| Project Overview |
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World Heritage site management in developing countries is challenged by conflicting demands of conservation, economic development and social equity. Living with Heritage connects conservation policy to the dynamic interaction between cultural heritage, society and the natural environment. Increasing tourist numbers, damage to monuments and ecology, hotel development and land clearance for new farms and houses, are all inter-related. Management must be sensitive to these interactions and changes across space and time. The aim of the project is to create a versatile monitoring system to track, visualise and compare change over time at differing scales. World Heritage site managers will gain a new tool essential for implementing heritage policies to achieve sustainable development integrated with community needs and aspirations. Pressures on the national agencies that manage these sites are intense. The sites are often vast and are a key feature of the local tourist economy. Large numbers of people live in and around them. For comparatively poor countries, World Heritage sites are both an asset and a heavy obligation. The UNESCO World Heritage List includes over 600 cultural sites (of which 35 are classed as “in danger”), ranging from landscapes, such as the rice terraces of Luzon in the Philippines, to individual monuments, like the Taj Mahal in India. Most of the 19 new cultural sites added in 2003 are in the developing world. The World Heritage site of Angkor in Cambodia epitomises the problems and opportunities. APSARA, the Cambodian government authority responsible for the management of the Angkor-Siem Reap region faces complex demands. The site is vast and diverse, including the great ruined medieval capital city, its world-famous temples and Siem Reap, a rapidly growing town with a 19th century colonial core. Many people live within the designated World Heritage park. Siem Reap town and the surrounding region are subject to intense development to serve the burgeoning heritage tourist industry, on which the Cambodian economy now depends. Living standards are improving, the natural environment is being damaged and local communities face the stresses of rapid change and displacement. The 2nd UNESCO International World Heritage Conference on Angkor (November 2003) identified the next ten years as the critical period of intense development for Angkor-Siem Reap. The new information monitoring system that we intend to develop is both urgently needed and a timely innovation. The complex issue of living with heritage will be engaged by a joint Australian, international and Cambodian team through a structured program of participatory conservation planning involving local communities and agencies. The outcome will be a focus on heritage values and clarity in management objectives that relate both to local community development and to on-the-ground implementation of site management. To build the monitoring system spatial information science, including Geographical Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing data acquisition and time-series visualisation of change will be meshed with the pragmatic implementation of national heritage policies. Complementary and overlapping expertise in research, management and governance is required.
The broad field of spatial information science, including GIS and remote sensing, has come to be widely recognised as an essential and successful addition to expertise in many application fields (see Federal government – Australian Spatial Information Action Agenda). This is reflected in the establishment, by UNESCO, of a dedicated Remote Sensing and Information Management office. Over the past decade there has been an increasing emphasis on establishing principles of governance for heritage conservation that reconcile national and international heritage values. National and World Heritage managers are encouraged to share information and experience in adopting and implementing the World Heritage Convention through networks such as the Asia-Pacific Focal Point Group of the Department of Environment and Heritage, and conventions such as the Asia-Pacific World Heritage memorandum of agreement to which Australia is a signatory. A crucial tool for effective adoption and implementation is participatory planning. The Burra Charter – the Australian ICOMOS heritage conservation philosophy and methodology – is internationally recognised as world’s best-practice. Recently, the Getty Foundation funded an international participatory planning project to develop a heritage conservation philosophy and methodology for use by the Peoples’ Republic of China at the instigation of the Chinese State Administration of Cultural Heritage. Sharon Sullivan and Sullivan Blazejowski & Associates were involved as facilitators of the four-year project. That project provides the basis and the benchmark for the participatory approach proposed at Angkor in collaboration with UNESCO, APSARA, the Department of Environment and Heritage, and Godden Mackay Logan. Combining management and research to effect policy for heritage sites is now standard international practice. Large, urban-scale projects require the use of GIS to manage the volume and complexity of relevant information. The Godden Mackay Logan methodology for the recently completed Parramatta Historical Archaeological Landscape Management Study [3], implemented in collaboration with the University of Sydney GIS team, provides the overall structure for the monitoring policy to be applied to the more complex and extensive urban assessment and management issues of Angkor–Siem Reap. |
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Written by Administrator on Thursday, 30 June 2005. Last Updated by Kevin Davies on Tuesday, 04 March 2008 |