ancient cities

196 Cultural Heritage
region in India have emphasized the importance of
sustainable local economic development.
Global tourism to heritage sites and cities, at
times excessive and insensitive, has exacerbated
the conflicts between global cultures and local
beliefs and practices. Venice, one of the most
popular destinations, attracts more than 20 million
tourists a year from around the world, but has
lost its own culture and local population. The flow
of capital, the demands of tourists for familiar
modern amenities, and the environmental externalities
of tourism have distorted the value of heritage
and destroyed the fragile systems that nurtured
it. In Siem Reap in Cambodia, seat of the Angkor
Vat, hotels are said to have depleted the groundwater
reserves while the dominance of a few large
multinational companies operating with imported
staff or exploiting the labor of local women and
youth has reduced economic benefits for residents.
Tourism can introduce or accelerate social change
and revive folk arts but also exacerbate commodification.
The pressure to retain every aspect of its
heritage has stymied development and marginalized
the needs of local residents in many places.
Cultural Politics of Heritage
Where cities are competing globally for investments
and tourism, cultural richness can become a
significant selling point. Cultural heritage has
become a way of branding cities and making them
interesting and significant. Whereas cities such as
Vienna, Prague, and Barcelona have long been
known as cultural centers, others such as Rio de
Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Singapore have made
efforts in recent years to reconnect with their histories.
Uniqueness and character command attention;
cities with heritage have what some scholars
call designer quality. Such market pressures have
led cities to invent cultural practices and exaggerate
or essentialize heritage.
The conflicts between contemporary cultures
and historical authenticity are everywhere. The
debate ranges between those who would like to
protect heritage sites in their entirety, wishing to
recreate their original context, and those who see
change as reflecting multiple layers of history and
culture. Furthermore, the concern for an imageable
and consumable identity has resulted in the
creation of structures, settings, and rituals that
mimic a sanitized and aesthetic past. In cities
such as Santa Fe in New Mexico, Annapolis in
Maryland, and Charleston in South Carolina,
critics regard efforts to capture only the delectable
and delightful in heritage settings as caricatures
of cultural heritage, not as repositories of
knowledge.
Global politics is reflected in institutional mechanisms
for managing cultural heritage. Colonial
powers once assumed stewardship of cultural heritage,
as for instance, the French in Morocco or the
British in India. In so doing, they imposed historical
narratives and national identities on the colonized
nations. The views of local people were entirely
disregarded. In the postcolonial era, although many
nations have made efforts to redress the colonial
prejudices and reinscribe nationalist histories, political
imbalance has persisted in the global selection
of cultural heritage and the charters and conventions
that govern them as well as in the relationships
between the state and local community over the
ownership, interpretation, and management of heritage.
Although philanthropists and the wealthy elite
pioneered the protection of heritage in Europe and
North America, since the late nineteenth century the
responsibility for protecting historic buildings and
works of art has been placed on public institutions.
This has raised questions of ownership and access
to heritage. The idea that the inheritors and local
communities have a stewardship of the sites and a
voice in their management is gradually becoming
more current.
Inclusiveness, Equity, and Sustainability
Social and economic change and the inclusion of
private property under heritage have resulted in
multiple stakeholders and shared responsibility. The
inclusion of stakeholder participation ranges from
encouraging private investments in the revitalization
and adaptive reuse of historic neighborhoods
and buildings such as the industrial neighborhoods
and waterfront warehouses of many North American
cities, to the strengthening of heritage values and
identification of meaningful roles for marginalized
people. Inherent in these partnerships with stakeholders
is the idea of balancing the value of preserving
heritage with the needs of current use or finding
a value for heritage within contemporary economic,
social, and political frameworks. Many of the historic
centers of Latin American towns, such as
Salvador in Brazil, struggle to balance the present