74 Geographie, Raumordnung, Städtebau
The conservation of living heritage sites is a highly complex process. Two factors need careful consideration in order to achieve a balance in the management of such sites: the conservation demands of conservation experts for built heritage and the needs of local people for development of their heritage living space. The complexity of factors involved make for an interesting study of living heritage, taken up by this research in its main case study of the town of Nan in Thailand.
Research into the historical background of Nan and its cultural heritage reveals a living heritage site, which is both unique and diverse. Present day Nan was examined using a variety of analysis tools, which were applied to data from interviews, empirical data, field surveys, and documents, in order to better understand the nature of the living heritage site and changing trends over time. Luang Prabang in Lao PDR, a World Heritage site since 1995, was also selected as a further case study with which to compare Nan’s potential World Heritage status from a point of view of changes to living heritage attributes.
The outcomes of the research indicate the importance of the management of the sites, which can be at risk of losing balance by focusing on one aspect of heritage to the detriment of the other. The conservation perspective, if allowed to dominate, as in Luang Prabang, can cause irreparable damage to the social fabric, where the development needs of the town are not met. This research concludes that a balance of power amongst stakeholders in the collaborative networks managing such sites is vital to sustaining a balance of living heritage attributes.
Housing estates were fundamentally conceived upon state socialist utopia ideas to provide standard housing for citizens. While former state socialist housing estates have been extensively researched in the field of architecture, urban and sociology studies, there is still a gap in identifying how production processes affect morphological changes during the post-socialist era. This thesis compares the processes in the production of the largest housing estates of Marzahn in GDR and Petržalka in Czechoslovakia from 1970 to 1989 through contextual analysis of primary and secondary sources, which include visual maps, diagrams from professional architecture and planning journals, government documents and textbooks, as well as academic journals, books and newspaper articles. Then it discusses how these processes inadvertently created conducive conditions affecting their development in the market economy after 1989. It then interprets the results through application of Actor-Network Theory and Historical Institutionalism, while conceptualising them through David Harvey’s dialectical utopianism theory. Harvey (2000) delineates two types of utopia, one of spatial form and one of process. The former refers to materialised ideals in physical forms whereas the latter refers to the ongoing process of spatializing. The thesis aims to show how the production of Marzahn in GDR was more path dependent on policies established in 1950s and 1960s whereas Petržalka was a product of new Czechoslovakian policies in 1970s, changing aspects of the urban planning process, a manifestation of a more emphatic technocratic thinking on a wider scale. This ultimately influences the trajectories of development after 1989, showing more effects in Petržalka.
Living heritage sites are strongly connected to their historical, geographical, socio-political and cultural context. A descriptive narrative of the evolutionary process of the living heritage site of a Sufi shrine is undertaken in this research. It focuses on the changing relationship between the spatial and socio-cultural aspects over time. The larger or macro regional context is interrelated to the micro architectural context. The tangible heritage is defined by and intimately tied to the intangible aspects of the heritage. It is these constituting macro and micro elements and their interrelationships particularly through space and architecture that the research thesis explores in its documentation and analysis.
The Sufi shrine in the South Asian Pakistani context is representative of a larger culture in the precolonial era. It is an expression of an indigenous modernity, belonging to a certain time period, place and community. The Sufi shrine as a building type has evolved from the precolonial time period, particularly starting at the golden ages of the Muslim Empire in the world (9th – 12th century), through the colonial age when western modernity arrived until the current neoliberal paradigm within the post independence period. Continued and evolved use of space, ritualistic performances, multiple social groups using the site are various elements whose documentation and analysis can establish the essential co-relations that contribute to continuity of its historical living. Physical and social relation of the historic site to its immediate settlement context is also a significant element that preserves the socio-cultural context.
The chosen case of the Shrine of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, situated in the small town of Bhitshah in the province of Sindh, Pakistan forms a unique example where the particular physical and socio-cultural environment forms the context within which the Sufi heritage lives and survives. It is well integrated within its context at multiple levels. What are these levels and how do the constituting elements integrate is a major subject of research? These form the background to defining some of the basic issues and questions addressed in this doctoral thesis.
Given that living heritage sites are unique due to their particular association to the context, the case study method was used to gain deeper insight and understanding on the topic.
Since the end of the 1950s, Italy has focused part of its modernization on the erection of public works. Due to corruption, mafia, and further malpractice, this form of development has occasionally failed, producing a high number of constructions that have remained unfinished for decades. In 2007, the group of artists Alterazioni Video constructed an informal survey in the form of an on-line tool open to public contributions, which revealed that there are 395 unfinished public works in Italy from which 156, approximately 39.5%, are located in Sicily alone. In view of such a statistic, Alterazioni Video opted to coin the term ‘Incompiuto Siciliano’ – literally ‘Sicilian Incompletion’ – to refer to unfinished public works as a formal architectural style. This re-interpretation, which aims to convey the recovered dignity of these ‘modern ruins’, considers unfinished public works a type of heritage with the potential to represent the entirety of Italian society. Furthermore, it goes as far as to say an unfinished public work is ‘Incompiuto Siciliano’ despite being located in another of the Italian regions.
This doctoral dissertation embraces the artists’ argument to develop a complete study of Incompiuto Siciliano by embedding this architectural style/artistic project within the main debates on modern ruins at present. This is important because it is expected to contribute to the revalorization and eventual recommissioning of unfinished sites by validating Incompiuto Siciliano in the realm of academia. Furthermore, this work aspires to be a worthwhile source of information for future investigations dealing with cultural interpretations of incompletion in any other context – a not unreasonable goal considering how unfinished works are one of the key urban topics after the 2008 financial crisis. Hence, this doctoral dissertation uses Incompiuto Siciliano to discuss a different perspective in each of the five chapters and, though these can be read as independent contributions, the objective is that all chapters read together, form a clear, concise, continuous unit. And so it must be said this is not a dissertation about unfinished public works in Italy; this is a dissertation about Incompiuto Siciliano as an artistic response to unfinished public works in Italy – which clearly requires an interdisciplinary analysis involving Urban Studies, Cultural Geography, Contemporary Archaeology, Critical Heritage and Visual Arts.