It’s people, in addition to architecture or history, that make some meeting places worthy of heritage protection. Social values are now among the listing criteria, but many such places remain at risk.
A statue of slaveholder Robert Milligan is removed at West India Quay, east London.
Yui Mok/PA Wire/PA Images
Jack Mundey fought to save Australia’s urban and environmental heritage. An architect of green bans, his lifelong efforts empowered citizens to assert their right to keep the heritage of their city.
Bhaktapur Durbar Square in January 2020.
Vanicka Arora
Bhaktapur suffered 300 deaths, 2,000 wounded and over 30,000 houses damaged in the 2015 earthquake. Heritage restoration has become crucial to community recovery.
Mining companies and some heritage consultants don’t understand the sacredness attached to ancestral remains, and the meaning of land in African communities.
Graffiti bullheads carved on the temple walls.
RTI: Suzanne Davis and Janelle Batkin-Hall/IKAP, 2016
Visitors to these sites had one particular religious ritual that may strike some as strange: they carved graffiti in important and sacred places.
Public opposition to plans for an Apple store was the trigger for the nomination of Federation Square for heritage listing, but it still had to meet the criteria.
Andi Yu/AAP
A youthful Fed Square satisfied five criteria to be added to the Victorian Heritage Register. The listing protects the square as a public place, but doesn’t prevent its continuing evolution.
Chengkan village, Anhui province: this beautifully-crafted and retreating architecture holds an important place in Chinese heritage.
Xiang Ren.
Two thirds of China’s 900m rural residents are moving to cities. Now, architects are finding ways to preserve their built heritage, before it disappears.
Nepal’s capital city was devastated by the 2015 earthquake, but rebuilding heritage sites has been fraught with difficulties.
The grief expressed at the Notre Dame fire is not just because it is a beautiful building – some places become more important to us because of history, culture and our own memories of them.
Julien De Rosa/EPA/AAP
Images of Notre Dame on fire have elicited an outpouring of grief around the world and online. This response raises the question of why we feel more connected to some heritage places than others.
The spire collapses while flames are burning the roof of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, France.
Ian Langsdon/EPA
With modern technology, it is entirely possible for the cathedral to be recreated with near-accuracy to the original. We can do this and keep the original building’s spirit and feeling.
Doonagore Castle, which Cadbury incorrectly identified as Mooghaun Fort in its ad campaign.
Shutterstock.
Senior Lecturer in Architectural HIstory and Theory, UNSW & Honorary Research Fellow, Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage (ACAHUCH), UNSW Sydney