Gábor Sonkoly, "Between preservation and development: the problems of contemporary urban heritage", in Fellows : Mégalopoles, villes-musées, bidonvilles : la ville au XXIe siècle, Paris, RFIEA, n° 31, december 2017

Extract

The globalization of the notion of urban heritage
The conflict between the preservation of urban heritage and the accelerating urban development is a global challenge with a great number of regional varieties. It has been present in Europe for centuries, where the long history of heritage/ monument protection confronted not only the effects of modernization and urbanization, but also those of devastating wars. It is very much in the centre of interest in the Americas in the last decades, where re-urbanizing tendencies, which can be summarized as “return to the center” resulted in the urban rehabilitation of several cities and towns. In Asia, where the significance of the built heritage is different to that of in Europe and where the acceleration and the volume of the urban growth is unprecedented, this conflict seemed to be of minor importance until the last few years. Nowadays, however, Asian urban heritage gains ground. Through the globalization of urban heritage, this originally European concept gets more and more distanced from its sources and its related notions such as renovation, reconstruction and monument protection are revised.

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