ICRT 'Evening With'

For several years it has been a tradition for ICRT staff, students and alumni to meet on the second Wednesday of the month to catch up with one another, share ideas and generally try to find ways to progress the Responsible Tourism agenda. Tomorrow evening's meeting at the Vintry, a wine bar near Bank underground station, will be no exception. From my perspective, however, it will be slightly different as I am the 'guest speaker' and will spend an hour or so talking about three recently completed consultancy assignments.

The first project is the Cycle Hubs project that we have just completed in Northumberland, working for 18 months to set up a suite of routes radiating out from the two market towns of Wooler and Haltwhistle. At a time when the UK government is very keen to push more and more responsibility onto communities as part of its'Big Society' movement, it has been very instructive to compare and contrast the differing attitudes in the two towns towards the creation of a legacy group that can take the project forward now that our initial seed funding has been exhausted.

The second project was the preparation of a business plan for the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Fife, a small but important museum with a nationally recognised collection relating to the fishing heritage of Scotland, and particularly of the East Coast fisheries which once employed tens of thousands of people. The museum has existed for some 30 years, has a core of local authority financial funding and yet still relies on volunteers for much of the labour needed to care for and present the collections to the public. There is a good cohort of volunteers at the moment including ex-fishermen, academics, accountants and marine engineers. But what is interesting is the way that these men (and they are almost exclusively men who are volunteers at the museum) gravitate towards the 'sexier' jobs of restoring and conserving fishing boats and sailing the boats (particularly Reaper, a historic sail-powered 'Fifie' fishing boat) to other ports up and down the East Coast. There is far less interest in the unglamourous jobs of staffing the till in the shop or catologuing the photograph collection. So even when there is volunteer support, it is not always easy to direct it in the most effective direction - I know many museum curators who are afraid to do anything that might upset volunteers and drive them away - better some input than none!

And the final project I shall be discussing is an evaluation I carried out for UNWTO of the Saudi Council for Tourism and Antiquities Urban Heritage Programme. In many ways this seems totally different from the others but there are similarities. In one of the flagship projects, Rijjal Al Maa, a village of four and five storey stone-built houses in the mountains of Aseer, a community-based group has been investing its own resources in the conservation of the historic core of the village in order to protect and preserve the traditional urban form. They recognise that this is not only their own heritage, but also that without their involvement, they run the risk of the state party diverting its attention towards other, equally worthy causes. In two of the other historic villages participating in the scheme there are other interesting issues arising - at Al Ghat north of Riyadh, much of the leadership has come from one family (related to the Saudi Royal Family by marriage) who have the resources to be able to invest in the restoration of their original home in the village, thus setting an example (and challenge) to others in the area. And in Dhi'Ain in Al Baha province, ownership of the whole village has been transferred into a trust so that the conservation and re-presentation of the village for tourism purposes can be delivered effectively and to the highest standards.

No matter where I work as a consultant, I constantly am faced with new permutations of the community:state party relationship, and feel that there is still much that we can do in this country to learn how to make the most of community passion for heritage.

Heritage conservation in Saudi Arabia

In 2001 the Supreme Commission for Tourism (SCTA) in Saudi Arabia commissioned a team of more than 60 consultants to assist in the preparation of the first national tourism strategy for the Kingdom. I was fortunate enough to be part of that team, working for nearly two years on several aspects of the strategy including assessing the likely social impacts of the emergence of a strong tourism sector in Saudi and leading the team that looked at how the Kingdom’s rich and varied cultural heritage assets (tangible and intangible) could be developed. One of the recommendations that we put forward in the first strategy was for a co-ordinated programme of conservation across the country, focussed on protecting, preserving and adapting for tourism usage of a representative sample of historic villages and towns.

Between 2006 and 2008 I led the team that prepared masterplans for the historic cores of four small cities on the coast, plans that although well received have yet to be implemented because of a lack of funding. So it was with considerable satisfaction that I have finally been able to see progress on the wholesale conservation of a historic village in Saudi Arabia. I have been asked by UNWTO – the World Tourism Organisation – to advise the successor organisation to the SCT – the Saudi Council for Tourism and Antiquities (SCTA) on what international awards their Historic Villages Conservation programme might be eligible for. Other than the internationally respected Aga Khan Awards (www.akdn.org) there are very few heritage or conservation awards for projects in the Arab World. My research has thrown up several awards for new architecture (inspired no doubt by the massive urban expansion across the GCC area but little that could, if awarded, bring to this innovative programme the international attention that it merits.

The photos are of a couple of the restored buildings in Al Ghat, a small town of around 12,000 people on the fringe of the Najd desert, some 250 km north of Riyadh. The traditional mud-brick houses and public buildings were abandoned around 30 years ago but because of the arid desert environment, have remained in fairly good shape since. In order to secure the support and participation of the community, a co-operative has been established by all of the property owners to take ownership of the project (all property rights have been transferred into the co-op) and to raise the funds necessary for the conservation of the buildings and their adaptation for tourism uses. A signature, pilot project has been funded directly by the SCTA, converting the former Amarah (governor’s palace) into a local history museum and the municipality has ensured that all essential services (water, electricity, sewerage, telecoms) are installed. Finally, a loan of SAR 7 million (more than £1.15 million) has been obtained from the government to kick-start conservation works across the whole village. One house, the traditional home of the Sudairi family, has already been completed and furnished as an 8 room lodge. More will follow as the village is developed and marketed as a destination mainly to the domestic market. Other attractions in the area include a new national park, many date farms (Al Ghat is famous for its high quality dates) and some amazing sand dunes.

On Sunday I head off to the mountains of Aseer in the west of the country to see Rijjal Al Maa, a village I first visited back in 2001 and where there has been sustained investment for a number of years, mainly by the community but also by the SCT/SCTA and also the municipality. Built from stone and decorated with quartz, the tower houses of Aseer are very different from the mud brick (adobe) buildings of the Najd and represented very different conservation challenges. But the opportunities for introducing tourism uses into the buildings are the same, and I will be interested to see what changes have been made since my last trip in 2005.

For more information on the SCTA’s work on conserving architectural heritage, visit http://www.scta.gov.sa/sites/english/Antiquities_and_Museums/InternationallyRegisteredSites/Pages/conference_on_heritage.aspx

The World Heritage List - playing politics with heritage?

Last week UNESCO inscribed another 21 sites onto the World Heritage List, including the amazing observatory of Jantar Mantar in Delhi, the canals of central Amsterdam and the At Turaif District in ad-Dir’iyah, Saudi Arabia. I know all of these sites, having holidayed in both Delhi and Amsterdam and having visited ad-Dir’iyah, the capital of the first Saudi state, many times during the time I was based in Riyadh working alongside the Supreme Commission for Tourism (now the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities – SCTA).

The architecture of Jantar Mantar (opposite) is certainly stunning – almost abstract in places and looking like a contemporary skatepark. The site was a lunar and celestial observatory and is testament to the scientific knowledge and spirit of inquiry of the time. Amsterdam’s canals are an iconic aspect of the city’s urban form and reflect the ingenuity of the town’s inhabitants in terms of managing flood control as well as facilitating trade.

At Turaif I am a little more bothered about. The site itself is architecturally interesting although none of the original fabric remains – the authorities have invested considerably in restoration and rebuilding works in recent years. But the authenticity argument is only part of my concern. For a cultural heritage site to be inscribed on the WH list it must meet a number of criteria that have been taken to reflect its global significance.

The UNESCO press release issued on august 1^st and celebrating its inscription explains the significance of At Turaif thus: “This property was the first capital of the Saudi Dynasty, in the heart of the Arabian Penisula, north-west of Riyadh. Founded in the 15th century, it bears witness to the Najdi architectural style, which is specific to the centre of the Arabian peninsula. In the 18th and early 19th century, its political and religious role increased, and the citadel at at-Turaif became the centre of the temporal power of the House of Saud and the spread of the Wahhabi reform inside the Muslim religion. The property includes the remains of many palaces and an urban ensemble built on the edge of the ad-Dir’iyah oasis”.

Note the link to Wahhabism – the very conservative form of Sunni Islam based on the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, an 18th century scholar whose legacy, if one is to agree with the work of some scholars, includes the Taliban and Al-Qaeda (see for examples Charles Allen’s 2006 book God’s Terrorists). Whether or not one agrees with the beliefs of these organisations, it does appear that by according international status to a site directly linked with their progenitor, UNESCO could be seen to be legitimising this fundamentalist ethos.

The reason that this particular issue struck such a chord with me is that in the same week that the World Heritage Committee was meeting in Brasilia, I was asked to review a fascinating new collection of essays edited by Sophia Labadi and Colin Long entitled ‘Heritage and Globalisation’ and published in the UK by Routledge. One of the first chapters of the book, written by the Australian ethnographer Marc Askew, takes a very strong position on the way in which UNESCO, through the World Heritage List, is using what he terms a veneer of academic and specialist validation to support the work of nation-states in what he calls ‘projects of cultural reification and domination’. In other words, UNESCO is complicit in allowing member states to pursue their own ideological agendas by according globally-endowed status to sites that are supposed to be of outstanding universal value, but which in reality can be highly political and indeed contentious. However, the involvement of the state party with the support of UNESCO allows a homogeonised view of the past to be celebrated – what Laurajane Smith refers to as AHD – the Authorised Heritage Discourse that reflects that state’s view, and not that of other stakeholders (existing and potential, domestic and international).

I retain a strong affection for my many Saudi Arabian friends and colleagues, and am delighted that in recent years they have engaged with the World Heritage Convention and that so much investment is being made in protecting, conserving and managing the wealth of heritage assets – pre and post-Islamic – across the Kingdom. I just wonder, however, whether in the current global political climate, the nomination of At Turaif was a sensitive act?