Report about the ICOMOS & OWHC Conference that took place on the 8th of September 2004 in Bergen, Norway
To start with, this conference was one of the most successfull conferences I attended so far. The organization was perfect (thanks Siri and Siri), Bergen welcomed us with fantastic weather and at the conference famous scientists in the World Heritage Business gave very interesting speeches.
Especially the lecture of Dr. Jukka Jokiletho about »Authenticity and Function« was very exciting. He presented a concept about the Outstanding Universal Value, that can help to to evaluate whether a cultural sight should to be inscribed in the World Heriatage List or not. Facing the enormously large number of potentially interested monuments, cities, etc. methods like this should urgently be developed for the evaluation and selection process (here you can find a compendium of the criteria for the inscription in the Wolrd Heritage List.). The question of authenticity was already discussed earlier (e.g.:Nara document of Authenticity ). Recently I discovered an exciting example in northern Spain: The cave paintings in the Altamira cave was endangered by a growing algae vegetation due to the high number of visitors. For a short time a one-to-one copy of the complete cave is available to be visited. The original cave remains only accessible for scientists. A very good museum is completing the World Heritage Site . For the protection of the original paintings this is a safe and suitable way to deal with it (perhaps the only possible way), as a visitor was it however a somewhat limited experience.
A second discussion that I really appreciated was stimulated by the lecture from Nile Marstein about the topic »Buffer zone Issues«. One Example which he showed to explain the difficulties was a mining town. If the buffer zone world be designed in an simple circular form around the town, in whose radius all elements connected to the former mining industry are located, a lot of people would be subject to specific regulations, who does not have much to do with the heritage site. One the other hand, if you only choose a small area around the heritage site there is no influence on protection of elements that are located further away (information on a similar problem you can find here: http://www.cornish-mining.org.uk/). Another critical point lies in the point of view axis that frequently are reaching far into the surrounding landscape, and therefore are very hard to be protected.
In summary the impression was confirmed that the problems and questions of many world heritage cities are similar, and therefore communication needs to be enforced. The world heritage list seems to have reached the point, where the methodology for the selection, the implementation and the management is.
