Gábor Sonkoly – författare

Urban heritage, which is part of the conceptual expansion of cultural heritage, has become an extraordinarily complex notion. Any aspect of urban life and experience can become heritage and this heritage is then continuously reinterpreted and exploited as a source not only for a city’s identification but also for its cultural and economic innovation.This book provides a detailed overview of Central European urban heritage. It examines the key aspects of urban heritage –tangible/monumental, natural/landscape, world heritage/urban quarter and heritage experience/dark heritage. The ‘regimes of urban heritage’ approach retraces 200 years of the development of European urban heritage to understand how it has become so significant and how it could integrate practically every area of urban existence.The novelty of the book is the interpretation of this development as a process of successive and integrating regimes, which are examined through the changing urban heritage agency and discourse. Through the examples of European cities and towns, such as Belgrade, Budapest, Gdansk, Krakow, Ljubljana, Subotica, Szentendre, Vienna, but also Edinburgh, Nordic cities and Rome, these changes reveal their inner complexities and become comparable in an interdisciplinary analysis. Further, a particular aspect of the history of these cities is revealed through the development of their own urban heritage.The book is primarily aimed at academics, researchers and postgraduate students of cultural and economic geography, cultural history, culture and heritage management, modern and contemporary history as well as urban history, planning and sociology.

Urban heritage, which is part of the conceptual expansion of cultural heritage, has become an extraordinarily complex notion. Any aspect of urban life and experience can become heritage and this heritage is then continuously reinterpreted and exploited as a source not only for a city’s identification but also for its cultural and economic innovation.This book provides a detailed overview of Central European urban heritage. It examines the key aspects of urban heritage –tangible/monumental, natural/landscape, world heritage/urban quarter and heritage experience/dark heritage. The ‘regimes of urban heritage’ approach retraces 200 years of the development of European urban heritage to understand how it has become so significant and how it could integrate practically every area of urban existence.The novelty of the book is the interpretation of this development as a process of successive and integrating regimes, which are examined through the changing urban heritage agency and discourse. Through the examples of European cities and towns, such as Belgrade, Budapest, Gdansk, Krakow, Ljubljana, Subotica, Szentendre, Vienna, but also Edinburgh, Nordic cities and Rome, these changes reveal their inner complexities and become comparable in an interdisciplinary analysis. Further, a particular aspect of the history of these cities is revealed through the development of their own urban heritage.The book is primarily aimed at academics, researchers and postgraduate students of cultural and economic geography, cultural history, culture and heritage management, modern and contemporary history as well as urban history, planning and sociology.

In recent years, the plurality of values of culture has been increasingly recognized in practical, academic, and policymaking contexts. Beyond its traditional intrinsic values—linked to aesthetics, authenticity, and excellence—its capacity to contribute to well-being, to promote identity and belonging and tolerance and inclusiveness, to stimulate creativity, and to foster innovation are ever more acknowledged by a great variety of social actors. However, an economy- and market-oriented perspective has come to dominate the administrative and managerial discourse on cultural valuation for a few decades. This has resulted in a predominance of an approach to valuing culture that is expressed exclusively in terms of its economic impact, obscuring other values of culture. The European research project UNCHARTED has tried to counteract this predominance by providing a broader vision of the societal value of culture in the European context and by applying this alternative view to some of the most relevant areas in which cultural valuation impinges on cultural management and cultural policy today. This book presents its main results.Based on a pragmatist perspective, we have carried out an extensive multiple case study (65 cases in seven countries) that considers the multiplicity of agents who participate in cultural valuation processes (citizens, professionals of creation and preservation, experts, and politicians) and the diversity of evaluative practices in which they engage within three main areas: the field of cultural participation, the field of cultural production and heritage, and the field of cultural administration. The book shows the irreducible plurality of the values of culture, the characteristic complexity of the dynamics of valuation and evaluation in the cultural sphere, and the current shortcomings and possible improvements in institutional processes of cultural evaluation. It is essential reading for cultural professionals, policymakers, and scholars of culture.

This book uses the Historic Urban Landscape - the most recently codified notion of international urban heritage conservation - to demonstrate why it is necessary to demarcate history from cultural heritage and what consequences the increasing popularity of the latter have on history.