Contested townscapes: the walled city as world heritage

Abstract

Walled towns and cities feature prominently on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. But while a fundamental guiding principle of the WHS list is that properties are designated for the benefit of all, these historic walled communities can be conceptualised as a particularly 'dissonant' form of heritage where the past is contested or disputed in the present. Many such places have violent histories and have changed political or national allegiance in the past. Moreover, city walls, while outwardly embracing populations, also inevitably serve to exclude or marginalise other social groups. The identities of walled heritage cities are multi-layered and far from static, being susceptible to re-invention. Tensions and contradictions are also apparent in the fact that heritage agencies work in national contexts on the management of sites that are designated as an international resource, and the agendas of these organisations can mean that certain periods or interpretations of the past are prioritised above others. All these factors present considerable challenges to those responsible for conserving and researching heritage sites that are simultaneously living communities. Against this background, the practicalities and politics of designating and delineating historic walled communities as World Heritage Sites are reviewed, as are strategies for managing the archaeological resource. The paper draws on examples of walled communities inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites, with a particular emphasis on Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

Headlining Dubrovnik's Tourism Image: Transitioning Representations/Narratives of War and Heritage Preservation 1991–2010

“…To preserve the city's unique cultural and historical heritage, in 1979 UNESCO declared Old Town Dubrovnik a World Heritage Site (Creighton 1997;Harris 2003). Years later, Croatia was engaged in war from the early-tomid-1990s (Bennett 1995;Klemencic and Zagar 2004) and Dubrovnik attracted much attention as a siege ravaged the old town and surrounding residential areas (Dubrovnik in War 2002).…”

Contested Heritage: An Analysis of the Physical Transformation of Derry/Londonderry’s Siege Monument

“…The rituals associated with the Walls' martial past were a major factor in the creation of various contested spaces in the city (Creighton, 2007). Both the Unionist celebration of annual marches around the Walls and contested spaces exemplify the Walls as a symbol of division.…”

“…Walls in towns are intellectualised as a 'dissonant' form of heritage whose value is commonly contested among different interest groups and whose meaning is not static but can be interpreted in various ways. During periods of insecurity and past endeavours, walls portrayed cities as achieving order from chaos and providing protection for citizens, at the expense of putting up barriers to their free movement (Creighton, 2007).…”

Archaeologies of Landscape

“…But as noted in the introduction, whilst monuments such as Stonehenge are widely understood as powerful and contested in these terms, Hadrian"s Wall generally is not. (Creighton 2007; generally, Labadi 2007). As heritage, these monuments must be distanced and de-problematized before they can become shared universally (Fowler 1992).…”