Cultural heritage in socio-economic development: local and global perspectives.

Similar trends are present in other rural regions around the world. For example, The American Farmland Trust was established in 1980 as a nationwide non-profit organization dedicated to farmland protection and sustainable agriculture, through maintaining rural lifestyles and landscapes, and especially the family farm (American Farmland Trust 2006). Another major initiative, launched by Heritage Canada in the 1980s, was a program developed to help rural areas hard hit by a weakened economy and population migration by finding new ways to regenerate communities. The approach--called Heritage Regions (Le Blanc 1991, Heritage Canada 1995)--was based on motivating and helping existing bodies integrate their various initiatives, linking education, conservation and entrepreneurship, and using natural and cultural resources.

In England, English Heritage drafted a Rural White Paper highlighting the strong contribution made by historic buildings, landscapes and monuments to the quality of people's surroundings, their sense of identity and to the health of England's tourism industry. It also highlighted contributions to the balanced and sustainable regeneration of the countryside through the re-use of cultural heritage (DEFRA 2000). Likewise, The Australian Heritage Commission has been very active in cooperating with local communities, landowners, and natural and cultural resource managers. The Commission (2000) has produced an award-winning guide--Protecting Local Heritage Places, a Guide for Communities--to assist communities around Australia to re-assess their heritage in the context of community needs and aspirations, including developing heritage business opportunities. A number of initiatives around Australia in recent years have brought heritage and tourism together in creative community and business ventures (King 1999).

Developing countries

It is noteworthy that heritage-based development initiatives are planned and implemented in developing countries and countries in transition as well. In some cases, these are self-initiated, in others, they are stimulated from outside. An illustrative example is the Shaxi Valley Rehabilitation Project in China. China has 70% of its population living in rural and mountainous areas where poverty and economic underdevelopment are widespread. Shaxi valley, located in the foothills of the Himalaya, is known as one of the last strongholds of the Bai minority and is famous for its historic market square of Shaxi listed as a World Heritage Site.

The recently started Shaxi Rehabilitation and Development project has focused on achieving sustainable endogenous development of the rural community by generating a framework for ecological, economic and social issues to balance development and heritage conservation in the long run. Rural tourism is not considered the sole vehicle for revitalization of the valley, but only one of four basic pillars--which include a well-maintained structural environment, improved infrastructure and economic diversification. A comprehensive plan, including zoning, transportation, sustainable basic infrastructure, tourism development, historic heritage protection, development and investment was produced by regional authorities in cooperation with the Swiss Federal Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (Feiner et al. 2002). The implementation strategy includes six different modules: Marketplace Restoration, Historic Village Preservation, Sustainable Valley Development, Ecological Sanitation, Poverty Alleviation and Dissemination, and is intended to become a guiding model for wide-scale conservation and development throughout the region.

In this vein, equally worth mentioning are the increasing number of initiatives in the sphere of development assistance in developing countries, which focus on the resource value of heritage. The World Bank has been progressively drawing attention to the fact that culture and heritage can contribute directly to core development objectives in several important ways:

* Providing new opportunities for poor communities to grow out of poverty by generating incomes from their own cultural knowledge and production;

* Catalyzing local-level development through the diverse social, cultural, economic, and physical resources that communities have to work with;

* Conserving and generating revenues from existing cultural assets by reviving city centres, conserving socially significant natural assets, and generating sustainable, significant tourism revenues;

* Strengthening social capital--in particular, to provide a basis on which poor, marginalized groups can pursue activities that enhance their self-respect and efficacy and to strengthen respect for diversity and social inclusion so that such groups can have a share in the benefits of economic development; and

* Diversifying strategies of human development and capacity building for knowledge-based dynamic societies--for example, through support for local publishing, library services, and museum services, especially those serving marginalized communities and children (World Bank 1998: 15).

In its strategy paper on cultural heritage and development for the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, The World Bank in cooperation with UNESCO, outlined a new development paradigm--one that places economic development within its social context. On the basis of this new paradigm the future of the region is seen as greatly depending on the region's unique history, culture and the cultivation of a strong identity rooted in this uniqueness but open to the rest of the world (Cernea 2001: 4). To implement this orientation, a pioneering set of investment projects in the cultural heritage sectors has already been developed in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia and many other areas. Important economic and social impacts are anticipated.

Positive impacts are becoming visible in some places, as in the Rehabilitation and Revitalization Project of the historic city of Fez in Morocco, where the preservation of the historic urban areas proved intricately linked to the problems of achieving sustainability in all societal, cultural, economic and environmental terms. Despite being on UNESCO's World Heritage list, Fez--like most historic centres in the developing world and due to a complex of reasons--has suffered progressive erosion of its urban quality of life and has a high concentration of poverty and substandard living conditions. Hence, it was increasingly diagnosed as being in crisis. Under a comprehensive definition of cultural heritage as the historically built environment, encompassing the housing stock and the social structures which support it (World Bank 1997), the rehabilitation and revitalization project's primary objective was conservation and rehabilitation of the medina by empowering its population and institutions and by raising national and international awareness of its cultural value. Thus, cultural heritage became the focus for the total rehabilitation strategy and efforts to evaluate it in a most appropriate way proved to be of key importance for the whole project.

In order to reverse the cycle of deterioration and loss, a total understanding of the urban dynamics of the historic setting and a balance between historicism and livability were required. In Fez, that was judged to be particularly complex (Erbach 1997); however, without a broadly based holistic approach and the active participation of private sector and local community groups, preservation goals and the aim of adaptive reuse of historic buildings could never be achieved. A major consideration was that without the people living in the core area of the city, its special and historic character would deteriorate at an even higher rate (Erbach 1997). Several effective solutions were proposed. In addition to reducing population pressure and improving building maintenance, one interesting proposal was to encourage the use of traditional building materials and skills as part of ordinary construction practice, which was becoming more and more expensive and difficult to obtain. In Fez, this involves the use of Moroccan zellij- or pieces of ceramic tile--for elaborate floor and wall mosaics. Several dozen pieces of tiles, shaped by hand, are combined in different ways to create various designs. In the opinion of professionals, the art of zellij is in danger of disappearing unless new technologies in the production of basic ceramic materials are introduced to keep this unique decoration affordable. This was anticipated as an attractive business opportunity for small-scale local industries that could thus be made sustainable with some financial or technical assistance (Erbach 1997).

Concluding remarks