Gentrification, Conservation, and Regeneration: Lessons from Urban Conservation Cases in Asia

Abstract

Heritage is defined as the combined creations and products of nature and man, in their entirety, which makes up the environment in which we live in space and time. Heritage is a reality, a possession of the community, and a rich inheritance that may be passed on, which invites our recognition and our participation. Cultural Heritage is the entire corpus of material signs – either artistic or symbolic – handed on by the past to each culture, and therefore, to the whole of mankind … and is the storehouse of human experience (UNESCO, 1989).

Sinnathamby Rajaratnam (1915-2006) once stated that: “a nation must have a memory to give it a sense of cohesion, continuity and identity; the longer the past, the greater the awareness of a nation’s identity”. The nation’s memory and identity are kept in its entire tangible and intangible cultural heritage, handed down from the past to the present, layered, mixed, and hybridized along its historical periods.

Currently heritage conservation efforts in Asia are facing serious challenges and threats coming from various directions, such as: natural and man-made disasters, rapid economic and urban developments, ideological chauvinism & exclusivism, greed and speculative developments, mass tourism and commercialization of heritage, fabrication and commoditization of identity, widespread artificial climatic control paradigm, inappropriate adaptive re-use design and implementation, etc.