People and Built Heritage - Role of communities in preserving the heritage of small/medium-sized towns

Built heritage in India is an integral part of the daily lives of people and hence cannot be seen as a separate and detached part of the urban fabric. Heritage continues to be in active use and hence forms the ‘living’ heritage; heritage that consists of tangible as well as intangible forms of heritage and the link between the two (Article 2.2 of the INTACH Charter for the Conservation of Unprotected Architectural Heritage and Sites in India, 2004). Small and medium-sized towns, typically, identify themselves unique through their living heritage more than the monumental heritage. Therefore, any decision to alter its past for the present and future should involve people at its core decision-making level and derive answers about what to conserve and what not to from people.

The role of communities in heritage discourse has been touched upon internationally through several charters in the past, most significantly through the Burra Charter (1999) along with several others. However, the most recent, ICOMOS Delhi Declaration on Heritage and Democracy (2017) promoted heritage and democracy as an essential element for people-based approaches for promoting sustainable development. It identifies democracy as something that gives both rights and duties to the communities to engage with the cultural heritage (Preamble). The declaration addresses the contemporary issues of population growth, human migration, climate change and various deliberate and natural causes for the deterioration of the cultural property and emphasizes the role of communities to come together to cater to these causes.

The people-centric approach being the main focus of the declaration, it also encourages the encompassing of a wide range of heritage, modest to monumental, to which a larger community can contribute. It underlines the need for the legislative policies to incorporate this relation of communities and place and make engagement thoroughly meaningful through transparent processes. Promotion of inclusive democratic community engagement processes elevates the importance of this movement and promotes the idea of ‘of all the people, by all the people, and for all the people’ (ICOMOS 2017).

Even today, owing to incomprehension and ignorance that continues to prevail within the society, much of the heritage is perceived as a liability leading to uninformed decisions, demolitions ultimately affecting the shared historic property. Therefore, in the present state of rapid urban development, the role of communities is vital to understand what aspects of urban heritage should be conserved, what is valued by people, what requires intervention, and what citizens can do for sustainable development. According to the survey carried out by Ipsos MORI (Bhatia 2019) in 2018, 62% of people in India feel that the government does not do enough to involve people in understanding what infrastructure to invest in.

With the growing body of literature around participation and community engagement in the historic environments globally, it becomes important to evaluate its competency in the Indian context.