Cultural Heritage and the City: Law, Sustainable Development, Urban Heritage, and the Cases of Hong Kong and Macau
Cultural Heritage and the City: Law, Sustainable Development, Urban Heritage, and the Cases of Hong Kong and Macau

Summary/Abstract: Constant change has proved essential to their growth, as the ones who stay in place slowly crumble into pieces. In the urban environment, however, moving forward often results in the destruction of its past. Gentrification, urbanisation, reindustrialisation — they are often to blame when cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible, is destroyed. The purpose of this article is to analyse how urban cultural heritage may be preserved in the 21st century and to show the best ways to manage it, on the ‘extreme’ examples of global metropolises — Hong Kong and Macau. In the first, introductory part of the paper, the author explains the concept of cultural heritage, defining its different ‘varieties’ — tangible, intangible, and urban. The second part of the article is devoted to the current international legal regulations protecting cultural heritage, notably UNESCO’s conventions. The author first critically surveys them, trying to establish whether or not they are successful tools in protecting urban cultural heritage, and then moves on to the analysis of a recent approach towards urban cultural heritage, based on the 2011 recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL). In the third, last part of the paper, the author examines the legal frameworks protecting cultural heritage in place in Hong Kong and Macau. He first explains his choice of the two cities as case studies, then shows how their legal regulations correspond with UNESCO’s guidelines, and ultimately ventures to make suggestions which may improve the fate of cultural heritage in this kind of a changing modern metropolis.

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