Heritage diplomacy and Australia's responses to a shifting landscape of international conservation

The economic and political shifts that together constitute contemporary globalisation are opening up new spaces for non-Western modes of heritage governance in the international arena. Perhaps most notable here is the so-called rise of Asia, wherein a growing number of countries are investing heavily in a range of institutions and initiatives designed to provide cultural sector aid across the region. These new forms of heritage diplomacy hold significant implications for the governance of heritage at the global level, such that they promise to unsettle those structures and norms which emerged from Europe and North America and stabilised internationally over the course of the twentieth century. The paper explores such changes and some of the ways the Australian heritage conservation sector might respond to this rapidly shifting landscape of heritage diplomacy.&nbsp

Heritage tourism : the dawn of a new era?

For many years tourism has been one of the principal ways through which the relationship between heritage and globalisation is analytically articulated. Countless studies since the 1970s have considered the arrival of tourism as the precipitator of modernity, of modernisation and of widespread social transformation. There is little doubt this tradition of scholarship will continue to thrive and evolve. By way of a contribution to this research, this chapter sets out to illustrate why current debates in this field need to shift direction, and why frameworks which better reflect the realities of today’s global tourism industry need to be developed, most notably ones which can better account for the ongoing rise of non-Western forms of tourism

Destination Asia : rethinking material culture

Today, the legacy of Cambodia’s colonial past can still be seen in the country’s ‘cultural heritage.’ Indeed, commonly held prescriptions of an ‘authentic’ Khmer or Cambodian culture, forged during a period of French colonialism, have been re-invigorated through the cultural logics of a post-conflict international tourism and heritage industry overwhelmingly oriented around the World Heritage Site of Angkor. Closer examination of tourism in Cambodia today, however, suggests important shifts are now occurring. During the 1990s, North America and Europe dominated Cambodia’s arrival statistics. More recently, Northeast Asia and ASEAN countries have become the country’s key source markets. Today, over 70 percent of all tourists traveling to Cambodia are from within Asia. This shift in markets holds important consequences for Cambodia’s material culture, where a Eurocentric discourse of what is considered as ‘traditional’ Khmer or Cambodian is now being overlaid, transcended and reconstituted by the aesthetics of a tourism industry linked to Taiwan, Korea and China. Characterized by a multitude of economic and cultural flows, this shift in tourism holds major implications for a country still very much engaged in a task of socio-cultural rehabilitation and identity reconstruction

Conclusion : recasting tourism theory, towards an Asian future

As we move into the new millennium we are constantly told this will be the ‘Asian century.’ By 2050, India and China will be the powerhouses of the global economy. If this is the case, then it can be safely assumed that modernization, development and vast increases in wealth for hundreds of millions of people will lead to unprecedented levels of travel. Urry’s (2007) suggestion that contemporary globalization demands us to re-conceive societies in terms of ‘mobilities’ holds extremely important consequences for understanding and making sense of the rapid changes now occurring in Asia. The near overnight growth of budget airlines across the region and the launch of a car costing US$2,500 by Tata that will bring the freedom of movement to hundreds of thousands of families are just two indicators of a mobile future. Is the world of academia, and in particular the field of tourism studies, institutionally and intellectually equipped to address the profound social changes Asian tourism will inevitably bring? I believe it isn’t. In this final chapter I want to spell out why not and offer some initiatives that might help us better address the myriad challenges and possibilities Asian tourism poses. The chapter begins by highlighting some of the key problems that continue to lie at the heart of scholarship on tourism. This is followed by a discussion of how such issues might be tackled in ways that create a more pluralistic, less Western-centric discourse

Urban futures – some concluding thoughts

The papers presented in this special issue move us back and forth, from past approaches to urban conservation to a consideration of future trajectories. As the editors note in the Introduction, the preservation of urban heritage is a rapidly evolving field, and significant developments are now being made to address the very real challenges, paradoxes and ambiguities posed by – what are invariably – spaces of significant complexity. To round off this special issue on Historic Cities, I want to point to some future trends, which, when considered together, suggest such complexities are only going to multiply. As we shall see, the future of cities in different parts of the world looks vastly different. I believe if place specific initiatives are to be effective and appropriately tailored to local conditions, they simultaneously need to be cognisant and responsive to their larger contexts, whether that be national or global. Accordingly, it is these more macro trends that I focus on here, concentrating particularly on the regions of the world where the challenges will undoubtedly be the greatest and most pressing: the ‘developing world’, to use such a term advisedly

Understanding the tensions in place – conflict and conservation in Kashmir

The ongoing evolution of the global heritage movement has been marked by a move away from fabric-centred understandings of heritage, towards a language of ‘place’, ‘values’ and ‘stakeholders’. Recent initiatives like the ‘Vienna Memorandum on Historic Urban Landscapes’ and the ‘Seoul Declaration on Heritage and the Metropolis in Asia and the Pacific’ represent important steps in such directions for managing the heritage of urban environments. This paper examines these developments in the context of Srinagar, the capital city of Indian administered Kashmir. With the conflict in the region enduring for more than fifteen years, the city - regarded as one of the most important pre-modern urban landscapes in South Asia - has suffered extensive physical damage. Nonetheless, the city remains the cultural and political heart of a wider collective identity rooted in the Kashmir Valley. As such, Srinagar presents a rich example of a city that would strongly benefit from the insights gained from Seoul and Vienna; an approach that recognises how a sense of ‘place’ arises through an intimate dialogue between the built environment and the socio-cultural context within which it sits. However, as we shall see, a framework oriented around ‘values’ and ‘context’ opens up unfamiliar and difficult questions and challenges. If a city like Srinagar is to be discussed in more holistic, less fabric-based terms, the interfaces between heritage and its wider social values, such as cultural sovereignty, multi-culturalism or democracy require far greater attention than they have received to date