CHCAP: Historic Urban Landscape Approach

The final 2014 CHCAP seminar: ‘The Historic Urban Landscape Approach: Finding a better way to manage change in the regional historic city of Ballarat’ with Susan Fayad Coordinator Heritage Strategy at the City of Ballarat in regional Victoria who is managing the roll out of UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape pilot program through a Strategic Cooperation Agreement between the World Heritage Institute of Training and Research for Asia and the Pacific (WHITRAP) in Shanghai, China and the City of Ballarat.
Urban Landscape (HUL) by the City of Ballarat: said to be a new approach to urban conservation the HUL is, perhaps unsurprisingly, receiving mixed reviews.  Challenging dominant understandings of urban heritage and confronting the challenge of change versus conservation head-on, the HUL is intended to be a much needed holistic and integrated landscape-based approach that responds to contemporary pressures confronting historic cities.
The regional city of Ballarat is renowned for its 19th century goldfields buildings and predominant historic streetscapes.  With extensive planning protection and long-established community activism focused on built heritage conservation outcomes, Ballarat is representative of a dominant focus on the static built environment.  Motivated by a need to adopt better and more inclusive processes as well as responding to projections of almost fifty percent population growth by 2031, the City of Ballarat began localising the HUL approach in 2012 and formally became part of an international pilot program to implement UNESCO’s HUL in 2013.
This is a first-hand account of the City of Ballarat’s journey to find better ways to conserve and manage Ballarat’s heritage.  In a time of increasing decentralisation this journey is highlighting what could happen when you empower Local Government to take a lead role in delivering and developing innovative new local approaches to urban conservation.
Heritage diplomacy thus seeks to both complicate the picture and allow us to ask more fine-grained questions about the possible futures of World Heritage and the governance of culture and nature more generally.
5.30 pm on Thursday, 27 November at Deakin Prime, City Campus, Theatre Room, 3/550, Bourke Street, Melbourne 3000.  The seminar will be followed by drinks as well as dinner to celebrate a year of very exciting seminars and participation!! Please RSVP for booking. Drinks is catered, dinner is a self-paid event as usual. Contact Yamini Narayanan at y.narayanan@deakin.edu.au