Sustainability in the preservation of cultural heritage. The meaning of UNESCO's 1972 World Heritage Convention and Brazil's contribution in recent decades

50 years after the establishment of the World Heritage Convention, it is worth reflecting on and evaluating its contribution to humanity in the face of increasingly accelerated processes of transformation of societies and the planet itself, not always consistent with the future that can be desired and achieved in terms of lasting well-being.  As a guide to procedures that have been guiding nations in valuing their heritage, whether cultural, natural or mixed, as a way to register, understand and disseminate the civilizing process of humanity, the World Heritage Convention has acquired throughout its trajectory various meanings, according to and according to the needs, precepts and stages of societal and institutional maturation in each country that has adopted it in its national normative framework.

In the Brazilian case, the national initiatives in favor of the safeguarding of heritage predate the Convention and are established from a logic of Brazilian thinkers and intellectuals who aimed at the modernity of the country and understood that the combination with tradition was fundamental to establish the paths of the desired development, that is, the germ of a sustainable perspective for the preservation of the country's cultural heritage was already present, recognizing cultural values as a lever to imprint a socially just, environmentally appropriate and culturally diverse development.

The basic principles that guided the institution of the Convention as a legally binding instrument that established an intergovernmental framework for international cooperation, starting with the case of Aswan, Egypt, in the 1960s, with the international movement led by UNESCO, to protect the temples of Abu Simbel that would be submerged with the construction of the dam that was necessary for the Egyptian people, favored the creation of a mechanism and an instrument of international arbitration that could mediate the process of economic growth, printing regulatory parameters that would include culture and nature in the development agendas as indispensable variables for decision-making on which directions and models of development to adopt. It is in this spirit that the World Heritage Committee and the Convention itself, which ratified by the countries, began to regulate, to a greater or lesser extent, the practices that are promoted for the preservation and safeguarding of heritage, whether cultural, natural or mixed. It should be noted that the World Heritage Centre was created 20 years later, in 1992, as an autonomous body of the UNESCO Secretariat to administratively manage all matters related to the Convention and, with the assistance of the advisory bodies, to technically manage its application.

Brazil ratified the Convention in 1977, five years after its adoption by UNESCO, and three years later, it has inscribed its first cultural asset, the city of Ouro Preto, a landmark of the Baroque in the southern hemisphere and an important reference of the country's colonial period to the world. The first inscriptions of Brazilian sites on the World Heritage List follow the logic that already existed in the scope of national politics. Thus, other urban historical sites are incorporated, such as the historic centers of Olinda and Salvador, as well as an archaeological site – the Ruins of São Miguel das Missões in the south of the country and the architectural complex of the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos, in Congonhas, MG, until the inscription of Brasília, in 1987, as a modern heritage, which occurs ten years after the Brazilian ratification, whose inscription inaugurates a reality that is expressed, at the time, in the face of the 50 years of implementation of policies for the preservation of cultural heritage in Brazil, which began in 1937 with the creation of the National Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage – IPHAN and with the institution of listing as an instrument of national recognition, a moment in which new challenges are outlined and the results achieved become references for the world.

The candidacies that follow are finding an echo, by mobilizing diverse actors and manifesting other reference frameworks that are enabling Brazil to show itself more, in its entirety to itself and to the world, and, in the external sphere, its candidacy proposals to identify and be increasingly in line with the global strategies established in 1994, which expressed the need to make the World Heritage List more representative, balanced and more credible. A study carried out by ICOMOS between 1987 and 1993 already revealed that Europe, historic cities, religious monuments of Christianity and erudite architecture were over-represented on the list, while living cultures and especially the so-called "traditional cultures" were still under-represented.

For Brazil, in this policy of recognition, protection and appreciation of Brazilian cultural assets, qualitative aspects have always been present, above the quantitative ones, in terms of presence and contribution to the Convention and the World Heritage List. Brazil sought to assist the process of implementation and consolidation of the Convention itself and at the same time update the national policy, whether in the conceptual advance on the notion of heritage, the management practices of recognized assets and the instruments applied to the existing realities in the country. Concerns about the forms of appropriation of these recognized sites, such as tourist consumption, have been gaining prominence, given the potential that these sites have and their operational capacity to provide economic, social, educational and cultural dynamics that, through tourism, if well worked, can generate in favor of this heritage and its populations.

Thus, the Brazilian initiatives carried in their DNA a notorious concern with the sustainability of the initiatives that were sought to be undertaken as a policy of recognition of cultural assets and their consequent management. This can be seen with the presentation of the candidacy of the city of Goiás and which is reiterated with the candidacies of Praça São Francisco in São Cristóvão, the urban cultural landscape of Rio de Janeiro, the Pampulha Modern Complex, the Archaeological Site of Cais do Valongo, Paraty and Ilha Grande and the Roberto Burle Marx Site, of which I had the grateful satisfaction of being an integral part of the national team.  All of them faced the challenges and obstacles that such candidacies represent, exploring all the possible opportunities that the recognition process gave rise to and, consequently, that the resulting management practices demanded.

The city of Goiás expressed the challenges of recognizing vernacular architecture as opposed to monumental architecture, in a context of intense local participation and political-institutional motivation, supported by a concerted and shared action, providing urban improvements, such as basic sanitation, embedding of overhead wiring for public lighting and restoration of monuments. The São Francisco Square in São Cristóvão, emphasized the need for new territorial readings due to historical contexts little addressed when analyzed transversally, such as those referring to the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, highlighting the opportunity to promote devitalized urban spaces.  The landscapes of Rio de Janeiro between the mountain and the sea, expressed in the city of Rio de Janeiro, highlighted the effective application of the concept of cultural landscape in an urban context, constituting the first urban cultural landscape declared in the world, in addition to expressing the challenge of shared management between public agents and society in the search for management practices that demand convergence in the application of territorial management instruments, are urban, environmental and cultural.  The Pampulha Modern Complex, in Belo Horizonte, accelerated processes aimed at improving the environmental conditions of the site, especially the Pampulha Lagoon, in addition to providing a more transversal and coordinated action between municipal administration agents in the area and an unprecedented promotion of the private sector in associating its brand with the declared site, expressing the immense potential that World Heritage sites have in generating new investments. The Valongo Wharf, on the other hand, as a site of sensitive memory, brought to light a very important theme to be included in the World Heritage List, due to its physical transcendence, as an archaeological site, for a place of memory and incentive to the appreciation and self-determination of Afro-descendants in Brazil and in the world. Paraty and Ilha Grande express the challenge of managing a mixed site composed of living human settlements in an exuberant and exemplary natural landscape, adopting the concept of cultural system to articulate these settlements in a territory, occupied and configured through specific layers, requiring an integrated territorial management where culture and nature are sides of the same coin. And, finally, the Roberto Burle Marx Farm, expressing the ideas of its creator and highlighting the concept of the modern tropical garden, whose principles continue to influence the field of landscaping in Brazil and in the world.

In this performance of recognition and management, over the last twenty years, the representativeness beyond the exceptionality of the cultural asset in a perspective of sustainability stands out, with comprehensive rereadings of the assets presented, and the management practices of the recognized assets, through the constituted governance and the instruments applied, becoming references for the improvement of internal policies of cultural heritage in Brazil, especially in what was established in the Material Heritage Policy adopted by IPHAN in 2018.

Finally, it would be worth highlighting the Brazilian intentions to propose, in its speeches and positions, as a member of the World Heritage Committee, in 2010, during its 34th Session, in Brasilia, the establishment of the 6th "C" of "Cooperation" to be considered together with the other strategic objectives of the Convention, namely, Credibility, Conservation, Training, Communication and Communities, a challenge to be better faced in Brazil and by the countries that have ratified the Convention of the World Heritage in the coming years.

References

ICOMOS. The report of the meeting of experts on the "Global Strategy" and the thematic studies for a representative World Heritage List. Phuket, 1994.

IPHAN. World heritage: grounds for its recognition – The 1972 Convention on the Protection of the World, Cultural and Natural Heritage: to know the essentials. Brasilia, 2008.

IPHAN. Material Cultural Heritage Policy. Brasília, 2018.

UNESCO Brazil. IPHAN. Management of the Cultural World Heritage. World Heritage Reference Manual. Brasília, 2016.

UNESCO. Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Paris, 1972.

UNESCO. WHC. Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention. Paris, 2021.

Photo Credits:

Historic Center of Paraty, World Heritage.

Oscar Liberal