Experiencing heritage as an urban journey

On a recent trip to Bucharest – a must for anyone interested in architecture or history – I was lucky enough to be given a guided tour of the decaying and often abandoned eighteenth and nineteenth century network of neighbourhoods tucked away immediately behind the vast and grand post-war communist boulevards and avenues that form the main public realm.

This got me thinking about the value of experiencing architectural heritage as a collective journey through and within public urban space. This is particularly important in an era where conservation is becoming dominated by an emphasis on concepts such as ‘sense of place’, the ability to perceive the unique character and cultural context that has formed through situational-specific interplay between distinct historic layers, and creation of an experiential socio-cultural landscape with people and the value they draw from heritage at its centre.

I found particular value in experiencing cultural sites as a connected part of a single urban story as reflected in a mature and complex built and topographical palimpsest. Winding my way through the decayed streets and crumbling buildings of pre-communist Bucharest, once fine examples of internationally-important architectural styles, allowed me to experience at a much more emotive level the complex development of the city and its people through time. I perceived the city in its raw, unbiased form, and recognised its successes and its tragedies. I was able to understand, through the interplay between distinct built and topographical elements, eras of pre-war prosperity, immigration, and growth in the city followed by the large-scale abandonment of neighbourhoods and destruction of architectural and cultural heritage during the Ceausescu communist era.

The ways in which buildings and spaces interact with one another throughout an urban space is critical for understanding, at a much deeper level, the development of a place and to connect people to a place-based collective memory. In Bucharest for example on the communist boulevards are concrete monolith apartment blocks enveloping tiny orthodox churches, though only those that escaped Ceausescu’s bulldozer or those that were not moved on rollers and stilts by desperate citizens to the connecting streets (true story, that actually happened), and through this you begin to understand the traumas of the city’s very recent past.

Experiencing cultural heritage as a journey through urban space increases the ability to perceive broader and more nuanced heritage significance and also offers opportunities to create a personal experience of a cityscape and its heritage allowing you to discover spaces within a city that contribute greatly to its significance but which perhaps do not form part of the more formalised cultural offer – areas of decay or forgotten buildings and spaces for example.

The management and development of cultural heritage should take account of the value in experiencing heritage as a journey through the public realm and preserve and enhance the complex palimpsest of a place. In urban planning for example we look to protect historic street plans and layouts where they survive, preserving important functional and visual relationships between distinct elements of architectural and landscaped heritage. We only have to think of the tight narrow snickelways of York representative of thin medieval burghage plots. Even if a medieval building, or whole street of medieval buildings, in York has gone the fact you still wind your way through the thin, narrow, cobbled alleyways allows you to experience a connection with the medieval city that many delight in and which provides the city with a particularly unique character.

Where this historic topography has been lost, and no evidence for it survives, we can create relationships between built and landscaped space to provide new ways of experiencing heritage assets. We can create areas or spaces of reflection, places to sit for example, design centralising squares, or open up grand vistas. We can increase access to underutilised but important parts of a city to create physical pathways through the cultural palimpsest by pedestrianizing areas to allow easier and more relaxed movement where the domination of cars have meant people rarely stop to experience the environment. It might often be as simple as designing the public realm with more gradual and relaxed slopes so people can more easily access areas such as historic canals. This is particularly important for example in an environment such as the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter where the canal, a key part of the industrial story of the area, in many places sits at a lower level to the complex artisanal and industrial spaces and buildings above but which hides a fascinating story critical to the development of the area and the city.

Heritage, and the experiencing of heritage, is often very personal. The ability to draw a powerful sense of place, or value, from this experience is reliant on the physical, visual, and emotive connections we make to the historic environment around us. By experiencing heritage as a story through an urban space -following historic street patterns, identifying connections between historic buildings and their relationship to contemporary space, discovering forgotten relics, and forging your own path through the complex historic palimpsest is crucial for understanding the potential of heritage and its impact on modern society. In particular, through experiencing heritage as an urban journey we can appreciate the potential of heritage as a central part of modern place-shaping activities and, ultimately, quality of life in which historic places have an intrinsic and meaningful link, social importance, and relevance to those in the present.