Heritage Planning in Selected Cities of Central Europe

GeoJournal 49: 105–116, 1999. 105 © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Old cities, new pasts: Heritage planning in selected cities of Central Europe G.J. Ashworth1 and J.E. Tunbridge2 1University of Groningen, Department Planning, Faculty of Spatial Sciences, 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands 2Carleton University, Department of Geography, Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Canada Received 3 October 1998; accepted in revised form 5 April 1999 Key words: heritage planning, heritage tourism, historic preservation, urban landscape Abstract Heritage is the contemporary usage of a past and is consciously shaped from history, its survivals and memories, in response to current needs for it. If these needs and consequent roles of heritage, whether for the political legitimacy of governments, for social and ethnic cohesion, for individual identification with places and groups, or for the provision of economic resources in heritage industries change rapidly, then clearly we expect the content and management of that heritage to do likewise. The cities of Central Europe have long been the heritage showcases that reflected the complex historical and geographical patterns of the region’s changing governments and ideologies. The abrupt economic and political transition and reorientation of the countries of Central Europe has thus, unsurprisingly, led to many equally abrupt changes in the content and management of urban heritage throughout the region. The uses made of heritage are clearly drastically changing but so also is the way that heritage is currently managed. What is happening, as well as how, is however uncertain and investigated here. The revolutionary eradication of a rejected past, a return to some previous pasts or the beginnings of a new past in the service of a new present are all possibilities. Answers are sought to these questions through the examination of a selection of cases of types of heritage city and their management in the region. These include an archetypical European gem city (Eger, Hungary), a tourist-historic honey-pot (Ceskyˇ Krumlov, Czechia), a medium-sized multifunctional city (Gdansk, Poland), a major metropolis (Budapest, Hungary), the relict anomaly (Kaliningrad/ Königsberg, Russia) and the national cultural centre of Weimar. Pasts and presents ism do not need convincing that among these contemporary needs, and consequent roles of heritage, is the political le- It may seem perverse to include an article concerned with gitimation of governments and governing ideologies. It is, the pasts of the cities of Central Europe in a special issue perhaps, less obvious to argue that such need for legitimacy that focuses upon their drastically changing present and un- is not confined to totalitarian regimes but is just as neces- certain futures. However, a central part of the transition now sary, although more multifaceted, in pluralist democracies underway is a rejection of many aspects of an immediate with liberal free market economic systems. Thus the rapid past, a resuscitation of other, previously suppressed, pasts changes now being experienced are having a profound effect and a reconstruction of a new past in the service of the newly upon the content and management of heritage in the cities of envisaged futures. Almost all revolutions begin with the idea Central Europe as new demands for identification, legitima- of year zero: a new beginning founded upon the eradication tion and commodification are being made upon the heritage of what went before. Equally almost all find this collective resources. voluntary amnesia an ultimately untenable position and re- The focus here will be upon the built environment as the turn either to conciliated versions of old pasts or feel the most visible of such heritage resources and the point where need to create a new past in support of new identities and the link between a conserved past and more general planning aspirations. and management aspects of cities is most obvious. The argument here is based upon the definition of her- Despite its historical and geographical differences, the itage as the contemporary uses of the past. The interpretation region shares, however, a number of common characteristics of the past in history, the surviving relict buildings and relevant to the management of its heritage. Its geopolitical artefacts and collective and individual memories are all position between German-Hapsburg and Russian–Slavonic harnessed in response to current needs which include the realms and subsequent history has created a social and eth- identification of individuals with social, ethnic and territorial nic spatial complexity. The survival of dynastic states was entities and the provision of economic resources for com- associated with relatively late development of nationalism modification within heritage industries, of which tourism and the nation state, has left ethnic enclaves and exclaves, is the most apparent. Citizens of countries with 50 years’ national minorities and irredentist possibilities. There was an experience of the operation of Marxist historical determin- abrupt post-Second World War suppression of nationalism 106 sector responsibility, the direct impact of this change has been less than in other spheres of public responsibility such as housing, industry or transport. The role of the state in the designation and care of architectural monuments or in the management of museums has remained largely intact: little of the national responsibility was a suitable candidate for direct privatisation or was attractive to private investors. Similarly commercialisation, in the sense of a wholesale shifting of financial responsibility from government subsidy to direct commercial sales, was just not possible for much of the conserved built environment which retained the characteristics of a freely accessible, zero-priced public good. However the relative reduction in financial support for such facilities, evident throughout Central Europe, has prompted a search for additional sources of revenue. These may be through commercial sponsorship or returns from consumers through the sale of services both, more significant perhaps, were underpinned by a change in managerial approach. Changes in public planning systems The change in political ideology led inevitably and rapidly to a dismantling of much of the apparatus of the directive state and has left a legacy of a distrust of planning systems. The abolition of some existing planning structures and their replacement by others, as the need for some forms of regulation became obvious, has created uncertainty. A more subtle change is in the attitudes towards and accep- tance of public planning itself. The reliance of the previous Figure 1. Gdansk. centralised regimes on state direction has tended to asso- ciate all planning with the discarded past and contrary to the new concepts of free markets. Local planning has therefore and ethnic regionalism within the Soviet political hegemony, had to reestablish itself, with a new, no longer self-evident, and finally a sudden economic and political transition in the justification for its operation as well as a new set of in- 1990s, consequent upon the collapse of that hegemony and struments that were less directive and prohibitory but more the rise of new national self-awareness and new international stipulatory and coordinating (Rehnicer, 1997). There is an orientations. All of this raises questions about the objectives, additional simple point that much of the preservation of her- content and method of management of the heritage of the itage resources whether monuments or museums has been, conserved built environment of the cities of Central Europe. and remains, a public sector responsibility. It is managed by public sector employees at a time when enormous discrep- ancies have opened up between incomes, and also esteem, in Change in the management of the past the private and public sectors, which seriously threatens the recruitment and retention of skilled personnel. Clearly changes in the management of heritage cannot be di- vorced from the many other changes that have impacted on, Changes in property ownership or are just reflected and amplified by, the cities of the region in their functions as national or regional symbols, show- Attempts to correct currently perceived injustices of previ- cases or experimental archetypes. From the myriad of possi- ous regimes have focused upon the return of dispossessed ble changes likely to affect the management of the conserved properties to former individual or collective owners. Such built environment, three are of general importance. ostensibly natural justice has however a number of largely unforeseen consequences for the management of heritage. Changes in the role of the state As much of such property consists of buildings, which almost by definition are at least 50 years old, uncertainty about One of the most noticeable consequences of the change in present and future ownership is a major cause of planning economic philosophy, and almost symbolic of it, is the shift blight. The rehabilitation or even maintenance of occupied in emphasis from public to private responsibility: from the buildings is discouraged as individuals or state agencies are nationalisation in the collective interest to privatisation and reluctant to invest where their title is doubtful and the im- commercialisation. Although a large part of the preserva- provement could accrue to some, as yet untraced, heir of the tion and presentation of heritage has always

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