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Heritage and (under) Development: a Global Perspective
Economics and Built Heritage
Nordic Networking Event
Hämeenlinna, Finland
Donovan D. Rypkema
February 12, 2007
Thank you for letting me join you at this Nordic Networking Event. I very much
look forward to learning a great deal in the next two days.
Panu and Kaisa assigned me this topic of heritage and underdevelopment – a
global perspective. And in our exchange of emails that was more specifically defined as
heritage as part of development in “under” developed countries, and the particular
challenges of the under developed peripheries of the developed Northern Europe.
I accepted the assignment and I will give it my best shot. I would begin, however,
to ask you to ponder if we might not need to start adjusting our thinking not to developed
and underdeveloped, but perhaps to developed and overdeveloped. At least in my country
the greatest challenges both for heritage buildings and for sustainable development come
from what could easily be defined as overdevelopment. But that, I suppose, is a
discussion for another time.
Very often when I’m asked to think in a broad, systematic fashion, I turn first to a
work I hope many of you are familiar with – The Art of War, written about 500 B.C. by
the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu. Forget that it’s about armed conflict, Sun Tzu’s
intellectual discipline of identifying and evaluating the variables for a variety of
circumstances is still useful today. He ponders the Six Kinds of Terrain, the
Nine Varieties of Ground, and others. So I have tried to organize this presentation into
the Nine Heritage Situations in under-developed countries.
In the heritage conservation world it is conventional wisdom that historic
resources are at risk in two situations – when there is no money to maintain them, and
when there is so much money that heritage buildings are demolished for something
bigger, newer, shinier. While I do believe that premise has some validity, I think that a
more nuanced look at the developing world provides exceptions in both directions.
There are also three limitations of my perspective which you need to know from
the start. First, I am very much a practitioner, not an academic or a scholar. I would
suggest that perspective is neither better nor worse, but most probably a different starting
point than is true for most of you. Having said that, I am fortunate enough to get to teach
a course on the economics of historic preservation at Dr. Mason’s institution, the
University of Pennsylvania. And so you know, the reading for this week for my students
is the first chapter of Dr. Navrud’s excellent book on Valuing Cultural Heritage.
The second caveat is this – both my framework for this discussion and my
particular examples are going to be based on a rather narrow lens. They are limited either
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to places where I have worked myself, or where I have personal contact and
communications with those who are working directly in these countries or on these
projects. And like me, these people will tend to be practitioners rather than scholars.
Third, I’m not at all certain that I’ve gotten it right. The situations, the challenges,
the opportunities may all be wrong. But I take comfort that these two days were described
as a “think tank” opportunity. So I look forward to adjusting my own thinking based on
your comments, corrections and amendments. Also, I would suggest that one of the
advantages of a non-scholar among scholars is the opportunity to put into a broader and
deeper intellectual framework the observations that are formed from a decidedly nonscholarly perspective.
Einstein once said that things should be made as simple as possible but not more
so. I may have crossed that line with these categories. There are absolutely overlaps and
incongruities in the way I’ve arranged these situations. But, again, I view this as a starting
point for analysis, not the final conclusion.
Well, with those preliminaries out of the way, let me begin. I’ll start with the Nine
Situations I have identified and then I’ll give an example of one or more countries in each
of those situations and the reason I decided it categorize in that manner.
The Nine Situations for Heritage in Under Developed Countries are these:
The "1000 Higher Priorities" Countries
"Struggling to Create an Approach" Countries
Success Stories against all odds Countries
Institutionalized Heritage Countries
“The Market has the Answer” Countries
"Three to One Leaping" Counties
"Three to One Wanna Be" Countries
"Saving Monuments is Enough" Countries
“Thought it was settled but it’s not” Countries
So the first category is The 1000 Higher Priorities Countries. By this I mean
countries that are consumed with mere survival. These countries always have
extraordinary high rates of poverty, most often are in the midst of ongoing internal
violence, very low levels of literacy and, if there is any government at all it is rarely
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representative and frequently both corrupt and oppressive. Countries in this category
would include Haiti, Somalia, East Timor, the Sudan. In these situations there is no
economic base in either the public or the private sector available to invest in heritage
buildings. International aid will be focused on some combination of food and water for
basic survival and peace keeping operations. While in many instances there are
significant built heritage assets, they are in imminent danger from lack of maintenance,
and destruction during civil war. There is usually an absence of the intellectual
infrastructure to make the case for the identification and protection of more indigenous
assets. What can international advocates for heritage conservation do? What
opportunities are there for systematic evaluation of the impact of heritage resources?
What are the ways to integrate the built heritage into the local economy? Frankly the
answers to these three questions are, “Not much, not likely, and probably not.” Having
said that, I’d like nothing more than to hear differently.
The second situation is countries struggling to find an approach. I think Indonesia
is a good example and perhaps South Africa as well. In these countries often many the
monuments are remnants of a colonial empire creating ambivalence at best and hostility
at worst among the local population. There is an internal conflict whether designating
them as “historic” and giving them some sort of legislative protection is somehow
condoning or even celebrating the colonization. But last year a young Sumatran woman
heritage advocate said this to me, “Some of my colleagues say we shouldn’t protect or
valorize colonial buildings, after all they are Dutch buildings. And I respond to them,
'Dutch buildings? It was our fathers’ hands who built them. Those are our buildings and
we ought to celebrate the skill of those who built them.' ”
The characteristics of countries in this category are at least some semblance of
democracy, a growing middle class, and economic growth in the country. On the heritage
side there needs to be enlightened heritage understanding in academia and either an
organized NGO sector or a relatively uninhibited press.
Recently there were proposals in Indonesia that property owners would have to be
compensated in exchange for their buildings being designated as historic. It was the NGO
sector that has led the opposition to this approach. In Sumatra an NGO – Badan Warison
– is building a heritage advocacy organization from the ground up, including academics,
students, and recently some property owners. They are committed to integrating historic
preservation into development, but they are still struggling to establish a regulatory
protection framework country wide.
Category three is countries with minimal resources yet wonderful success stories.
My examples here are in three different continents – Cuba, Ghana, and Palestine. All
three examples have a wonderful inventory of heritage resources. In all three places most
of those resources are at great risk. But still there are historic preservation victories. In
Cuba, in spite of decades of isolation from the US and other countries in the Americas,
and 15 years without the financial support of the Soviet Union, somehow they are
hanging on to their historic buildings. Of course in this regard it helps that there is an
authoritarian government that can simply mandate protections, and there is virtually no
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privately owned property. Nonetheless, Havana in particular has well established
preservation protocols, is an ongoing laboratory for preservation professionals from
around the world, and has made the best of their limited resources. My concern is that
five minutes after Castro dies, there will be so much money that flows into the country
from the US, Canada, and Spain that too many heritage buildings will be lost in the
process.
In Elmina, Ghana, a heritage-based comprehensive development strategy is being
implemented. Elmina has a centuries-long relationship with Europe and served as an
outpost and port for the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English. Its economy has been at
various times based on gold, slaves, pepper and ivory. With considerable assistance from
the European Union and the Dutch government and technical assistance from the
Netherlands and elsewhere, Elmina is using its heritage resources as means, not just end.
The ten-year “heritage strategy” is actually comprised of five components including
drainage and waste management, fishing and harbor improvements, health, education,
and tourism and local economic development. They are certainly looking toward heritage
tourism as a growing part of the economic base, but they are viewing their resources
much more broadly than that.
My last example in the success with minimal resources category is Palestine. I
don’t know how you could find a more difficult environment within which to work than
there – tens of thousands of displaced persons, poverty and high unemployment, conflicts
with Israel, conflicts between Fatah and Hamas, extreme limitations on movement, and
on and on. Half of the traditional buildings in Palestine are abandoned. And yet, a
wonderful success story against all odds.
At the end of 2006 the Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation received one
of the Dubai International Awards for Best Practices. They received the award not just
because of their ongoing effort to rehabilitate the heritage buildings in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip. Rather that their program is specifically geared to providing training, reviving
traditional skills, and creating employment opportunities while doing so.
The Riwaq Centre is an NGO that has received support from multiple
international donors especially from SIDA, the Swedish International Development
Agency. International donors have required that detailed records be maintained about
jobs, expenditures, etcetera. They are appropriately rehabilitating heritage buildings for
between 60% and 70% of the cost of new construction. Every $100,000 project typically
provides 3000 to 3500 workdays, with labor constituting around 70% of the total
expenditures.
This is certainly development through heritage conservation, with tourism having
very little to do with it.
Institutionalized Heritage Countries is the next category, and Brazil is my
example. The characteristics of this category are: there is a regulatory framework in place
for the protection of heritage assets; there is strong advocacy for historic preservation
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both within the government and in the NGO and academic sectors; there is strong
association with international organizations – in Brazil’s case that includes ICCROM,
ICOMOS, UNESCO, and others. There are incentives in place to encourage the private
sector investment in heritage buildings. There are specific programs integrating heritage
conservation and development strategies. And there is an intellectual infrastructure that
thinks, writes, debates and convenes around pertinent preservation issues. This doesn’t
mean, of course, that there aren’t setbacks and disappointments, but there is an
understanding of and commitment to heritage conservation across sectors and disciplines.
My next category is “The Market has the Answers” Countries. My example is
going to be Slovakia, but I would speculate that other emerging market-based economies
in Central and Eastern Europe will fall in this category as well.
These countries are making a rapid and simultaneous transition in both their
political systems and their economic systems. While many of us in the West appreciate
the change from top-down authoritarian political system to participatory democracy and
from a state-driven to a market-driven economic system, heritage buildings can be
victims in this process. Without meaning to oversimplify, in the case of Slovakia on the
economic side, they seem to have jumped all the way forward to 19th century American
capitalism. There is a widely held political and economic viewpoint that if it’s a good
idea, the market place will do it. And if the market place doesn’t do it, it must not be a
good idea. This perspective manifests itself in three ways that affect heritage resources.
First, instead of a progressive income tax system where higher income individuals pay a
higher rate of taxes than those with lower incomes, there is essentially a flat tax where all
incomes are taxed at the same rate. Second, since it is assumed that if it’s a good idea the
marketplace will do it, there is a strong antipathy toward the creation of governmental
incentives that would encourage private capital to invest in areas, like historic
preservation, deemed in the public good. Finally, while there are land use laws, the
penalty for violating the law is not at all proportionate to the benefit of breaking the rules.
In Bratislava last summer I saw an eight story building being constructed in an
area zoned to only allow five story buildings. But the developer simply paid a fine, built
the cost of the fine into his construction budget, and kept on building. When the penalty
for non-compliance is far less than the benefits of violation, land use laws are of
negligible value. The protections for historic buildings fall under the same risk.
While there is academic expertise in heritage conservation and an emerging NGO
sector, when the public policy excessively subordinates itself to the whims of the
marketplace, those voices are not particularly heeded.
There are a handful of places in the world which, in a relatively short time period,
have gone straight from third world countries to first world countries – these I refer to as
the Three to One Leaping Counties. Actually they tend to be cities rather than countries
and I would include in this category Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai. Now on a
geopolitical basis the three are all different, Singapore being an independent state, Hong
Kong a semi-autonomous district of China, and Dubai the capital city of one of the seven
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emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates. But here’s what they have in common –
they are all fully integrated into the global economy, they all view themselves as 21st
Century cities, their strategies for rapid growth largely ignored their heritage assets, and
now in retrospect they are recognizing they should have paid more attention to their
heritage buildings on the way. All three, today, are attempting, rather after the fact, to
preserve their few remaining historic buildings. In some cases they are reconstructing
heritage buildings that have been lost and in other instances trying to create a heritage
context out of what remains. They are not using heritage assets for job creation as in
Palestine or for heritage tourism like Cuba. Rather they are trying to add a sense of urban
evolution as counterpoint to their chrome and glass skyscrapers.
But lessons from those places are being learned by the next category – the Three
to One Wanna Be Countries. These are places that, too, aspire to be globalized, 21st
century cities, but want to incorporate their heritage buildings as part of that process. My
two examples are Bahrain in the Person Gulf and Sharjah, the Emirate that abuts Dubai.
In Sharjah, a very enlightened Emir looked at Dubai becoming the financial and
commercial capital of the UAE and Abu Dhabi as the political and oil capital, and made
the decision that his emirate would be the country’s educational and cultural center. As
part of that effort he has put considerable resources into restoring the heritage buildings
that remain and meticulously recreating important buildings that have been lost. He is
even demolishing late 20th century buildings that have an adverse impact on the context
of the historic structures.
The Kingdom of Bahrain funded and the United Nations Development Program
commissioned the preparation of a comprehensive heritage strategy for their two major
cities – Manama and Muharraq. There were traditional preservation elements included in
the analysis, such as inventories of heritage buildings, design guidelines, protected zones
and buffer areas. But central to the assignment was the creation of strategies to utilize the
heritage resources as part of an economic development strategy. Notably the decision was
consciously made by Bahrain to create this strategy through UNDP rather than UNESCO.
They assumed – rightly or wrongly – that the development arm of the UN would be more
attuned to the integration of economic development and heritage resources than would
the cultural arm.
But in both Bahrain and Sharjah they want to learn from the mistakes in relation
to heritage assets that were made by those places a decade ahead of them on the
development curve.
Then there is a group of countries that I’ll refer to as the “Saving the Monuments
is Enough” countries. These are the places where the highest grade landmarks are
probably safe from demolition but the context of those monuments is at risk. And there is
little if any concern for the urban built heritage below the monument level. I would argue
that if we are really serious about making the built heritage an integral part of
development, the handful of landmark buildings will have little to do with it. This is
particularly true if we move past thinking that the economic impacts of the built heritage
is more than just tourism.
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I think Iran is a country that fits in this category. There has been considerable
focus recently on the Iranian city of Isfahan. UNESCO has threatened to remove the
Naqsh-e Jahan Square from the World Heritage List if the top two floors of a nearby
commercial development tower are not removed. Iranian officials are apparently
complying.
But below that monument level, other heritage resources are in jeopardy. Iran
isn’t a country that immediately leaps to mind in talking about unbridled capitalism, but
both private development and public transportation projects are putting at risk the
important, but not necessarily world heritage quality structures.
Finally there are the “Thought it was settled but it’s not” Countries. And my
example is nearby – St. Petersburg, Russia. Here is this World Heritage Site, and one of
the most beautiful cities in the world…certainly the pride of Russia. But in December,
Gazprom, the state-owned gas company, unveiled its plans for a huge complex directly
across the river from the center of St. Petersburg, and vastly out of scale with the historic
city.
In fairness, Gazprom held an international competition to design the corporate
headquarters building and surrounding structures. I saw an exhibit of all of the proposals
in December, any some of them are breathtakingly wonderful and imaginative, and could
be among the first landmarks built in the 21st Century. But they could just as easily be
built three miles away, where there would be negligible negative impact on historic St.
Petersburg. But in Russia today there is not a clear distinction between the government
and the corporate world. Therefore there is little chance that the current plans will be
significantly altered.
Russia is a country with incredible historic resources, an intellectual infrastructure
of advocacy for heritage conservation, and under the Soviet system a reasonably strong
commitment to preserve resources. But today the money of the giant corporations speak
far louder than preservationists.
Of course you will have noticed that I have not mentioned China, where to say the
least heritage conservation is problematic. But China is so complex and multifaceted, I
couldn’t put it into just one of these categories. In fact, there are examples within China
that probably fit in each of the nine.
But I’m ending with mentioning China for another reason. China is now a major
player in providing assistance to the developing world. In just the last two weeks they’ve
committed loans to Zambia, Namibia, and the Sudan. But here’s the worrisome aspect –
Last month the Philippines turned down a loan from the Asian Development Bank
because China would lend them the money quicker with fewer strings attached. What that
really means is that the evaluations of projects’ impacts on the natural and built
environment that are built into loans from the international lending agencies are most
likely absent from the loan agreements with China. Preparing Environmental Impact
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Statements takes time, and we shouldn’t be at all surprised if countries in the developing
world opt out of that process if they can borrow money from China without those
requirements. This is an issue that the international community will need to keep on top
of.
So there is my best shot at various roles that heritage conservation plays in
development in the developing world. Clearly we have far to go to make it the rule rather
than the exception.
Thank you very much.