« Dar Echaraa » or the ancient religious tribunal of the Medina of Sousse remains a historic monument from the 17th century, symbolic and emblematic with its heritage value and its original ...architectural qualities. It is preserved until nowadays thanks to the initiatives of the local community, national and international institutions. The building is composed of wide courtyard, sober exterior fronts and a richly decorated entrance door. It is approachable through stairs, and around the square courtyard whose walls are covered with carved and ochre-coloured stones, several rooms are arranged. Dar Echaraa is a valuable landmark in the Medina of Sousse, for the inhabitants, the users and the visitors wandering daily in the alleys of the historic centre. Since the secularisation and unification of Tunisian justice system and from the time when the promulgation of the personal status code occurred on 13 August, 1956, Dar Echaraa has lost all its judicial and administrative functions as a court of justice. This architectural jewel, abandoned for many decades, depreciated and ruined, ended up being forgotten. In the 90s and thanks to the privilege of recognition of the Medina of Sousse as a World Heritage site by UNESCO, Dar Echaraa witnessed important restoration project launched by the municipality of Sousse with close collaboration with the Association for the Safeguarding of the Medina (ASM), and the technical and financial support provided by the International Association of Francophone Town Halls (AIMF). Consequently, the building has been restored, maintained and then converted into a contemporary cultural centre. Thanks to this architectural conversion, Dar Echaraa has acquired a new contemporary expression, and the former charaic tribunal, threatened to be ruined, has become a privileged destination hosting cultural and scientific events, seminars, and thus it often hosts many visitors. Therefore, what are the impacts of this architectural conversion on the ancient tribunal of the Medina? How to assess this requalification and its impacts on the process of heritagisation of the monument? The present research consists on assessing the conversion and the requalification of Dar Echaraa by comparing between the old and current states of the monument. Thus, we are describing thoroughly the changes of a place that was once a symbol of the rigor of justice and jurisprudence and that has become a space of culture and leisure, where sometimes hundreds of visitors come to assist, in a friendly atmosphere, to the various events that take place there.
Founded in 1115, Clairvaux Abbey became a prison in 1808. Inmates replaced monks in the buildings for more than 160 years. During the 1970’s, prisoners were transferred in the new high security ...prison within the cloister wall and since then the Ministry of Culture is in charge of historic buildings. Today the future of Clairvaux is very uncertain due to the French government decision to close the prison in 2023. This paper, based on the webdocumentary The monastery and the prison: places of confinement (Le Cloître et la prison: les espaces de l’enfermement), analyses the way buildings were transformed during 19th and 20th centuries. It shows the heritagisation process, by comparing Clairvaux to other abbey prisons (such as Fontevraud or le Mont-Saint-Michel). The webdocumentary promotes virtually the heritage value of Clairvaux and its archives, playing a role in its preservation as well as its economic and touristic valorisation.
The inventory is a means of knowledge and a first tool for heritage protection. Subsequent to the law amending the cultural heritage law and other legislative provisions passed by the National ...Assembly of Quebec on 25th March 2021, the regional county municipalities have to provide themselves with an inventory of the heritage buildings located on their territory, at least those built before 1940, the integration of more recent elements being left at their discretion. This cut-off time set by the law belittles the built heritage of innovative architecture of the 20th century, whose many elements were constructed in the 1960’s, while Quebec was undergoing major transformations with the “Révolution tranquille”, the Quiet Revolution. Social movements caused by urban renewal operations and their demolitions by the middle of the decade, as well as the failures of some major construction sites implementing concrete at the beginning of the next one, have they not left their imprint on the collective memory to such an extent that they have permanently marred the cultural value of the buildings from this time? To answer this question, we explore the representations emanating from three cases, the renovation of the Milton-Parc neighbourhood in Montreal, the rehabilitation of the Parliament Hill in Qubec City and the construction of the Olympic park of Montreal for the 1976 summer Olympic Games.
This article discusses heritagisation in Albania. It starts by situating the issue in the history of the country and the course taken by the city and the Stacioni i Trenit district. This district ...used to house the central station, until it was destroyed in 2013, as well as agricultural facilities which were dismantled after the fall of Communism in 1990. This site now forms a 25-hectare wasteland, characterized by a variety of informal uses, the incomplete reprivatisation of land, and a major urban transformation project. We explore how the legacies of agriculture and the railway in Stacioni i Trenit transpire in practices, how they are identified and used by the various protagonists, and to what extent the heritagization process may reveal social and spatial dynamics at work more broadly across Tirana and Albania today. Data presented in the text stems from a multidisciplinary research project conducted since 2018, combining urban planning, architecture, sociology, and anthropology.
The Porto-Novo region in West Africa is part of a growing conurbation in South-Eastern Benin. In the same way as in the city of Porto-Novo - the political capital of the country, which for some years ...has been undergoing a major dynamic heritagisation process - a spontaneous movement of identification and promotion of tangible and intangible cultural assets has emerged in the small municipalities of the Porto-Novo suburbs which have been marked by a profound re-composition of their landscapes and a redefining of their functions while undergoing a decentralisation process. The sacred forests of the Porto-Novo countryside, some of which are reservoirs of biodiversity, bear witness to the renewal of religious practices attached to the customary Vodun religion which have survived despite the rapid and predatory encroachment of urbanization. These wooded areas close to the city have many different forms today although their overall surface area has decreased; they also sometimes adapt to the modern context and to ongoing cultural transformations. In a context of religious diversity and of a revival of traditions in Benin since the 1990s, the recognition of these small forests as part of the cultural heritage may help protect them.
Inscribed on the ICH list since 2016, taḥṭīb is an Egyptian practice typically performed at wedding celebrations and pilgrimages (mawlid). It is an exclusively male martial art with strict rules, in ...which two men, each armed with a stick, perform a combat in a choreographed series of defined figures. Music is central to taḥṭīb: the players are accompanied—encouraged and restrained—by the playing of mizmār and ṭabla baladi. Like many rural practices, taḥṭīb is considered by both its participants and spectators to be an ancestral tradition tracing back to Egypt’s Pharaonic era. After presenting the practice of taḥṭīb in twenty-first century Egypt, I will examine elements of the Pharaonist discourse, the resulting heritagisation processes, and the recent developments that led to Adel Boulad’s creation of Modern Tahtib. This analysis will focus on the memory constructions currently at play in Egypt, their reception abroad—in this case, in France—and how they allowed taḥṭīb and its music to be inscribed on the ICH list.
The Ways of Saint James are ancient routes of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela travelled from the 9th century and which in recent years have seen a profound revitalisation of tourism, based on ...the conversion of these routes into tourist-cultural routes, which in turn allows these routes to be valued and the existing heritage assets to be articulated. This study has as main goals to identify and analyse the transformation of the existing Ways of Saint James in the interior north of Portugal into tourist-cultural routes. At the same time, it is intended to demonstrate how these tourist routes allow dynamising and conferring a new role to these routes, through a process of transformation and recovery. In methodological terms, a quali-quantitative approach was employed, based on interviews with tourism agents, but it also involved the analysis of statistical indicators. This triangulation of data facilitated an understanding of measures and perceptions resulting from the revitalisation process of these Ways. The results obtained allow us to demonstrate that the conversion of the paths results essentially in three vectors: their recovery; the adoption of a continuous process of dynamisation in tourist terms and above all; a process of heritagisation and valorisation of the route itineraries.
In Yangon, Myanmar, urban heritage has been deployed to mean material objects capable of both recalling history and producing a better future. This article examines the ‘heritagisation’ of the ...Secretariat during the so-called ‘transition’, even as ‘transition’ and ‘heritagisation’ were intertwined ideas and discursive tactics that capitalised on the temporary retreat of military autocracy. We use the term ‘heritagisation’ to indicate a process wherein something comes to be quite commonsensically considered as ‘heritage’ and in which actors and stakeholders disavow being the driving force behind this process. Heritagisation, for us, differs from heritage-making in that the former excludes accountability. It is predicated on the eventual heritage status of a place, object or practice appearing as obvious, naturally emergent, and seemingly indisputable rather than constructed by invested actors. This process of claiming significance effectively turned heritage into a ‘boundary object’ that enabled Myanmar’s cultural elites and international stakeholders to not only reframe colonial architecture as ‘heritage’ but also imagine an alternative future wherein the actions of coercive governments – both British colonial and Myanmar military – could be reconciled with the idea of a new democratic nation, made visible by a revitalised colonial cityscape.
The Ardèche department is often vaunted today for its attractive natural landscapes and its historic heritage, but it stands out in French industrial history for its production of thrown silk, ...accounting for half of national production during the nineteenth century. The thrown silk is obtained during a little-known intermediate stage in the industry, called ‘moulinage’ in French, silk-throwing, situated between ‘filature’, the spinning, or, more precisely, the reeling of raw silk from the cocoons, and weaving. The process gives twists to one or several threads of hard silk, making them hold together but also giving the silk a series of other qualities such as brilliance, resistance, elasticity, and so on. The work we undertook for our geography thesis on the territory of the natural regional park of the Ardèche Mountains tried to answer a simple question: what has become of this industrial heritage? Between disappearance and conceptualisation as heritage, between inventory notices and citizens initiatives, our article looks at different forms of interpretation and promotion. To begin with we examine the industrial heritage itself, both physical and intangible, observing this heritage in the light of its links with the surrounding rural environment. We then go on to an analysis of the situation and the uses to which the heritage is put today, in keeping with different territorial tendencies within the department. And we conclude by asking what particularities can be observed in the heritagisation processes at work.
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