SUMMARY
With the adoption of the UNESCO 2011 Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL), urban conservation is moving beyond the historical view of preserving built heritage through isolated objects towards managing heritage and its change, within the broader context of social, cultural and economic development in an increasingly urbanising world. Within the HUL recommendation, community participation is recognised as a pivotal tool for cultural heritage management practices. However, in China, local governments often occupy a predominant or even exclusive role in cultural heritage practices, while residents do not have sufficient platforms to express their ideas and have their interests properly registered. This results in a structural under-representation of the views, needs and ambitions of residents. Therefore, this thesis aims to advance the understanding and process of community participation for cultural heritage management within the Chinese context of rapidly urbanising development.
Compared to international cultural heritage practices, literature shows Chinese community participation has retained its contextual characteristics, including the centralised administrative role of governments, government- led participatory platforms, the co-existence of both top-down and bottom- up processes and a strong representation of local elites and business circles. Residents struggle to wield their power in decision-making processes. Furthermore, when a review was conducted, an assessment framework of community participation was still lacking within the literature of global cultural heritage studies. In response to this lack, an assessment framework was established in this PhD research based on both literature and policies and then applied to UNESCO reporting documents of Chinese World Heritage practices between 1987 and 2018. The assessment framework identified 23 indicators under four criteria: 1) participation in decision- making; 2) the competence of participants; 3) the right to social justice and confidence of participants; 4) empowerment and equity in cultural heritage management. Its application provided an overview of the state-of-the- practice of Chinese cultural World Heritage. It shows that only a small number of conservation projects on properties have been conducted with a relatively high degree of local participatory practices. A noteworthy example is the Old Town of Lijiang, which was selected as the studied case in this thesis.
Inscribed into the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997, the Old Town of Lijiang consists of three housing clusters, Dayang, Shuhe and Baisha. All the three housing clusters were investigated to produce the findings of the current state of community participation in local heritage management practices and to discuss potential future improvements within the Chinese context. The Old Town of Lijiang has organised various participatory practices, including community and governmental meetings to engage locals in decision-making processes, lectures and cultural activities to enhance public awareness and capacities, and digital platforms to communicate with residents. Nevertheless, it is local government institutions, rather than grass-roots initiatives, that actually have exclusive power to control the social, psychological, political and economic factors and decisions that shape residents’ lives. The degree of local participatory practices is minimal and lies between informing and consulting with reference to the IAP2 model.
To achieve the goal of enhancing community participation in Lijiang, and also in China as a whole, a participatory process of cultural heritage management was proposed in the research, based on local conditions and expectations. This thesis maintains the following: 1) local governments should initiate, guide and finance heritage practices; 2) residents need to be involved in the whole management process, including identifying local contexts, adjusting initial heritage schemes and approving final schemes; 3) local (business and cultural) elites and community-based organisations, as the representatives of residents, should play a strong role in collecting public interests and then negotiating with local decision-makers; 4) a legal requirement is needed to ensure local governments incorporate public feedback and interests, and prevent local political leaders from wielding exclusive power in decision- making processes. Chinese community participation in cultural heritage management has yet to find a firm foothold. Based on local contextual characteristics, it needs to develop a balanced methodology of both top- down and bottom-up processes to more directly include the needs, interests and dreams of local residents and better face the challenges of Chinese rapid social, cultural and economic development.
CASE STUDY
Lijiang