Keywords

The contributions presented in this volume are the result of experiences of cultural heritage preservation, carried out in vastly different technical spheres, and highly diverse geographical and temporal contexts. They range from interventions for heritage preservation in its physical form, to archaeological research, to museum reconstruction, to a structural analysis of the cultural landscape, to the formulation of protection plans in the context of broader territorial transformation processes.

Despite the diversity of these contexts, the contributions all offer a cue for general reflections on the relationship between development cooperation action for the protection and enhancement of cultural heritage on the one hand, and processes of territorial transformation and socio-economic development on the other.

1 Addressing Complexity

The first point to stress is that each contribution brings us back to what we might call a central challenge with regards to what will be the results of development cooperation actions, namely the in-depth understanding of the local context and the capacity to address its complexity.

This is in fact the precondition for any effective connection between technical intervention and the social dynamics and transformative processes taking place in the area. Taking into account the complexity of territorial systems, deciphering an area’s societal articulation and long-term transformative processes provides knowledge of that area, necessary in assessing interventions in terms of their effectiveness and sustainability. This is particularly true for action aimed at safeguarding cultural heritage, which, as a highly symbolic expression of the identity and memory of local communities—and, in the case of world heritage, of all humanity—offers fertile ground for the activation of valid development paths. This is even more the case in fragile contexts. Specific knowledge of the context, of its physical-natural but also social subtleties, and of the evolutionary dynamics at play, is crucial for the realization of a vision, in which the preservation of cultural heritage becomes key for the self-recognition of local communities while functioning as an effective lever of social consolidation and economic advancement.

An in-depth geo-anthropological and social analysis should therefore lay the groundwork for and accompany interventions for the safeguarding of cultural heritage. Only a solid knowledge of the local reality, particularly from a social perspective, allows for an understanding of both the symbolic and concrete meanings that the protective action takes on for local communities, today and in future. It allows for the drawing up of scenarios aimed at the development and activation of endogenous resources—material, economic, human—which heritage intervention could act as a catalyst for. This is because a cultural heritage protection that does not turn its gaze to the future value of the property is inconceivable.

The need for a high-quality cognitive framework brings about the need for highly skilled personnel with adequate disciplinary training and deep knowledge, especially in the field of geo-anthropological and social sciences. In short, the practice of conservation is not a matter for conservation experts alone and cannot be understood solely through a historical lens.Footnote 1

Similarly, it is necessary to come up with an adequate timeframe. Work continuity for scholars and cooperative practitioners should be ensured to the greatest extent possible so as to facilitate the consolidation of knowledge and experience of the context as well as interactions with the local community.

The contributions presented in this volume, offer up evidence for the importance of devoting full, long-term and unwavering attention to the study of the social context as a guarantee for the effectiveness of the intervention.

2 Empirical Research and Participative Practices

The second point to stress is that in-depth understanding of the context and sustainable heritage safeguarding can only go hand-in-hand with community involvement and empowerment. There cannot be a universal heritage site that is not first and foremost recognized by the local community.

This approach to heritage protection has now been almost universally accepted on the theoretical level, as confirmed by the contributions to the recent UNESCO Conference Cultural Heritage in the 21st Century.Footnote 2 More dubious, however, appears to be how it is put into practice in development cooperation projects.

Placing conservation interventions in their contemporary environment means conceiving the local community as a strategic actor in the process, rather than simply providing basic forms of community involvement, which often result in a mere rhetorical addition to otherwise purely technical projects.

So as to really be a means towards general social development, the safeguarding of cultural heritage should proceed through the strengthening of institutions and grassroots democracy. In this paradigm, it is crucial to enact participative practices able to facilitate a deeper understanding of the place, its internal dynamics and workings, and finally, processes of virtuous change. Therefore, the way in which the participative processes are formulated is of paramount importance.

The first step should be to engage in dialogue with all extant institutions directly or indirectly involved both in the safeguarding of cultural heritage and in the urban planning sector, so as to guarantee that heritage preservation policies do not remain isolated sectoral interventions, but part and parcel of the general territorial planning tools of the protected territory, as stated by the ICOMOS Paris Declaration on heritage as a driver of development (ICOMOS 2011) as well as by other documents from UNESCO or its advisory bodies (see Introduction).

With regards to institutional personnel, its involvement in extended training activities has proved to be especially effective, such as those provided by Florence University for technical staff from the MoIC-Afghan Ministry of Information and Culture, the MUDH-Ministry of Urban Development and Housing and the Bamiyan Municipality during the preparation of the Bamiyan Strategic Master Plan (LaGeS 2018).Footnote 3 This solution provided a suitable space–time context in which researchers and practitioners were able to develop a common approach and language for the safeguarding of cultural heritage, within the broader framework of the spatial and urban management of the valley, and to deal jointly with complex methodological and technical aspects.

Interesting results are also to be expected from calling on local researchers to contribute to preparing the knowledge base. Their contribution can be relevant in setting up the research design and identifying sensitive topics. The development of inter-cooperation partnerships with local universities is therefore highly desirable.

The direct and continuous involvement of local staff, researchers, and students has proved extremely effective in developing methodological approaches suited to the local context and for achieving otherwise unimaginable levels of in-depth context analysis. At the same time, it ensures complete community ownership of the process from the very beginning of the interventions.

Local community involvement should also address the wider public of stakeholders and society at large. This involvement can take various forms, the most typical being meetings to allow for an exchange of opinions on the results of the investigations previously conducted on specific aspects of local life, or to illustrate and discuss possible scenarios for the development and strategies connected to the valorization of its cultural heritage. The link between safeguarding cultural heritage and the potential for developing the tourist industry is a major topic to be discussed with local society. It is equally important to publicly address the consequences that prioritizing safeguarding interventions can have in terms of strict rules for other sectors and/or activities. For example, by heightening buildings or developing road networks, we might hope to prevent negative reactions and opposition.

Among the ways by which to involve the wider public, special attention should be devoted to participative practices set up to give voice to underrepresented components of the local population. Depending on the context, this may refer to gender, to ethnic or religious belonging or to other dimensions of the social setting.

As documented by the contributions that make up this volume, geo-anthropological empirical research and fieldwork play an important role in this regard, as an opportunity for direct contact with the population during the production of the knowledge foundations. Firstly, quantitative surveys make it possible to update and integrate the information obtainable from secondary literature (historical, geo-anthropological, sociological, and economic) and the (normally) available statistics, that for these fragile regions are usually highly limited and gathered by international agencies at a rather aggregated territorial level, being therefore of little benefit for the analysis of specific areas or communities.

Secondly, geo-anthropological empirical research can help fill knowledge gaps on various aspects of local life, including the socio-economic conditions of households, the quality of housing stock and housing styles, the status of infrastructure and services, mobility patterns and behaviors, as well as the structure and setup of the productive sectors and so on. These aspects, even if seemingly unrelated to heritage preservation, provide precious information on the material environment surrounding heritage.

Thirdly, through qualitative research techniques such as participant observation, semi-structured interviews or focus groups, geo-anthropological empirical research helps open up a dialogue with the local community on relevant topics such as people’s living practices, forms of socialization, how urban spaces are enjoyed, handicraft production modes (especially women’s) and so forth. These aspects allow for an in-depth understanding of the socio-cultural environment.

Particularly promising is the use of audio-visual techniques for analyzing changes affecting the cultural landscape, an area as crucial to cultural heritage as it is intricate to analyze. As we will see in the next paragraph, audio-visual techniques prove effective both for analyzing territorial transformations and erosive processes across the cultural landscape and for communicating them to the broader public.Footnote 4

Finally, qualitative empirical research sets the ideal conditions for addressing sensitive issues such as migration processes, settlement dynamics in informal contexts, gender, ethnic belonging, or religious affiliation; all aspects that shed light on the inherent makeup of the local community. Researchers and cooperation practitioners tend to think of the local community as a whole, as a homogeneous entity, while in reality it is made up of various subgroups with often diverging interests. We might even speak of local communities in the plural, instead of as a single community.

Only awareness about the makeup/structure of the local community make it possible to correctly address sensitive issues and mitigate the conflicts inevitably accompanying decisions regarding the use of resources (notably land, financial resources, fundings).

3 Sensitive Issues

The contributions in this volume provide significant examples of how empirical research and in-depth interactions with different components of the local community makes it possible to address sensitive issues and mitigate conflicts. We will briefly reflect on these examples with reference to the topics of gender, interethnic conflicts, and cultural landscape.

As far as gender is concerned, surveys and studies carried out have made it possible to more effectively document the significance that domestic space takes on in Bamiyan and in other rural areas in Afghanistan, as well as in similar realities dealt with in this book. In these contexts, the domestic sphere is relevant not only as a private and family space. Instead, it is extended to encompass parental/clan networks that are sometimes very extensive, and which therefore transcend the strict family perimeter. The extended dimension of families functions as a kind of public (political) sphere and the domestic space works as a quasi-public space.Footnote 5 Considerations, which result from preliminary investigations of women’s mobility, housing styles, family living practices, and so on, suggest the need for a certain paradigm shift in the way urban public spaces are conceived and designed in contexts of substantial gender segregation, such as that seen across many regions considered in this volume. In these cases, classically understood open public spaces, like parks, are in fact only enjoyed by the male population. On the other hand, the improvement and enhancement of domestic spaces can strengthen the socialization opportunities and “public” agency of the female population, contrary to what one might assume in the West. Measures in this direction should therefore be included among the primary objectives of urban rehabilitation interventions. Similarly, recognizing the dual significance of shrines and other pilgrimage sites in women’s practices—that serve as both spaces for prayer and as open spaces independently usable by women—may open up land-use planning possibilities, aimed at solutions that could improve the quality of their urban experience. In the specific case of Bamiyan, recognizing the shrines’ highly symbolic value for the local population (in particular women), ultimately allows those places—although not listed as heritage properties—to be identified as potential objects of protection and enhancement, from a cultural heritage preservation perspective that aims first and foremost at recognition of and enjoyment by the local population.

Moving on to the delicate matter of ethnicity, this is an element of social organization that has received increased political attention in recent decades, and thus also in the field of cooperation.

This attention reflects the importance that this topic has acquired in academia since the 1960s. However, the way ethnicity is often conceptualized entails certain risks. The most common approach sees ethnicity as a primordial condition of the individual. The ethnic group is defined as a unified and stable group of individuals who share an original cultural condition and thus has agency. On a theoretical level, such an ontological reading effectively reifies ethnicity as an innate condition, not susceptible to change. On a practical level, this understanding may lead to a definition of ethnicity which, to the outside observer, explains all societal tensions and conflicts. Consequently, this approach entails an attitude of powerlessness combined with foreignness in the face of tension, that can severely hinder cooperative action.

The opposing perspective refers instead to a reading of ethnicity as a category that takes on relevance only when it “is deployed as a discursive resource for political or economic goals” (Brubaker et al. 2006). Ethnicity—(re)produced in response to the discursive political practice that solicits it—becomes a device capable of hindering the proper interpretation and resolution of tensions and conflicts, and indeed of concealing their underlying causes.

An example might be found in the tension that exists between the Tajiks and the Hazaras, concerning the regional administration’s efforts at protecting the cultural landscape in front of Bamiyan’s Buddha niches, in accordance with UNESCO’s guidance (see Chap. 2.2). The reason behind their different reactions serves as a strong reminder that we should refrain from absolutizing the ethnically grounded viewpoints present in the local context but should instead read them in connection to the political discourse that (re)produces them. The contrasting reactions to the administration’s efforts to protect the cultural landscape correspond perfectly to the terms that Naysan Adlparvar uses to define the interethnic dynamic in Bamiyan—“Ethnicity is … an intermittent phenomenon during which people become temporarily ethnicised. They are not always ‘Hazarah’ or ‘Tajik’, for example, but become so when their ethnicity is called upon” (Adlparvar 2014, p. 12).

In a context where ethnicity has always been thrown about as a discursive resource in the political arena, it was inevitable that the cultural landscape debate would evolve into a politico-ethnical issue. The difficulties that come from the different positions on the topic of heritage protection were thus charged with tension, owing to the growing rigidity of ethnic factors during the Afghan turmoil. The underlying reasons for the conflict between Tajiks and Hazaras over landscape protection measures in the Bamiyan valley emerged through an empirical survey of the economic base of the two groups, which—putting ethnicity aside—brought out their different economic background (agricultural in the first case, commercial in the second) and thus the differing impact of administrative action. The Hazara group was advantaged, and the Tajik group significantly disadvantaged by the landscape protection policies. In-depth studies have made it possible to move beyond an ethnic reading of the conflict and shift focus to the need to prepare and secure compensatory measures for the disadvantaged farmers.

In the interplay between efforts to protect the landscape and efforts to protect economic interests, the ethnic dimension played a complex and misleading role, stirring mutual resentment and making it harder to strike a balance between the different interest groups. Thanks to the surveys carried out, it was possible to mitigate the conflict between the groups and pave the way for a shared approach to the protection of the cultural landscape.

Finally, it should be remembered that the cultural landscape can represent at the same time an aspect of cultural heritage to be preserved in itself (as in the case of Bamiyan, where the outstanding value of the cultural landscape is mentioned in the nomination), or the setting that includes assets of cultural heritage. In either case, cultural landscape is the sphere in which the intersection between local traditions and modernization and the development drive of the local community becomes visible, with all the transformation and erosion that this may have involved. This makes it especially challenging to look at cultural landscape from a safeguarding perspective.

However, the contributions in the volume demonstrate how an in-depth understanding of the local culture can pave the way towards approaches to safeguarding cultural landscapes that suit the local context.

They have first shown the urgency of efforts to break out of an abstract logic of pure preservation, and to reinterpret the objective of landscape protection within a strategic vision of spatial organization, informed by the sustainable use and enhancement of local resources.

Moreover, it has become clear that establishing the system of rules with regard to land use and the permissible interventions on the physical landscape in the context of inevitable territorial transformation, fundamental as it may be, does not guarantee the preservation of the structural elements that make up the cultural landscape. This holds especially in situations-like those handled in this volume—where the concept of landscape is not rooted in the local culture but has been introduced quite recently alongside that of heritage by the international safeguarding agencies. The lack of specific terms with which to translate the concept of landscape into the local language—as is the case of Dari and Pashtu—should be considered an indicator of the difficulties that the local community has in grasping the importance of its preservation as an expression of the distinct, settled relationship between the social community and the territory on which it stands.

Rather, the system of rules for the safeguarding of the cultural landscape needs to be anchored in the widespread awareness of and emotional attachment to the values that the cultural landscape conveys.

Therefore, in cases where the concept of cultural landscape is not rooted in the local culture, the starting point for its preservation should be in interventions aimed at creating a widespread awareness of its relevance both as an emotional connection to the place and as a potential asset for a growth in tourism. It would be appropriate to begin by focusing on projects that advocate a perception and understanding of the landscape as a prerequisite for its protection. An interesting case of this kind is the ongoing documenting and training program set up in Bamiyan. It focuses on audio-visual recordings of characteristic features of the cultural landscape and of the way they are (re)produced or modified by the daily practices of the inhabitants.Footnote 6 The aim of the program is to put together an interactive video installation on the subject, open to the wider public, particularly students and schoolchildren of the region, as a sort of education program to the values of the cultural landscape, but also for visitors, in efforts to support mindful and sustainable tourism.

In conclusion, the experiences reported in this volume confirm that in order to be effective and sustainable, interventions for the preservation of cultural heritage should work hand in hand with the social sciences, conceiving safeguarding as part of a general process of social advancement and economic development, of which the local communities ought to be the leading actors and supporters.