Bandarin and Oers, 2012

Koseki-reading_notes-bandarin_and_oers_2012-20201008

• "Urban conservation is an idea of modern times [...] developed in the aftermath of the French Revolution" p. 1
• "The emergence of the notion of 'heritage' is linked to the establishment of modern nation states and the need to define their own traditions and identities" p. 1
• "This important movement, however, did not concern the historic city, but was rather focused on individuals monuments of the past" p. 1
• The authors discuss the history of sanitation urbanism, giving examples of Florence, Paris, Rome (influenced by Haussmann), Cairo, Teheran, Sofia and Istanbul. The Hausmannian method would also have influeced Robert Moses, post War Europe and is still applied in many Asian cities.
• The authors qualify the nineteenth century effort of preservation as “romantic” and opposition “modernism”.
• [The romantic approach] certainly contributed to the development of a vision of the historic city as 'common' heritaage, beyond national borders" p. 6.
• "For Viollet-le-Duc, restoration of a building was the reconstitution of a 'complete' and 'ideal' state of the monument, one that perhaps never existed." p. 7
• "The key theoretical devleopèment came from the great Viennese art historian Aloïs Riegl [in the Modern Cult of Monuments, 1903], whose idea defined the role of heritage in contemporary society and still form the basis of our theories of heritage conservation." p.
• [Riegl] identifies two categories of value of heritage [...] the value of 'memory', the second category of value has to do with the 'contemporary' and the 'use value' of monuments'." Pp. 7-10.
• "It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that an 'operational' concepts of the historic city was devised, in parallel to the development of a new discipline, city planning” p. 10
• "For modern principles of urban conservation, Sitte’s theory [cf. Sitte, 1889, City Planning According to Artistic Principles] is important for two reasons: it established the historic city as an aesthetic model, a source of inspiration for modern design; and it paved the way to the development of urban conservation practice" p. 11
• "One can indeed trace back to this period [of Sitte] the origins both of modern town planning and urban conservation" p. 11
• "Geddes [...] In his 1915 book, Cities in Evolution, he sees the historic city as a model to be studied to understand its functioning and design principles and to identify management practices for the care of collective spaces. He sees for the first time the importance for city planning of understanding the spirit of place, the genius loci. The traces, memories and collective associations of values to space are key determinants of urban transformation" pp. 12-13
• "Gustavo Giovannoni [...] defined a technical approach to urban conservation that constitutes to this day the basis of the urban conservation practice (Choay, 1992): it was he who coined the term 'urban heritage'". P. 14
• The historic city, in this innovative concept, is seen as part of a new town of urban functions [...] an area where new functions compatible with traditional urban morphology can be absorbed." p. 14
• [Giovannoni] also developed a complete methodology for the management and conservation of the historic city, which remains today as the basis of the disciplinary approach. An integrative planning system is seen as the key management tool for the historic city in modern urban development. This is necessary to establish and guide the choice of its functions, to properly connect it with the new urban fabric and with communication systems, and to preserve the social structure of the population." p. 15