Protection of Human Rights to the City and Preservation of Historic Urban Landscapes: Ways to Coherence

Ref.: 157
Área temática: 02 Integridad funcional de los paisajes urbanos históricos
Fecha de recepción: 16/11/2008

AUTORES (* Autor principal)

Markeviciene, Jurate * - The Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts (Lituania)

EVALUACIÓN FINAL DEL COMITÉ CIENTÍFICO: Pendiente

ABSTRACT

The paper analyses relationships between three different and vividly developing fields of contemporary international law: human rights to the city, rights to cultural heritage, and preservation of cultural (urban) landscapes. The objective is to identify their mutual incompatibilities, side-by-sideness, or/and coherence in implementation of legislation on preservation and continuity of HULs.
It is presumed that this legislation has a huge cross-sectional potential for preservation and continuity of HULs in terms of their physical and visual, as well as functional integrity. Another notion is that, in practice, these fields often tend being isolated one from another. Activities in the field of human rights to the city are targeted in equality and non-discrimination, social cohesion, urban security, special protection for vulnerable persons and groups, access to and supply of public services, right to transport and public mobility, adequate housing, education, healthy environment, etc. Contrary, activities in fields of protection of cultural identity and diversity, as well as of heritage preservation (including HULs) by virtue of their subject tend to be self-focused, paying much less attention to the above-mentioned issues relating to human, civil and communal rights, environment, health and social welfare matters.
Further on, the author states that issues of HULs (even due only to their scale) usually are trans- sectorial, and soluble not in micro-, but in macro-levels ­ social, economic, and environmental. In addition, solutions for preservation of a HUL often lie outside the protected area, however, on these macro-levels heritage issues tend to be treated as «marginal», «non-important», «of no priority», «non-integral», «out of system», and «complimentary». Globalization pressures strengthen this tendency.
On the basis of analysis relevant UNESCO, UNECE, The Council of Europe, the ICOMOS doctrinal texts (including recommendations), as well as some European legal case studies, related to public participation in the field of urban heritage, the author states that the mentioned disintegration is much less caused by the international laws, and much more ­ by their practical implementation, which causes conflicts by separating issues of cultural sustainability (including continuity of HULs) and heritage rights from the issues of human rights to the city, not to say about economic and/or propagandic interests for new development.
Finally, the author suggests some practical solutions, regarding coherence of the different fields of law in advocacy for preservation and continuity of HULs' in the context of human rights to the city, such as social cohesion, right to peace and safety in the city, rights of children, right to housing, to the environment, to public transportation and to sustainable urban development, etc.

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