MEASURING HERITAGE CONSERVATION PERFORMANCE
1 Dates and place
29 to 31 March 2011
Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil
2 Theme
One of the great challenges for institutions and scholars of heritage conservation and protection has been to develop instruments for assessing the performance of the conservation actions of complex assets such as urban sites, cultural territories and landscapes and collections of many types of objects. UNESCO, for example, has been improving its Periodic Reports on the state of conservation of the assets on the World Heritage List in order to make the evaluations more transparent and less subject to distortions caused by technical and political constraints.
However, what remain at an incipient stage are monitoring and evaluation systems that allow the performance of conservation actions and their impacts to be identified, recorded and assessed, in an objective way. Ever since the Burra Charter, the theory of conservation has been undergoing a paradigm shift that sets the maintenance of significance as the central goal of heritage conservation. In addition to being informed by expert opinion, this change indicates that conservation of complex heritage assets must take into account the opinions of social actors directly involved with the assets (the stakeholders), and by doing so, this introduces cultural relativism and the use of subjectivity as an analytical tool. Also, the use of indicators has been suggested as a useful way to construct a monitoring instrument applicable to the different types of complex assets as this permits the performance of conservation actions to be evaluated, as well as the associated public policies to conservation as the economic valorization, the sustainability and the social inclusion.
The 6th Seminar will discuss this issue by analyzing both the theory and practice of evaluation of heritage conservation maintenance and of its impacts, and will respond to the following issues:
1) What are the consequences of the change in the theoretical paradigm for the development of monitoring and evaluation instruments for the conservation of complex assets such as urban sites, cultural territories and landscapes, and collections of various objects?
2) How can the performance of the conservation of heritage assets be evaluated over time? Can the performance of actions on different assets of the same kind or of different kinds be compared?
3) What lessons are to be learned from the use of indicators in the evaluation of conservation actions? Is it possible to estimate the efficiency and effectiveness of using these instruments for monitoring heritage conservation?
4) Have there been experiences of assessment or of use of conservation indicators which can contribute to the debate and so to the development of the theory and of the monitoring tools?
We invite all stakeholders in heritage conservation acting in the academic field and institution promoting the culture as a development factor to submit articles that present their ideas, proposals and studies which address these questions to the Scientific Committee of the 6th International Seminar on Urban Conservation
3 Languages
Spanish, Portuguese and English (USA) are the languages of the seminar.
4 Organization
4.1. Organizers
§ Centre for Advanced Studies in Integrated Conservation (CECI)
§ Graduate Program in Urban Development of the Federal University of Pernambuco (MDU/UFPE)
§ International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) – LATAM Program, Economic Indicators Group
4.2. Partners
§ Historic and Artistic National Heritage Institute - IPHAN
§ Joaquim Nabuco Foundation– FUNDAJ
§ Regional Bureau for Culture for the Latin America and the Caribbean (UNESCO)
4.3. Executive Committee
§ SÃlvio Mendes Zancheti (CECI)
§ Maria Ângela de Sousa (MDU/UFPE)
§ Katriina Simila (ICCROM)
§ Claudia Ranaboldo (Rimisp – Latin American Center for Rural Development))
§ Herman van Hooff (UNESCO)
§ Claudia Bastos do Nascimento (IPHAN)
§ Rita de Cássia Araujo (FUNDAJ)
4.4. Executive secretariat
§ Lúcia Tone Hidaka (CECI)
§ Rosane Piccolo (CECI)
§ Laura Alecrim (CECI)
4.5. Scientific Committee
§ Ana Jara Casco (Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e ArtÃstico Nacional, Brasil)
§ Ana Pereira Roders (Eindhoven University of Technology, Holanda)
§ Angel Cabeza (Dirección Nacional de Arquitectura del Ministerio de Obras Públicas, Chile)
§ Dora Arizaga (Universidade Andina Simon Bolivar, Equador)
§ Fátima Furtado (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brasil)
§ Flaviana Lira (Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e ArtÃstico Nacional, Brasil)
§ Flaviana Lira (Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e ArtÃstico Nacional, Brasil)
§ Heleni Porfyriou (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Itália)
Isabel Villaseñor (México)
§ Jeremy Wells (Historic Preservation Lead, City and County of DenverUSA)
§ LuÃs Amorim (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brasil)
§ Lúcia Hidaka (Universidade Federal de Alagoas, Brasil)
§ Marcelo Magadan (Magadan & Ass., Argentina)
Norma Lacerda (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brasil)
Paulius Kulikauskas (City&Time, Lituânia)
§ Sueli Schiffer (Universidade de São Paulo, Brasil)
§ Valerie Magar (Instituto Nacional de AntropologÃa e Historia, México)
§ VirgÃnia Pontual (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brasil)
