Themes
of the Seminar
Integrated
Conservation (IC) is an emerging concept of managing
human development in historic
cities. It takes its source in the idea of integrated
conservation promoted in
several documents of the 1970s, particularly the
Declaration of Amsterdam on European Architectural
Heritage of 1975. Integrated conservation is an
approach that embraces a multitude of traditional and
emerging disciplines spanning from
anthropology to architecture, economics to ecology,
sociology to statistics. There is as
yet no widely accepted IC approach that can
tackle the challenge of
communicating across disciplines. Nor is there a definition that encompasses the full
extent of such an approach.
For
the purpose of this seminar, the following qualifying
considerations offered:
-
Integrated
conservation is part of the general process of
planning and management of cities and territories,
according to a multi-referential perspective
(economic, political, social, cultural,
environmental and spatial);
-
It
centers on (but does not limit itself to) the
physical and spatial aspects of consolidated urban
areas that are socially recognized as of cultural
value and seeks to maintain integrity,
authenticity and continuity of the urban areas of
cultural value for present and future generations;
-
It
emphasizes the conservation of the physical and
spatial aspects within the
development/transformation process of the city,
while seeking sustainable development by treating
the cultural values of the city as
assets that aggregate value in all dimensions of
the development process (economic, political,
social, cultural, environmental and spatial).
A
city is a multifaceted entity that cannot be
apprehended by partial points of view without losing
its complex character. To retain its inherent
complexity as an ever-open system, the city must be
treated according to an approach that accepts a high
level of uncertainty in its statements and
propositions, allowing for references,
for example, to intangible heritage and poetry
as methods of understanding the urban environment. To communicate between disciplines, one
inevitably needs a higher degree of abstraction,
indeterminacy and complexity. Yet one also needs a
framework on a practical level. A critically important
approach to the complexity of the city involves
establishing communication between disciplines.
Such
communication is conceived in different degrees of
disciplinarity and can be laid out as follows:
To
define the scope of the seminar, we suggest exploiting
the Integrated
Conservation approach, emphasizing the following
themes:
(A)
Urban conservation across the limits of disciplines:
can shared values and common goals lead to cohesive
action?
How
to transfer the multi- and inter-disciplinary
approaches from the level of knowledge to the level of
action and practice in the real city?
Integrated
conservation was conceived as an approach to mediating
between the different disciplines that are involved in
conservation of historic cities. Clearly this approach
has not been developed enough to create an
integrated system that allows for
adequate conceptual exchange. What has been
observed in practice is a juxtaposition of disciplines
and the use of concepts
from one discipline, in
the theoretical framework of the other. There is a
clear lack of mediator.
(B)
Communication across disciplines in urban
conservation: how can poets talk to engineers?
How
different degrees of disciplinarity and action relate
to each other? How they communicate?
The
concept of interface is very important for bridging
disciplinary approaches in Integrated Conservation,
since it implies a
mediator that allows the communication between the
languages of different disciplines. It is conceived to
integrate many disciplinary approaches. The concept of
interface gained strength with the development of the
technologies of information and communication, and in
the last years there has been a huge expansion of the
use of electronic interfaces in the field of urban and
cultural heritage conservation. Virtual
reality in the creation of virtual cultural sites,
non-invasive scanning techniques in archeology,
three-dimensional scanning techniques for sites and
buildings, ‘intelligent’ interfaces for
decision-making processes and impact evaluation
systems in planning, etc. are becoming normal tools
and media in the urban conservation field.
Interfaces
are systems that support communication between people
and machines. Electronic
interfaces are improving enormously communication
among individuals and communities around the world.
Communications systems require the knowledge of
languages, the sharing of
system of values and attitudes of the individuals.
(C)
Technology and new interfaces in the service of urban
conservation – useful tools or fancy distractions?
How
can such interfaces help bridge disciplines in Urban
Conservation? What communication system can facilitate
cooperation?
Apart
from interfaces between
humans and artificial intelligence, there are
interfaces between different groups of people.
Professionals tend to subscribe to a view of
heritage that is disciplinary in different degrees,
while non-specialist individuals perceive and conceive
heritage in a non-disciplinary fashion. The
professionals present their reasoning,
grounded in their
disciplinary knowledge. Such reasoning does not always
reach the non-disciplinary perception of the public,
and backgrounds for decisions made remain unclear.
(D)
Will new interfaces bridging disciplinary knowledge of
professionals and non-disciplinary perception of the
public bring better decisions or yet more divergence?
How
can we improve understanding among
integrated urban conservation professionals
and the general public through defining interfaces
translating disciplinary knowledge to non-disciplinary
perception? How can such disciplinary to
non-disciplinary interfaces help better decision
making in conservation?
The
seminar is calling for exchange of experience and
discussion that may help answer all these questions.
