City Planning According to Artistic (and Preservationists’) Principles, or, Some Nineteenth-Century Lessons for the Twenty-First Century

lecture

English

The UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (2011) highlighted the second half of the twentieth century as a period when urban conservation policies were implemented worldwide (Introduction, paragraph 4). On the other hand, the world population has more than tripled since 1950 (from 2.5 billion to 7.7 billion), and many cities have almost lost their traditional urban tissue, except isolated areas protected mostly for education and tourism. When considering the maintenance of historic urban landscape in its broader sense, we find quite a lot of examples of best practice among small settlements and communities all over the world. What about contemporary large megacities and megalopolises, then? It seems much more difficult to embrace both tangible and intangible traditions within urban wholes where the population has increased, say, ten times in the last fifty years, and a lifestyle has changed substantially. But rapid industrialization, population growth and deep changes in common mindset do not necessarily imply neglecting historic layers and shared memory. In the nineteenth century, when similar changes occurred in Europe and North America, careful planning helped not only to save historical monuments but also to interlock essential traces of the past with modern development. For example, the population of Budapest had increased approximately thirteen times between the years 1800 and 1900, from 54,000 to 732,000. Modern buildings of that period are nowadays mostly considered not only beautiful but also resilient, adaptive, and sensitive to local genius loci and the patriotic feeling of inhabitants. The paper examines several predecessors of the HUL approach in the nineteenth century (Athens, Budapest, Munich, and New York). Following their brief comparison, it raises the question about the conditions of the HUL-friendly development on a large scale. Nevertheless, are such derived recommendations useful also in our times, when the scale of the population growth jumped from millions to ten-millions, and a huge amount of unsustainable buildings represents an additional new problem?

heritage conservation; urban growth; UNESCO; 19th century; 21st century

HORÁČEK, M.

21. 10. 2019

Academie des sciences des lettres et des arts

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