Heritage and Sustainability: the Matter of Temporal Shifting and Narrativity in Terms of Urban Development

Abstract

Due to a raise of network-based society and interaction based decision making processes in contemporary World cultural heritage field must respond by being an active actor of holistic development. Contemporary theory in heritage hardly sheds light on an adjacent processes happening in a field of economy, policy or alteration of social activity patterns. Therefore, the following issue focuses on broader perception on cultural heritage field on the basis of the theory of the narrative. As pointed out in Ricoeur’s (1985) linguistic approach towards narrative theory whereas he suggested to derive the past out of the future and thus to make our present to be a time of initiative in purpose to transpose history into a reasonable decision making.

Therefore, the narrative based approach towards an urban heritage (urban heritage here is to be a matrix where various of static structures of past, present and future meet and bias torrents of vivid social structure) contributes to a constant procedure of alteration that is likely enabled by the global-local continuum. The issue is to claim that the latter alteration procedures (those that provide a growth of quantity in terms of Human development) are a set of tools and methods used to rethink and interpret the past; yet the model of the future has been nearly designed.

The use of narrativity in heritage is still novel trial to adjust the prevailing heritage discourse. However, the methodology of narrativity either enhances a field of cultural ecology that plays a key role to achieve a convivial place. On the basis of some urban patterns made by Alexander as well as rethinking some researches of Zaleckis, I suggest to take a look back to a politan city structure in order to preserve and transmit a relevant leftovers of a genotype of the Polis into a megapolitan paradigm.

To sum it up, the idea of ecological is to be understood as novelty or already designed future to our cities that turn smart. However, the shape or frame for this kind of future must be sculpted by rethinking our past and the processes of alteration inside the past. Urban heritage (stable structures and vivid torrents) dwelled in a field of narrative may suggest a unique ways to turn about the physical environment in order to ensure convivial presence of cities as well as to prevent drastic alteration processes (that is already happening) and preserve a genotypic identity of the past.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sace.13.4.13555