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
Beginning in 1992 when the category of world heritage cultural landscapes was adopted by the World Heritage Committee, scholarly debates have ensued on how they could best be managed. One approach... Show moreBeginning in 1992 when the category of world heritage cultural landscapes was adopted by the World Heritage Committee, scholarly debates have ensued on how they could best be managed. One approach, which appears to have gained significance over the past two decades or so, is to consider the use of traditional conservation practices and the involvement of local indigenous communities in the management of world heritage cultural landscapes. To examine the efficacy of the approach, this book explores the concept of indigenous communities, the nature of the traditional conservation practices in the Matobo Hills Cultural World Heritage Landscape in which the study was conducted as well as the management history of the area. Based on the perspectives of the indigenous people of the Matobo Hills, this study examines the extent to which traditional conservation practices and their involvement can be germane in the management of World Heritage Cultural Landscapes. Show less
This dissertation examines the World Heritage status of Mt. Kenya, an alpine area in Central Kenya. The mountain joined the World Heritage List in 1997 and in 2013 the original designation... Show moreThis dissertation examines the World Heritage status of Mt. Kenya, an alpine area in Central Kenya. The mountain joined the World Heritage List in 1997 and in 2013 the original designation expanded to cover a larger area. Both events were formulated exclusively in natural scientific language. This partly echoes the natural beauty of Mt. Kenya’s landscape, but it also reverts to a range of conditions that shaped the World Heritage nomination and modification processes, this work demonstrates. These conditions include the World Heritage Convention’s rigid separation of natural and cultural heritages, reflected in its bureaucratic apparatus; the ongoing competition between two government institutes over the management of Mt. Kenya, which stems from colonial forest and game laws; the particular composition of Kenya’s political arena in respectively the late 1990s and the early 2010s; and the precarious position of white inhabitants of post-colonial Kenya, which for instance translates in constant fears for losing land rights. In sum, this dissertation argues against studies that claim that World Heritage is a state tool that chiefly serves the dissemination of nationalist propaganda. Instead, it suggests unpacking World Heritage’s technical and non-political rhetoric, to begin understanding how and why individual World Heritage Sites come about. Show less
