This book is the beginning of a conservation about what is important for us to protect in the city for future generations beyond built structures, and the role of intangible cultural heritage in the creation of full and happy lives. The book is of interest to legal and sociolegal readers, specifically those who study cities, cultural heritage law, and legal anthropology.

This book examines examples of contemporary situation of historic regions in the Middle East and its broader geographic context connected to the historic trade routes, offering cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral perspectives. The region is home to ancient settlements and early human endeavors to form cities, and across the region historic urban historic features, such as ancient city centers, still exist alongside contemporary ones. Many of those historic regions are along the Silk Roads. However, the urban continuity that once existed over generations in the physical and social paradigm have been interrupted by rapid urbanization, globalization and urban economic pressures, in addition to conflicts and frequent destructive natural hazards. It is often the case that dealing with such pressing issues in a historic city is more complex than dealing with those in newly built cities and urban areas. Based on carefully selected and updated papers from the Silk Cities 2017 International Conference, this book appeals to researches, practitioners and policy makers.

Theory without practice is empty, practice without theory is blind, to adapt a phrase from Immanuel Kant. The sentiment could not be truer of cultural heritage ethics. This intra-disciplinary book bridges the gap between theory and practice by bringing together a stellar cast of academics, activists, consultants, journalists, lawyers, and museum practitioners, each contributing their own expertise to the wider debate of what cultural heritage means in the twenty-first century. Cultural Heritage Ethics provides cutting-edge arguments built on case studies of cultural heritage and its management in a range of geographical and cultural contexts. Moreover, the volume feels the pulse of the debate on heritage ethics by discussing timely issues such as access, acquisition, archaeological practice, curatorship, education, ethnology, historiography, integrity, legislation, memory, museum management, ownership, preservation, protection, public trust, restitution, human rights, stewardship, and tourism. This volume is neither a textbook nor a manifesto for any particular approach to heritage ethics, but a snapshot of different positions and approaches that will inspire both thought and action. Cultural Heritage Ethics provides invaluable reading for students and teachers of philosophy of archaeology, history and moral philosophy – and for anyone interested in the theory and practice of cultural preservation.

This book explores bilingual community education, specifically the educational spaces shaped and organized by American ethnolinguistic communities for their children in the multilingual city of New York. Employing a rich variety of case studies which highlight the importance of the ethnolinguistic community in bilingual education, this collection examines the various structures that these communities use to educate their children as bilingual Americans. In doing so, it highlights the efforts and activism of these communities and what bilingual community education really means in today's globalized world. The volume offers new understandings of heritage language education, bilingual education, and speech communities for bilingual Americans in the 21st century.