ancient cities

many cities in the world that conceive of themselves
as old, in the sense of being conscious of
having had a lengthy or even distinguished history,
even though little physical record of this remains in
the urban fabric. Hamburg, Germany, for example,
thinks of itself as old and stresses in its promotion
its antiquity and historic associations,
expressed especially through its historically significant
citizens and its former role in the Hanseatic
League. It is, however, uncompromisingly modern
in its postwar rebuilt city center. The reverse situation
could conceivably occur, although the globalization
of the heritage industry renders this
increasingly unlikely, namely that a city composed
of old buildings and structures would be unaware
of its antiquity and its potential historicity.
History is the attempt of the present to describe,
necessarily highly selectively, aspects of the past.
As, by definition, the past does not exist any longer
in the present, a city of history, in this sense, can
exist only in the descriptions of historians.
However, relict structures, street patterns, and
sites that have associations with historical events
and personalities may survive and be acknowledged
in the present. Old cities become historic
cities through the application of the strategy of
preservation. Preservation is the action of preserving
from harm but involves first recognizing that
the object to be preserved has value through its
antiquity or beauty and then imposing physical
and legal protective measures. Such official designations
of historic city may be local, national, or
even international, through organizations such as
UNESCO, and there are officially sanctioned
leagues or networks of such historic cities nationally
and internationally. A conclusion might be
that a historic city is a city declared to be so by a
competent authority.
However, differences in the criteria for inclusion
as historic are wide. China, for example, lists
62 officially designated historic cities based on
their absolute historic values, thus including all the
major cities. The Council of Europe, on the other
hand, lists historic cities based on proportional
values, thus ignoring London, Rome, and Vienna
as nonhistoric in favor of more completely historic
Bath, Florence, and Salzburg.
Preservation rarely remains a purely defensive
strategy. There is a spectrum of increasing intervention
through preservation activities. This proceeds
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from protection of what remains from further
harm, maintenance so that it remains in the current
state, repair of damage, replacement of what is
missing, renovation to return it to an original condition,
reconstruction of what once was but is now
not, facsimile building in the spirit of what once
might have been, ultimately to the creative invention
of what should have been but never was. Cities
cannot be left as ruined relicts if they are to continue
to function as cities, although individual
buildings may be, if like the Kaiser Wilhelm
Gedächtniskirke in Berlin, they are deliberately
endowed with a new meaning as a ruin. The functional
demands of cities on space predispose
management to intervene beyond protective maintenance
and repair to facilitate adaptive reuse for
modern functions.
The difference between history and heritage is
that the former attempts, however imperfectly and
selectively, to describe or re-create a past believed
to have once existed, whereas the latter is the contemporary
uses of pasts that are products of the
imagination in the present designed to satisfy present
needs. Although both are contemporary creations,
the motives and criteria of the creators are
different. In preservation planning, the focus is on
the maintenance of the forms and morphologies
for their own sake. Although there is inevitably
some consideration of function, this will always be
a secondary and usually subsequent concern.
Conservation, however, is preserving purposefully,
with the contemporary and future function being a
crucial criterion for selection. The conservation
planning of historic cities concerns function as well
as form and thus urban planners and managers as
much as historians and architects.
Heritage makes no assumptions about a fixed
endowment of intrinsically valued artifacts from a
past but views the past solely from the standpoint
of the present, using the past as an almost infinite
resource to be quarried for the creation of contemporary
products through the process of commodification.
The resulting cities reflect how the present
sees the past, or even wishes it to have been. The
postwar Polish reconstruction of the nation’s
destroyed cities, especially Warsaw, in a detail so
meticulous as to produce a cityscape too perfect to
have ever been, was considered a necessary cultural
assertion of a Polish identity and the political
legitimacy of a reborn Polish state. Violett-le-duc’s