Objectives and Background
Objectives
We are proposing to organize three years long study, leading to an international conference, which will address the role of cultural and natural heritages in planning, designing and managing the 21st century metropolis. The final conference will bring together distinguished leaders and visionaries, UN partners, including policy makers, urban planning agencies, experts, business leaders, academic institutions, researchers and civil society. It will provide a platform to stimulate exchanges and articulate innovative approaches to identifying, producing and promoting the role of heritage in the 21st century metropolis, as a tool to promote sustainable development goals. This will provide, inter alia, critical inputs for the reporting and monitoring of the UNESCO 2011 Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDG) and the New Urban Agenda.
Background
The Metropolis is the main feature of the human settlements of the 21st century. Today, more than 60% of the urban population -a third of humanity- lives in metropolitan areas with more than 300.000 inhabitants. A new metropolis emerges every two weeks. They are the engine of growth for countries and regions, producing 70% of World GDP. They are the main tool for the globalisation process producing similar artefacts in the different part of the world. The metropolis is the materialization of the global, and as such is in the basis of worldwide agenda. Due to their huge urbanization, the future of metropolitan growth is in Asia-Pacific and Africa where rapid urbanization and the global ecological crisis weaken urban resilience and may undermine efforts to meet the Sustainable Development Goals.
The heritage and diversities encompassed in the metropolis may be considered a main resource of the 21st century to be delivered to the next generations. A new approach and taxonomy is needed to address the changing scale and categories beyond the current heritage concepts of monuments and sites to include landscape and nature, the vernacular and the intangible as defined in the UNESCO Historic Urban Landscape approach and in the implementation of the New Urban Agenda.
Metropolises are the places of innovation, knowledge, creativity and inspiration. They are also the object of multiscale, multi sector and multi territorial collaborations. These complex territorial systems are expanding worldwide supported by the demographic expansion, the fast urbanization process and the globalization effects that foster concentration of population on the most connected locations. These conurbations now generate gigantic amounts of data – managing this data is the challenge of the digital era together with a new understanding as to how the city and the citizens may benefit from a better understanding to achieve sustainable, resilient secure and safe metropolises.
Facing huge challenges in the backwash of the COVID-19 pandemic, and with congestion, pollution, overcrowding and unaffordability, metropolises’ main characteristics based on concentration and connectivity are also their main vulnerability. On the one hand, they are the main structure of human settlement globally, but on the other hand they bifurcate and break out to different parts – identities, authorities, resources. This fragmentation, inherent to the metropolitan existence, demonstrates the understanding how peoples around the world no longer have any stable, indifferent framework through which to keep pursuing modernization and developmental urban aspirations (Latour, 2018). As there are no longer enough resources matching the human consumption, instability is becoming a more and more realized condition of contemporary. The uncertainty affiliated with it put the very notion of living on earth in a new context, with the city as a nexus of accelerated dynamics of change and specifically cultural interchange.
The 21st century metropolis has become the space of practice for increasingly fluid and diverse cultural expressions which alter the nature and structure of cities across the globe and the reconfiguration of Historic urban centres, districts and quarters. The social fabric of cities has also seen major transformations, with urban populations being highly dynamic due to migration flows and rapid changes in the socio-economic landscape. The scale of cities is undergoing enormous change. All this challenge the static concepts of “local/global/hybrid”, “urban/rural”, “culture/nature” and “traditional/ contemporary”. Featuring climate crisis and extremes as a global setting and the dynamics of change shed a new light on the need for urban resilience.
The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a wake-up call in this context and an understanding of the uniqueness of the metropolis, for its inclusiveness, encompassing multiplicity and redundancy of urban identities and fragments with an array of boundaries, possible through its scale and size. The pandemic has also shown us how metropolitan and regional management systems and “whole of society” approaches represent the surest way to achieve meaningful multi-level governance and maximize results during such kind of global crises.
Many cities are increasingly adopting cultural policies, realizing the central role that cultural heritage in all its forms can play in contributing to stability, vibrant urban cultures and histories, quality of life and job creation, particularly in the context of globalization. Heritage places ranging from the individual monument to the vernacular architecture, together with the natural setting and intangible heritage may provide the thread of continuity offering greater socio-economic stabilities and resilience. The heritage of the metropolis is yet to be defined.
Promoting creativity for sustainable development, the safeguarding of cultural heritage and the expression of diverse forms of cultural expression are essential prerequisites for communities and individuals alike, as well as urban leaders and policy makers, to generate a sense of place and belonging, to build up social capital and enhance metropolitan sustainable development.
The question of future heritage now becomes crucial, as the relationships between heritage and the metropolis are yet to be fully explored. Heritage may exist without the metropolis, but what is the heritage of the metropolis? An improved understanding and practice of interpreting, assessing and managing urban development is critical in applying new criteria of “Metropolitan Heritage” to the urban development of the metropolis. Specific concepts and tools need to be defined to understand metropolitan heritage in the context of socio-political transformations and economic change. Therefore, redefining the metropolis is a necessary step for opening the discussion towards various forms of relationships between heritage, prosperity, and sustainable development.
This calls for a comparative study of the metropolis’ DNA, through cross-analysis of samples, leading to a contemporary understanding of the cultural and heritage components that make up the metropolis, and a springboard for a renewed and dynamic metropolitan agenda.