After the second day of the workshop about the future of Recife, a public seminar about heritage took place. Fernando Diniz (Cau, Ceci, UFPE) welcomed the public of monument experts, architects, developers, students and interested citizens.
Frank Altenburg of the Netherlands Cultural Heritage Agency started with his presentation on how the Dutch government works with heritage. He explains the decentralized system of the Netherlands with state and city monuments. There are over 50.000 state protected monuments. Most of them are private houses, but also religious objects, castles and estates, mills, industrial heritage and civil and military infrastructure.
Another, more spatial oriented ways of preserving heritage are the protected townscapes. The notion of living in a protected townscape creates a proud feeling and a mutual identity to the inhabitants. It gives stability in the area. If you invest, your neighbour will probably invest as well and you have a certain guarantee that for example – when you live in a low-rise area – no high-rise complexes will be build right next to you. There are 425 areas listed, like historic city and village centres, social housing areas and industrial heritage complexes. To get things done The Netherlands work with incentives like tax reduction, low interest loans and subsidies.
At this moment the Dutch government is modernising the national monuments policy. The main targets are: integrating heritage in spatial planning, deregulation and promoting re-use and transformation.
Trends:
- co-creation (of cultural, economic and social values)
- identity (people want to feel related)
- sustainability
- participation (experts versus citizens)
‘Heritage is not only about the object. It’s also a way of telling stories, and a search for meaning and significance. And thus a process.’
Karin Westerink from the Amsterdam Department of Monuments & Archeology took the floor and starts with a quick city tour of Amsterdam.
Currently there are 7510 monuments in Amsterdam of which 1480 are municipal.
‘Heritage is who we were and are. Heritage is the cities mirror’.
‘Never waste a good crisis’: The lack of pressure from the market gives space to think about better solutions. And never forget that cultural heritage has economic value.
Amsterdam has a lot of nationalities: we hope heritage can unite. Each generation has the obligation to re-write the history. An important recent development is the acknowledgement of part of the Amsterdam canals as UNESCO heritage.
Paul Meurs, architect and professor at TU Delft started his presentation with the statement that he actually learned a lot from the heritage practices in Brazil when he first came there back in the days. Modernism and heritage went hand in hand, a thing that was unthinkable in The Netherlands around that time.
A nice reference to describe the way we tend to work with heritage nowadays is the way Lina Bo Bardi was looking for ‘the soul of a place’. We always try to understand the stories of the area. The challenge is to make those stories understandable for architects.
We now have to deal with the heritage of the 20th century. Qualities are not so much in the materials, but in the areas as a whole. The question is how to transform these areas preserving some values and creating new value to the city. This challenge is also very valid for Recife.
Flora van Gaalen
