UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTRÉAL, CONSERVING CULTURAL LANDSCAPES, 2010 ROUND TABLE /CANADA RESEARCH CHAIR ON BUILT HERITAGE
OVERLAPPING CULTURAL LANDSCAPES: MEDIATING HERITAGE VALUE
Julian Smith, Executive Director, Willowbank School and National Historic Site
It is generally accepted that defining heritage value is fundamental to successful conservation activity. However, debates about heritage value were not necessarily front and centre during the 1960s, 70s and 80s, when the historic preservation movement was taking hold in North America. The debate was more focused on whether high heritage value was in itself enough to justify conservation. Arriving at definitions of heritage value was generally left to the experts, who not only prepared the frameworks for evaluation but filled out the forms and did the scoring. History and architecture were the key criteria, and both could be defined from within the dominant narratives of the day – refer for example to Parks Canada’s enormously popular The Evaluation of Historic Buildings by Harold Kalman, first published in 1980 and reprinted many times.
It is still true that almost every jurisdiction in Canada– whether federal, provincial, or municipal – assumes some kind of scoring system or criteria system that underlies the designation process and is referred to when interventions occur. The complaint from within the heritage community is often that these designating bylaws or registries are not detailed enough, but this underlines a desire for more certainty rather than less.
Included with the designation process is a legal definition of the property in question, which among other things requires a clear definition of boundaries. Even when there is a designation or a registry without strong legal implications – an example would be the new Canadian Register of Historic Places – a legal boundary description is a normal part of the registration process.
There are, however, relatively few culturally-significant sites that do not lend themselves to more than one reading. Anyone involved with the designation process knows that even the “experts” will disagree. There is usually enough shared sense of purpose, however, that competing views are mediated by arriving at either a consensus or a compromise. In the case of consensus, one searches for common ground and de-emphasizes points of diference. In the case of compromise, one quantifies gains and losses and proposes trade-offs. This mediation is invisible in the final designation, which presents a united front.
At the time of intervention, one is therefore dealing in most cases with a sense that heritage value has been arrived at by prior agreement, and the intervention is then judged against this reality. Even when this is not the case – the heritage value is not set out properly, or is poorly expressed, the general opinion within the heritage field is that this needs to be corrected by improving the system so that heritage value is better articulated and entrenched.
There are some corollaries to this emphasis on defining heritage value at the outset. First, it introduces and supports a relatively static view of value, with an assumption that what evolves over time is the nature of interventions and rituals of occupation and use, while the artifact to which the heritage value accrues remains essentially intact.
Secondly, it suggests protection as the key factor in sustaining heritage value – protection against undue physical change, protection against interference. One frequent outcome is the suggestion of buffer zones – zones that increase the level of protection by creating an intermediary between the artifact and the forces that might threaten its integrity.
The legal boundary of the property in question is then amplified by a new boundary, mapped at some set distance out from the original.
Thirdly, there is the concept of heritage impact assessments, which involve a measuring of interventions that might undermine the integrity of the artifact, which might change the heritage value defined during the designation process. Clear definitions of heritage value turn out to be very important to successful use of the cultural heritage impact process as a protective device.
Cultural landscape theory, I would argue, challenges many of the assumptions built up by the heritage community over the last thirty or forty years. It does not simply introduce a new category of heritage asset. It instead introduces an understanding that identifies heritage value as dynamic rather than static, that celebrates qualities that are often elusive to the expert but obvious to the participant, that does not depend on legal boundary definitions for designation, that depends as much on enhancement as protection for survival, and that does not fit easily within the structure of a cultural heritage impact assessment because its essential characteristics are proactive rather than reactive. Cultural landscape theory can be frustrating because it is not easily systematized or bureaucratized. As Lisa Prosper has said, a cultural landscape, if and when designated as a heritage asset, may in that act alone lose something of its intrinsic heritage value.
And finally, the place at which heritage value is mediated is not so much when a cultural landscape is identified and designated – rather, it occurs as part of its own natural evolution, within the ecological processes that define a dynamic approach to conservation. The various identities that create its reality will undergo a continual process of mediation, as part of the health of the organism. Mediation will also occur when other cultural landscapes emerge, landscapes that may occupy part of the same space and time, and whose boundaries may intersect and overlap.
The idea of overlapping cultural landscapes is central to the understanding of cultural landscape theory, because it alludes to the fact that cultural landscapes are not one-to-one claims on space. We have become accustomed, particularly through the artifice of zoning, to thinking of space as having a static and measurable quality. The recent emphasis on GIS, as a key planning and management tool, has only reinforced this idea that detailed mapping somehow brings us close to understanding physical reality. But cultural landscapes are not places, they are ideas. They are ideas embedded in a place, but it is the idea that is cultural, and the resulting experience of place that is the cultural landscape. Cultural landscapes are representations of reality, a reality exists as much in the imagination as it does on the ground.
We have to develop methods other than the normal Euclidean space of the gridded landscape to understand cultural landscapes. To quote Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space:
Euclidean space is defined by its "isotopy" (or homogeneity), a property which guarantees its social and political utility. The reduction by this homogenous Euclidean space, first of nature's space, then of all social space, has conferred a redoubtable power upon it. All the more so since that initial reduction leads easily to another -- namely, the reduction of three-dimensional realities to two dimensions (for example, a "plan," a blank sheet of paper, something drawn on paper, a map, or any kind of graphic representation or projection).
And a Situationist commentary on Lefebvre:
In its geometric aspect, the "abstract spectacle" is a double reduction: first the heterogeneous spaces of nature and social space are reduced to the homogenous space of Euclid; and next homogenous Euclidean space is reduced to the illusory space of two dimensional representations. Space is no longer something concrete and opaque, that is, something to be experienced and lived (as well as perceived and conceived); it is now something abstract and transparent, something to be looked at passively and from a distance, without being lived directly. What is seen is not space, but an image of space. Space becomes "intelligible" to the eye (but only to the eye); space appears to be a text to be read, a message that bears no traces of either state power or human bodies and their non-verbal flows. Certain basic geometrical forms -- the rectangular, the square, the circle, the triangle -- are elevated to the level of the exemplary (microcosms of the universe) and are reproduced everywhere as images of rationality, harmony and order.
Or as Anita Olsen, wife of Elijah Harper and graduate of the heritage conservation M.A. program at Carleton, put it,
When an aboriginal cultural site is overlaid by a grid, so that archaeologists can begin their supposedly objective documentation, the site has ceased to be an Aboriginal site and has become a European site.
This First Nations perspective reinforces Lefebvre’s point, that the space of nature and the social space have both been erased. But cultural landscape theory at least holds out the promise of recognizing the concrete and opaque realities that cultural groups experience. They acknowledge that this shared experience can create a sense of place and a sense of identity.
Cultural landscapes are terrains in terms of the imagination – the terrains of the cultural geographers, not the physical geographers. They are not confined to a particular boundary condition in the physical sense, as might be required for mapping. As an example, some people here will recall Peter Pratt, a conservation architect with Parks Canada who had grown up inEnglandin a family that had been part of the civil service tradition only recently dislodged from running theBritish Empire. When I visited him once inDawsonCityin theYukon, where he had been seconded for a year, he entertained me in a rather ramshackle building on stilts, designed to counteract the conditions of the permafrost. I was invited to come atfour o’clockin the afternoon, and showed up in this gritty townscape to be greeted by immaculate linen tablecloths, a silver tea set, and proper cube sugar in with tongs, to be served afternoon tea with small sandwiches and a biscuit. Peter was in his usual white shirt and tie. Having tea in that room – that place at that time – was to experience the cultural landscape of the British Raj. It was an isolated fragment of that landscape – separated by both time and place – but a fragment nonetheless, with no solid boundaries in either time or space. Its reality was immediate and palpable. And my experience of it was as the colonial subject entering the abode of the imperial master, which of course was not unintended at some level.
Cultural landscapes are subversive to the extent that they resist simple mapping and categorization. Euclidean geometry tends to blur their reality, which is best understood by the representations of ritual – an ordering of chaos through repeated practices which colour one’s sense of the physical landscape and which bend it to the logic of the rituals themselves. When rituals are cultural rather than personal – that is, shared by the members of a cultural group – they become powerful organizers of the world, and the basis for cultural landscape formation. To identify and analyze cultural landscapes, therefore, requires returning back through the physical layering to the mental imagining to the ritual ordering, which is why cultural landscapes are resistant to ‘experts’ outside the cultural community that inhabits them.
In contemporary urban centres, particularly in a country such as Canada, multiple cultural realities exist in almost all parts of the city. These cultural realities result, over time, in the development of cultural landscapes that often overlap and that have their own boundary conditions – some very stable, some much more fluid. The movie Masala by Indo-Canadian filmmaker Srinivas Krishna, is one of the best analyses done by anyone on the complex overlapping cultural landscapes of contemporaryToronto. It shows the richness created by these overlaps, but also the tensions. It makes it obvious that the differences cannot be coalesced into a single homogeneous whole, nor would one want them to be.
It is the challenge of contemporary urban planners and designers to understand cultural landscapes as a starting point in creating and sustaining the contemporary Canadian city. The current draft UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape is in some ways an effort to articulate this challenge and make it the responsibility of all its member states to implement a cultural landscape approach to urban development. The idea of layering is currently part of the draft document.
The reason that cultural landscape theory challenges the assumptions of cultural heritage impact assessments is that these assessments assume a static cultural heritage resource that is threatened by the dynamic forces of change and ‘progress’ that swirl around it. But if the cultural heritage resource is itself dynamic and fluid, the question is one of whether there is equilibrium, not whether there is impact. Impact is not to be avoided, but rather designed to be beneficial in both directions. The Historic Urban Landscape escapes the boundaries of the old Historic Urban District, and becomes the context for all development, whether fashioning the new or refashioning the old.
Cutlural landscape theory is not for the faint of heart. Its purview is not what some would consider the green parts of the urban or rural landscape – the landscape of the park and the garden and the streetscape. It is much more comprehensive – it includes the building, the structures, the open spaces, the public spaces, the private spaces, the intermediate spaces - as well as the rituals of habitation and use that map these spaces and interconnect them. Giambattista Nolli’s exquisite 1748 map of Rome is one of the few representations of urban space to even begin to document the city in a cultural landscape format, and his achievement has pretty much been ignored by urban and rural cartographers ever since. We are very much amateurs when it comes to understanding how to document cultural landscapes. But every cultural group that occupies a space over time, in a way that creates an equilibrium between artifact and ritual, has defined a cultural landscape – a landscape that exists and that is shared within its cultural imagination. For them its reality is not a question, even if the experts have never quite figured out how to record it. Another cultural group may share some of the same spaces, or some of the same rituals, but if there are sufficient differences then a different cultural landscape exists. Neither community will have a problem identifying the health of its own cultural landscape, or measuring change as being supportive or disruptive. But is should not be surprising that the same physical change may upset some and please others. The biggest tragedy comes when one group, presumably the dominant group, decides to try to make its cultural landscape exclusive and controlling. But it is also a tragedy when planners, preservationists, and others describe the dominant landscape and fail to recognize the other realities that exist.
Dolores Hayden in her book The Politics of Place demonstrates the importance of measuring the realities of marginalized communities in their own words and their own histories. She provides strong arguments for why different readings of the same urban landscapes are not only possible but necessary. Another powerful example is the National Film Board’s documentary Remember Africville, which shows how even a civil rights activist, the outsider ‘expert’, was unable to read the true cultural landscape, and therefore unable to define its heritage value. To say nothing of the dominant community, for whom the possibility of an indigenous cultural landscape reality did not even exist.
The heritage profession has often reflected a grass-roots reaction to the top-down pattern of much of contemporary architecture, planning and urbanism. It is important that this continue, even as the profession becomes more mainstream and broader in its influence. In particular, it needs to avoid becoming part of the utopian and static culture that it fights, but sometimes imitates. Cultural landscape theory is essentially organic and ecological, and ecology, unlike utopianism, thrives on complexity and diversity. If we can figure out how to translate this ecological bias into our day-to-day theory and practice, we should not have too much trouble mediating heritage value and celebrating overlapping cultural landscapes.