The "Un-Sustainable Development" Conference was jointly organized by Palazzo Cappello Venexia (an italian firm specialized in restoration and conservation design) and Politehnika Nova Gorica (the Slovenian post-graduate School for Environmental Studies) and promoted by the Municipality of Venice in cooperation with Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (the second Faculty of Architecture in Venice) and ICARE (International Center for Art Economics).
The Conference's focus was to address the sustainability of intervening on cultural heritage conservation and promotion through identifying and comparing the main theoretical approaches, and the perspective and the practical experience of different actors (government bodies and public institutions, private organization and firms, donors and international organizations). The Conference was divided in four sessions, each discussing the sustainability issue from a different point of view, and namely: The private sector perspective. This session mainly focused on the private actors' involvement in cultural heritage conservation and revitalization. Part of the session was dedicated to private organizations that act as sponsors/donors in conservation programs. Case histories enlightened how private donors make their decisions considering either the potential economic benefits attached to investing in sponsorships and the positive impacts on their image. This last factor introduced the interesting theme of corporate social responsibility, which has become a growing incentive for private sector's participation during recent years. The session's second part then addressed the implementation of cultural heritage programs by private firms. Presentations stressed the complexity and variety of constraints that affect the work of private actors managing cultural heritage programs, as bureaucratic obstacles, legislative impositions or population distrust; The public sector perspective. This session addressed both the role of the public sector and the experience of international organizations, among which the World Bank, working in the field of cultural heritage. Case histories of Italian local governments dealing with urban heritage revitalization provided best practices of planning, design and financial management that can be useful for dissemination among World Bank client countries; The academic perspective. Scholars from different Universities discussed the potential economic benefits resulting from the use of cultural heritage assets. They provided a full retrospective of the tools developed by cultural economics studies to assess these benefits while investing in cultural heritage conservation and revitalization. Among these, great attention was given to the improvements of contingent evaluation analysis, a tool widely used by World Bank staff in conjunction to major urban heritage revitalization program, as the rehabilitation of the Fez Medina in Morocco; The technical perspective. The session illustrated how technical approaches to conservation have evolved along the time, till leading to the modern affirmation of an "integral and integrated conservation". On the assumption that cultural heritage is the built shape of community's memory and identity, this type of conservation tends to bring built heritage back to its original splendor, even to the detriment of originality. According this approach, for example, sites destroyed by disasters should be rebuilt even ex-novo and exactly as the collective memory recalls them.
Elvira Morella, World Bank, Urban Development Unit, presented "Integrating the protection, promotion and economic use of cultural heritage in the development agenda: the World Bank, whose main focus was on explaining how the Bank helps client countries to use cultural assets as means for economic and social development. In particular, the presentation started by elaborating the rationale for the Bank’s interest in the sector, it then illustrated the evolution of the Bank’s approach, the Bank's current activities, and finally covered the case history of the cultural, historic and environmental heritage conservation program in Machu Picchu.
The participants welcomed with great interest the Bank's long commitment in the sector. They valued the integrated approach to cultural heritage protection and management and were surprised by the size and variety of the Bank's activities. The presentation on the Machu Picchu program in particular received great attention and was positively commented by the UNESCO Representatives attending the Conference. |
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