Write a dialogue between 2 Friends disscusing about need to presreve and protect the world heritage sites
Answers
As urbanisation expands and the rural is incorporated into the urban, the pace and scale of urbanisation has often been called destructive. However, the continuing resilience of the urban populations, the adaptation and accommodation of urban informalities, makes it better to consider urbanisation as a complex churning of temporal and spatial layers of cultural heritage, resulting from the historical and contemporary fusion of incoming migrants with existing populations. Besides, rather than ‘freezing’ heritage into particular time periods, or genres, memory and place studies show how incoming migrants bring with them their own intangible heritages that shape the physical and mental urban landscapes in conjunction with existing populations.
Conceptualising heritage as fluid rather than static is central to understanding how heritage can survive in the age of contemporary globalisation. The contrasting approaches of ‘formal planning’ and the ‘organic self-generated informal’ can usefully reframe thinking on ‘internally generated place’ versus ‘designed public spaces’, or even ‘aesthetic’ versus ‘kinetic’. Similarly, cultural heritage can be situated within its ecological and environmental contexts, which include crafts and vernacular heritage, and the ways this works with geography.
Memories, both collective and individual, are crucial for the understanding of who and what we are. When people preserve their heritage they are actually reinventing their past in order to interpret their present. The sense of a past consolidates an existence in the present and forms the basis of identity and social wellbeing.
Even though memories are within our minds, the physical environment plays a key role in creating and sustaining them. The urban heritage is the soul of the city and is created in the conjunction of memories and space, merging with the physical environment into what we usually refer to as ‘place’. Visible modifications to the urban environment are indicative of a broader relationship between culture and place. Urban landscapes can be approached in terms of this relationship, constituted and sustained through a series of informally institutionalised practices.
Every city and town contains fragments of historical landscapes intertwined with its current spatial configuration. When decoding these layers of time, the city becomes legible and ‘place’ makes sense. Cultural heritage is not just about old things. New or newly altered objects, places and practices are just as much a part of cultural heritage, in that they hold cultural value for today’s generations.
The city in their heart – a personal map of memories, experiences and expectations that define relationship with the surroundings – is something that all residents have. By provoking an articulation of the imagination, this mass of interacting ideas, emotions and preferences can be stimulated into defining the urban space as residents see it.