Evaluating Sustainable Development in the Built Environment. Built Cultural Heritage Case.

Description

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Stephen Bond runs UK-based consultancy, Heritage Places, providing advice for the historic environment to national and local government, public sector funding bodies, and property management, development and institutional clients.  From 1991-98, he undertook a seven year secondment to the Board of Historic Royal Palaces, at that time a UK Government agency, initially as its Surveyor of the Fabric, and subsequently as Director of the Tower Environs Scheme – a major regeneration scheme focused on the urban setting of the Tower of London, a World Heritage Site. 

Stephen is associate course director of the College of Estate Management’s Masters Programme in Conservation of the Historic Environment at Reading University.  He is also involved in international projects as a site management specialist.  Recent work of this kind has included providing management advice and capacity building programmes for government officials and World Heritage Site managers in Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Sri Lanka, Bali and India.

De Montfort University in the UK awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1998 in recognition of his contribution to building surveying and conservation.  He lectures widely on a range of heritage matters including policy, management and heritage value issues.
He joint-authored ‘Managing Built Heritage – the role of cultural significance’, published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2008.  A second edition is currently in preparation.

 

Tatiana V Vakhitova. Theory and a variety of legislation in different countries recommend approaching heritage in a holistic way, placing social value and interaction between human-made and natural environments at the core of cultural heritage understanding (e.g. NZ ICOMOS Charter 2010, Quebec Declaration 2008, Vienna Memorandum 2005). Nonetheless the prevailing practice is still to employ a limited view focusing on physical fabric (historic and aesthetic values), and limited consideration of cultural heritage in the majority of city planning decisions.

Impact Assessment tools, such as Environmental Impact Assessment, aim to provide more sustainable choices for decision-makers in city planning, used widely in the EU-practice, and have heritage as a category among other environmental and social categories. Improved understanding of heritage in an impact assessment process would add to more sustainable outcomes (socially aware, environmentally sound). There is a scope for better integration of categories, cross-referencing impacts on heritage, and more engagement with local communities. The world’s most well-known and arguably most protected sites with officially identified heritage – World Heritage sites – provide lessons for a general case on heritage management and assessment of impact.

Research on the boundaries of heritage and impact assessment fields contributes with an improved understanding of cultural heritage and with a framework for an integrated approach to impact assessment process applied in culturally significant urban areas. Developed framework and criteria for introducing change in historic urban areas should help to achieve agreement between different stakeholders, allowing a smoother and a more inclusive process, and leading to less need for monitoring from international bodies (e.g. for World Heritage sites these are UNESCO and ICOMOS).  

Research interests: Sustainable (educational) Built Environment, Cultural Heritage in Environmental and Social Impact assessment Tools; Sustainable Heritage management

 

 NB The group will meet at 12.00 today

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