DOCUMENTATION 1165

Modern Heritage Documentation
for Conservation and Cultural Development in the Mediterranean Region -
an Interdisciplinary Approach and Postcolonial Perspective
by Annarita Lamberti

Abstract

This article deals with approach to Documentation for Conservation, involving cultural and political aspects. In my argumentation the awareness of historical meanings of Urban Heritage is the basis for a culturally sustainable development.
It occurs when urban communities are able to understand the meanings of all historical components of their townscapes and to "mettre en valeur" culturally and economically their urban "patrimoines", realizing an integrated cultural landscape. For this purpose, I propose a critical Documentation, which comes from an interdisciplinary research in the light of postcolonial studies. The focus of my article is Modern Heritage in the Mediterranean region, where Modern Architectural Heritage constitutes a system of persistences of colonialism, modernization and nation buildings. Analysing Modern Heritage in this area, in the light of postcolonial perspective, would permit to discover connected histories of responsibilities and sufferings, developing better relationships between European Union (EU) and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries and among the latters.

Introduction

The awareness of historical meanings of Urban Heritage is the basis for a sustainable urban development, grounded in the cultural framework of territory. The cultural sustainability of urban development appears when urban communities are able to understand the meanings of the historical components of their urbanscapes, and when they are able to "mettre en valeur" their urban "patrimoines"1. Therefore, Heritage Documentation for Conservation is necessary for urban planning and development, in order to regenerate Urban Heritage and include it in the living flows of urban life. For this purpose, it needs a critical Documentation, which comes from an interdisciplinary research system, bringing together Human and Social Sciences in order to investigate the layers of urban history and to elaborate strategies for future culturally sustainable development.

1. Territory memories and Urban Development

Urban planning strategies and theories keep on identifying cities as cultural phenomena and considering their Heritage as the motor of their development, and of the global economy as well [1]. Contemporary urban economy is characterized by a growing demand of cultural products and experiences [2], and for more than ten years this cultural business sector has been estimated as one of the most promising source of employment, of opportunities and new transformations for urban condition [3]. Architectural Heritage plays an important part in this story. The restoration economy, based on the principle that the promotion of urban development moves from the regeneration of built and natural environment, has acquired the configuration of a great business, producing a strong relationship between public and private sectors [4]. Then, urban planning has to be interpretative planning inside this Heritage based-economic scenario. It has to realize a process of researching about the sense of place in urban territory, about the value of its Heritage, that has to be shared with local communities in a process of education and empowerment [5].

Heritage-based development strategies reveal the purpose to protect territories and local identities setting [6]. Heritage Documentation is on the basis of this process, it has to be part of strategies for urban development and planning, articulated in three logical and chronological moments: knowledge, conservation and exploitation.
The epistemology of multiplicity [7] explains the link between territory memories and urban development. It performs the sense of documentation as the first step of cultural and sustainable development process.
Assuming the complexity of a territory involves elaborating a development strategy that deals with this complexity according to a three-step conceptual itinerary: to know, to interpret, to inform.
Turning to memories and legacies of past has to respond to and stimulate the sense of present, rediscovering the spirit of past in order to face current issues: it has not to be a mere act of remembering aesthetics. Turning to memories and then to Heritage must assume the sense of a fresh epistemology of development, commencing from the different layers that compose urbanscape, letting the cultural dimension of places emerge and rendering it an instrument of development.

2. Located memories and postcolonial perspective

As to document Heritage is a way to re-read the past, then, Documentation is a manner to make historical research considering Heritage as a system of sources. Cultural Heritage is not an inert trace of past but a link through which an ensemble of History-Histories, narrations and memories come to the surface of the present epoch. Therefore, it is a system of evidences which needs examining and critically analyzing². Architectural Heritage is regarded as an ensemble of four-dimensional archives, which match the three dimensions of the physical experience of space to the fourth cultural and psychological dimension of sense of place [15-17].
Urban Architectural Heritage is the lexicon of cultural discourse on urban communities’ history of consciousness. In urban spaces it identifies “lieux de mémoire”, that transmit legacies of past when “milieux de mémoire” wane [18]. Modern Architectural Heritage is the ensemble of traces of a kind of past that more than other kinds comes to our eyes place-like, inspiring new research and methodological trends. Since UNESCO has been starting to deal with Modern Heritage, it has called for an interdisciplinary approach, conjoining anthropological, geographical and historical insights, in consideration of its particular meanings, regarded as an ensemble of legacies of a History perceived as unlocked in the past we can know from tales of living testimonies and from the numerous still in operation traces in the built environment.

Postcolonial Studies perspective permits us to re-think Heritage Documentation, regarded as a scientific discourse in the academic context, and to re-think its subject in this case the Modern Heritage and its political contents.
The postcolonial approach is characterized by the ontological slant, that involves the reconfiguration of time and space of Western Modernity in the light of repressed and removed histories, cultures, bodies. The reemerging of repressed histories produces radical re-articulations of perspectives on cultural, social and scientific discourses, too.
Interdisciplinary questions determine a reconfiguration of disciplines and knowledge: their borders become permeable and their languages are contaminated. In the light of this cross-disciplinary dimension, the subject of analysis assumes the role of witness. It is conceived as a complex, ambiguous and contradictory sign of historical and cultural phenomena, questioned in a process that is changing with time, just as its own meanings and interpretations, as well as the chronological and political hierarchy of its contents frequently fracture, its disciplinary paraments becoming more porous [20]. Modern Heritage is the witness of the Twentieth Century History, the epoch when the frailties and aporias of our days are
rooted.

City as memory device

My proposal is to think Documentation at urban scale, considering Heritage as part of the urbanscape. Urbanscape should be regarded as a text and every fabric as a syntactical element. This requires the synthetical approach of urban geography,
based on an epistemological and methodological trinomial: Heritage - city (as phenomenon) - city (as heuristic instrument) [21].
City is a memory and identity device [22]: urban Heritage, as it is an expression of city’s History-histories and memories, can be considered as an instrument for a critical process of remembering, that may involve the preservation, the deconstruction or the reformulation of different cultural layers of the city [23].
In my approach space is at the base of a visualisation practice of ways of thinking, feeling and interpreting the condition where we live. Observing the configurations that urban space assumes according to the landuse planning and the architecture, constitutes a strategy for investigating the sense of living, letting History and Geography perspectives come together, and freeing Social and Human Sciences research from the unilateral and progressive category of time.
Dwelling upon place and spatial configurations that cultural phenomena assume, makes the researcher develop an inquiring dimension applying to grasp the “durée” of cultural phenomena [24] and enable him/her to acquire the rhythm of investigated subjects, in order to try to reconstruct the social logic of place and to reproduce the condition of a kind of “historic present continuous”. Architectures, “lieux de mémoires” [25], watch the social milieux, of those who built and inhabited them and, furthermore, they mirror eyes of social and political milieux of those who are currently looking at them and taking them into consideration.

Modern Colonial Heritage in the Mediterranean Region

The focus of my paper is Modern Heritage in the Mediterranean region. Here Modern Heritage is often Colonial Heritage.
Historiography on colonialism, based on the “Établissement patrimonial” [26], has the aim of realizing an analysis that brings out “connected histories” between colonizers and colonized people, revealing an approach that avoids eurocentrism and the inflexibility of chronological and geographical frameworks, realizing a scientific investigation of a geohistorical subject commencing from its cultural and aesthetical phenomena [27, 28].
This kind of research needs undertaking multiplicity of scales of analysis and frequent scale changes, in order to point out translocal dynamics, and, dwelling upon micro-scales, in order to observe interactions among cultural, political and social phenomena in urban scenarios, both endogenous and exogenous ones [29].
This geo-historical approach of research fits the analysis of Modern Movement in urban planning and architecture, because they were conceived as universal/western instruments of territorial modernization, but they have revealed forms of cultural overlappings and “metissage”. This kind of architecture, born in Europe with the characteristic of internationality and exportability, considered ready to be implemented everywhere in the service of Empires and of their civilizing mission, has changed itself in contact with places of colonial space, assuming regional configurations [30-34]. Moreover, Modern Colonial Heritage is the evidence that the Westernisation project of the “Other” did not escape from a process of translation, appropriation and re-appropriation [35].
Regarding this issue, the Mediterranean context is a significant laboratory. The Mediterranean Region is a space of hybridization, where postcolonial narratives are emerging [36-40].
Here Modern Architectural Heritage constitutes a system of persistences, survivals of modernization and nation buildings, of imperialism and colonialism, and traces of a repressed past. This is the case of Italian Modern Heritage, both at home and in colonial spaces, where the rationalist architecture is the evidence of the Italian colonialism and colonial responsibilities [41-44]. The Modern Lexicon in Naples townscape suggests that its development process, during the 30s, has been linked to colonial spaces, since the city was regarded as the port of the Empire (Figure 1).

4. Colonial Memories between Naples and Tripoli

Recently, Modern Heritage of Naples has been rediscovered and chosen to represent part of local memories by Gabriele Basilico and Olivo Barbieri for the photographic exhibition Obiettivo Napoli. Luoghi memorie immagini, set in Naples in the 2005. Then, their photos have become a permanent installation on the pier of Piazza Vanvitelli metro (Figure 2).
In November 2005 the Municipality of Naples has presented the urban park of Mostra d’Oltre Mare to be listed in the Modern Heritage List. The Mostra d’Oltre Mare, like the whole architectural Heritage of fascist epoch that characterizes Italian cityscapes, can be regarded as persistences of silenced memories and histories, calling to be investigated.
Today, this recalled investigation as the regeneration of this Neapolitan Heritage should be linked to the rediscovery and regeneration of Modern Heritage in former Italian colonies, in Libya in particular, rereading and facing the colonial responsibilities through a cultural project at the Mediterranean scale and even beyond.
A critical documentation on the Modern Colonial Heritage according to a translocal approach, in order to reconstruct links among different places connected by colonial history, might be a way to face both responsibilities and traumas of this difficult Recent Past, moving toward a mutual possibility of encounter between the (ex-)colonizers and the (ex-)colonized people.
In fact, it is important to pay attention to what is happening to the Modern Colonial Heritage in those Mediterranean countries which have been colonies of European Powers. What is going on might have geopolitical echos or significances. The urgency of re-examining traces of Recent Past comes from the political and cultural meanings they are currently showing. In March 2006, the Libyan leader Gaddafy has requested that Italy should make a significant act for repairing colonial crimes. This act has been identified in the realization of a shoreline highway linking Tunisia and Egypt: i. e. the reconstruction of “Via Balbia”. This Heritage is an ensemble of legacies that mutually connect Italy and Libya, both in the past and in the present epoch, though in a different manner. Furthermore, this mutuality inspires the methodological connection between the interrogation of both past and present moving away from each other unceasingly, because at current time the traces of their co-presence are embedded in the urbanscapes. The Documentation process on this Heritage should be run by a team of Libyan and Italian scholars, creating a new dimension of encounter.

Modern Colonial Heritage holds geopolitical and cultural contents that are currently urgent and plays an important part in the building of the European-Mediterranean arena. A critical Documentation on it might help the elaboration of culture-based policy just as heritage preservation politics and practices can be considered as practices of cultural policy and, regarding Modern Colonial Heritage in the Mediterranean Region, an expression of European-Mediterranean cultural policy and politics (Figure 3).
In my opinion it is important to carry on the work begun by Euromed II Shared Heritage, but above all to carry it on in the light of fresh and critical openings. In the Mediterranean region Modern Colonial Heritage can be regarded as an aesthetical configuration of European-Mediterranean territory embedded in urbanscapes. Mediterranean urbanscapes represent European-Mediterranean geo-territorial identity, elaborated in the postcolonial reading of their Modern Colonial Heritage.

Figure 1. The port of the Empire (elaborated by A. Lamberti, 2006). The black-and-white photo (by G. Parisio 1936, Archivio Fotografico Parisio Naples, published in Lucarelli F., ed., La Mostra D’Oltremare, Naples, Electa, 2005, p. 39), in the cartogram, shows the Sea Station of Naples, projected by arch. Cesare Bazzani and built within the plan of urban development implemented by the Fascist Regime.
Figure 2. Modern Heritage at the metro (Digital Photo Elaboration by A. Lamberti, 2005)
Figure 3. Euro-mediterranean dialogue (elaborated by A. Lamberti, 2006) The photo, placed in the map on the Northern shore of the Mediterranean region (A. Lamberti, 2006) shows the current “life” and aspect of Stazione Marittima: the beauty of which needs rediscovering. The other one (by N. Tondini in “Libia”, Meridiani, no 123, 2003, p. 156), on the South-Western shore of the basin, effectively represents the process of translation and re-appropriation of the Italian Colonial Heritage in Libya.

Conclusions

Colonial Modern Movement traces, that still characterize the architectural syntax of urbanscapes in the North Africa, in the Middle East and in Dodecanese islands, are the landscape structures where to read geohistorical texts4 that narrate about the time when European societies were building themselves and their modernity. Colonies were laboratories for European modernity [50-52].
Today, transnational migrants, descendants of colonized people, individually enter the human landscape of the European Union and become part of it. Projects of preservation or regeneration of Modern Colonial Heritage seem to express a re-narration of colonial history, from the perspectives of colonized people and of those who have inherited their memories.

In the Modern Colonial Heritage, the European Union may recognize an expression of the common Heritage that does not belong only to Europe, mirroring itself in the eyes of “postcolonia”, in the European-Mediterranean urbanscapes, inside itself in the human landscapes of European cities.

A more widespread awareness of Modern Heritage quality, coupled to its historical meanings, would sustain the process of its involvement in living urban plots and, just as it happened in Tel Aviv5, inspire urban planning and touristic image.

The case of Tel Aviv is emblematic. On the one hand it is the witness of the importance of artistic interpretation and representation as a form of communication of the Documentation results which move from artistic and historiographical sensibility to other than technical ones [53]. On the other hand it witnesses the importance of UNESCO’s role and of the value of World Heritage nomination.
It is crucial that UNESCO fosters surveys and researches on Modern Heritage in the Mediterranean region and the conditions for a wider information through artistic representations too, in order to impress both on opinion leaders and common people.
UNESCO should create a space of cultural and social fluidity at local scale with links to a translocal dimension, in order to connect groups, belonging to civil societies with different socio-political geometries in the Mediterranean region. Scholars, intellectuals, artists and common people might be the subjects of a “Third Space” [29] of Documentation/Education about Modern Heritage in the Mediterranean region, a Heritage so rich of cultural, political and economic implications.
The realization of a Mediterranean Modern Heritage Tourist Route/Net would produce translocal relationships among the Mediterranean cities and support their urban economies.

Notes:

1 The reason to use these French expressions comes from the need of pointing out the different epistemological positions of Anglophone and Francophone literature about cultural Heritage. While the former explores the ontologic dimension of cultural
Heritage, the latter investigates the aspects of its national and nationalistic values and its economic exploitation.

2 This is the heuristic position of scholars dealing with the issues of Patrimoine and Heritage. Regarding the issue of Patrimoine, i.e. the French-speaking context, see Bourdin 1984, Choay 1992, Nora 1992, Poulot 1998. Instead on the issue of
Heritage, i. e. the English-speaking context, see Lowenthal 1985; Boyer 1994, Ashworth and Graham 2005 [8-14].

3. I am referring to the ICOMOS-UNESCO-ICCROM seminars, held in 1994 in Helsinki, and in 1996 in Mexico City. To reconstruct UNESCO’s attitude toward Modern Heritage, see also Van Oers and Haraguchi 2003 [19].

4. In the geographical literature the topic of the urbanscape as a geo-historical text has been treated by different scholars belonging to the New Anglo-American Cultural Geography [45-49].

5. The White City of Tel Aviv has obtained the WH nomination in the 2003 based on the II and IV criteria of the Convention on World Heritage (1972).

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About the author

Annarita Lamberti
Naples/Bergamo, Italy
Email: annarita.lamberti@unibg.it

Graduated in Political Sciences at the University of Naples L’Orientale, Annarita Lamberti completed her PhD in Development Geography in 2005, at the same university, dealing with cultural interpretation of urban development. She is an urban/cultural geographer, specialized in the South-Eastern Mediterranean cities with particular regard to the Israeli ones, and works on the cultural dimension of urban condition and experience. In the field of theorical research, her main interest is elaborating a methodology based on cross-disciplinarity, led to realize an osmotic relation between Social and Human Sciences, paying attention to artistic representations, such as literature, visual arts and architecture in the light of the critical openings of postcolonial thought.
Currently Annarita is lecturer of "Territorial Processes in Asian Lands" at the University of Bergamo, Faculty of Foreign Literature and Languages. At the moment she is also carrying out research about “Heritage and Identity” based at Postcolonian Studies Centre at the University of Napoli L’Orientale with a scholarship granted by CNR.

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