Valuing World Heritage Cities

With its celebrated World Heritage List, UNESCO steers the global heritage agenda by constantly defining and redefining what constitutes heritage and by offering the highest-level forum for heritage professionalism. World Heritage sites, as defined by UNESCO, are places that have outstanding universal value. This value is constructed in relation to the qualities of actual places, but in a complicated process of expert valuation. While it is the national governments that nominate sites for inclusion in the World Heritage List, and while it is the intergovernmental World Heritage Committee which makes the final decision on inclusion or non-inclusion, it is the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) for cultural heritage that examines whether the level of outstanding universal value is met. During this process of establishing value, a place that had previously been recognized as locally and nationally significant, is given an additional layer of meaning. When the official statement of World Heritage value has been decided on, it becomes critical as to how this abstract notion is interpreted and used locally. Focusing on the discourses of ICOMOS and their transmission to the local context, this volume is the first in-depth historical analysis of the construction of heritage value in the context of cities. Illustrated with a case study of Old Rauma in Finland, it contributes to the understanding of the discursive and constructed nature of World Heritage values as opposed to intrinsic values, critically scrutinizes the role of ICOMOS in making valuations concerning urban heritage, and sheds light on the interactions and tensions of universal and local (urban) perspectives in the practice of heritage valuation. In addition, the book contributes to the review of the relationship between cities and World Heritage.

Tanja Vahtikari is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Historical Research at the University of Tampere, Finland.