Practice-based approaches to urban built heritage in the historic centers of the Kathmandu Valley

Abstract

A critical approach to built heritage requires comprehensive ways of understanding it, beyond concepts that concentrate in its materiality such as conservation, preservation, intervention or reconstruction. Practitioners become centerfold in the placemaking agency of these processes, and their activity often morphs into activism when confronted with their own and other’s ideas about heritage, or the meaning entangled in the material result of such endeavors—be it maintaining, transforming, remaking or erasing what is built. Within this approach, social interactions become matter-of-fact “building blocks” of space, particularly in the urban environment, due to the diverse, dense and dynamic nature of meaning-making processes within it, particularly in what is claimed to be public, common or shared. Heritage processes are, in turn, key events of urban transformation, widely recognized as pivotal in understanding the future of cities. 

Open spaces within the historic centers of the Kathmandu Valley hold a diversity of heritage practices, defined by the distinctively urban nature of the Newa ethnicity, and the high density of social and communal entanglements happening within these places. My presentation identifies a spectrum of heritage practitioners acting in these neighborly environments and aims to understand built urban heritage through them, questioning particularly their role as negotiators: on one hand for vernacular, ethnic and/or stable values, on the other as members of a city and society where catastrophe, migration and political events make it essential to evolve a concept of belonging that encompasses the reality of urban transformation.