This book focuses on the practical challenges of managing a World Heritage listed historic city in a South Asian context. The Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka’s Galle Fort, a walled town,... Show moreThis book focuses on the practical challenges of managing a World Heritage listed historic city in a South Asian context. The Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka’s Galle Fort, a walled town, identified as the best-preserved colonial fort in South Asia, is the subject of this study. The book analyses the costs and benefits of the fort’s World Heritage recognition to its local urban community and to the colonial fort itself, as a monument. It shows how thirty years of the World Heritage project at Galle Fort changed a once small seaside walled town with dilapidated colonial buildings into a tourist hot-spot and prime real estate, also changing the lives of its inhabitants. The work addresses the range of impacts of this process such as gentrification, real estate pressures, and urban regeneration in a balanced way. It argues that the best practises of participatory and people-centred approaches of managing urban heritage at the global level are slow to progress at the local level. While seeing the World Heritage listing of Galle Fort optimistically, the book encourages the use of the World Heritage emblem for the well-being of local residents, who bring life to these landscapes. Show less
This chapter shows how, ironically, racism has often been combated on the basis of speciesist assumptions, in particular in the humanist post-WW2 United Nations discourse on human rights. It traces... Show moreThis chapter shows how, ironically, racism has often been combated on the basis of speciesist assumptions, in particular in the humanist post-WW2 United Nations discourse on human rights. It traces those assumptions to various roots - in biological and anthropological thinking of the period, European metaphysics, middle class cultural attitudes, and, ultimately, evolution. The subsequent Great Ape Project, which claimed moral respectability for all great apes, ran into a similar problem. The paperalso makes some observations on the ritual, performative character of various declarations of the rights of human and nonhuman beings. Show less
