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How can ancient cities benefit from the UNESCO world heritage badge and simultaneously avoid becoming a ‘Walt Disney’ for tourists?

There are fears that the UNESCO world heritage badge is being used to start a marketing campaign, based merely on capitalist standards. The common requirement for a rapid return on investment (ROI), however, leads to rapid development and rules out slow-growing and steady sustainability – and deprives local people of having a say during the city’s ‘rehabilitation’. In fact, here we don’t deal with rehabilitation but with reconstruction similar to a set stage fit to serve photo sessions by tourists.
Figure 1: ‘Damascus Barcode’
As to the Walt Disney reference, this was the general concern in an urban design studio at PAR. To simplify the theoretical task we chose the following UNESCO sites: Damascus, Syria, for the winter term 2008 / 2009 and Sana’a, Yemen, for the winter term 2009 / 2010 (still in progress). Understanding is the main base for a sustainable design in foreign cultures: learners – teachers, designers – researchers, locals – professionals, and so on are all communicating directly using all possible web 2.0 achievements. The students learnt how to access research communities and the local Damascene community to work out relevant propositions, which place(d) themselves in between ‘urban acupuncture’ and ‘slow urbanism’.
Our final presentation in Damascus proved this working method ideal and effective.

This is the century of communication. Collaboration between cultures happens via internet or via mobile phone. We knew this Tuareg-clan settling since a few years north of Timbuktu, who asked an interpreter and an architect from Darmstadt, Germany, to help with the construction of their first permanent educational building for their kids. Of course, we will join in; didn’t we have a splendid time in the desert some years ago…

A work process from one continent to the other was launched – between parties almost 4,000 km apart: some presentation sketches were sent via email as JPGs from Central Europe to Mali, West Africa; but the adequate form of communication has still to be learned by both sides; the newly found name Scarab’s School brands a tangible, palpable idea in all participant’ s minds and motivates the whole team. Asking, checking, and asking again is done via VoIP-mobile phoneconnection.

The above paragraphs seem to be the beginning of a futuristic fairy tale from the 1970s-ies, yet they are our built reality on the desert sands of Timbuktu. Planning and construction of the Scarab’s School was done within three months and a half, finalized in July 2009. The astounding issue in the whole process, from finding first ideas, design, construction, site management, and completion as well as use of the building was twofold: the harmonious communication as well as the horizontally structured collaboration between a “developing country” or for the case being a “nation without country” and on the other hand a “highly civilized industrial country”. The workflow, the building and hopefully the didactic methods in this building will thrive on de-hierachization.

The following article is about processes, which are in a constantly changing world more important than results, even more important than immutable ultimate results.

The article was published at the online peer-review journal for cultural comparative studies in architecture JCCS-a 4/2010 // Ephemeral Structures vs. Current Preservation Practice
The abstract and the article are both available here for download.

Marco Casagrande is an architect from Finland. I called him a an anarchitect mixing anarchy and architecture, since I feel his work REAL. Including ideas of urban acupuncture his work is soft and violent at the same time – something which has to be beautiful because of its honest trueness.

0:00 is it just provocation to burn your architecture or to build ruins?
2:45 what is the energy you take out of ruins?
5:33 living at the edge of habitat …
7:05 is nature the first architecture?
7:58 what are your origins? what do primitive tools like a fireplace have to do with architecture?
12:30 skin … patina … being present >>> what is your message to visual 3d software architects?
17:00 hope on teaching = celebrate the time of being FREE
19:25 connection and communication, use of web 2.0
22:28 ‘the medium is the message’ – McLuhan: are we changing with our new environment? GREEN buildings???
26:25 why are you an architect?