Supervisor: MER Elena Cogato Lanza, Lab-U
Co- Supervisor: Javier Fernández Contreras, HEAD-Geneva
Start date: September 2019 Defense date (expected): September 2023
Abstract
Despite its evolution over the past two centuries, heritage preservation has stayed primarily a top-down retrospective act with a material bias that entails a separation between the tangible from the intangible, nature from culture, a dualistic approach termed Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) by Laurajane Smith. This dissertation proposes to reverse such notion by unraveling the under-represented and unmapped local heritage sites of Huế City, Vietnam, and its surroundings, exploring the transformation of and relationship among aging architecture (interior space vs. form language), the urban fabric, and marginal communities’ contemporary interventions. It plans to do so by proposing the concept Impromptu Conservation. ‘Impromptu’ indicates something done without a plan or rehearsal; Impromptu Conservation advances alternative methods of preservation that are spontaneous s and non-deliberate, creative and rooted deeply in the everyday life. It refers to intricate habitats where the fabric could be seen as an on-going bottom-up collective project and process of inhabitation and preservation, rejecting the contemporary distinction among concepts such as city, village, and forest.
Huế City is Vietnam’s former capital and the seat of the Nguyễn – the country’s last imperial family. Situated within the postcolonial city discourse, Huế presents a complex case study encompassing both a settler colony and a protectorate; the city’s urban landscape manifests a delicate mediation among multiple stakeholders: indigenous people (Champa Kingdom), local settlers (Việt migrants from the North and other subgroups), Vietnamese imperial and French colonial rules. Heritage lies at the locus of these power struggles. On the one hand, since independence, especially after the Imperial Complex was recognized as its first UNESCO World Heritage Site (1993), Huế has pushed for a dynastic identity associated with the royal heritage and accelerated the urbanization process to become a municipality. The city’s official master plan with specialized functional zones contradicts its inherent integrated fabric. On the other hand, local landuse history and territorial relationships have been absorbed into that of the Nguyễn in scholarly writings to construct a dichotomy between indigenous culture (Champa people’s) and the colonizing regimes (the Nguyễn colonist and the French colonizer). Such asymmetrical representations and development schemes have eliminated the Việt and other subgroups’ role in the shaping of the city.
By analyzing Huế’s cultural material fragments (collected from archival and field research), the dissertation seeks to demonstrate different Impromptu Conservation tactics which embody the centuries-long efforts of Huế’s vulnerable communities (Việt people in particular) to survive the many still existing collisions among political, social, cultural, economic, and ecological forces; and safeguard their culture against oblivion. Moreover, it challenges established associations, binary assumptions and biased representations within postcolonial city and heritage discourses, which render insufficient in accommodating the postcolonial nuanced complexities and ambiguities. Based on Walter Benjamin’s radical materialist historiography together with other urban frameworks, the dissertation advances a non-hierarchical position, historically and geographically, that opens the discussion beyond the above-mentioned boundaries culture-nature, tangible-intangible. Using urbanism- associated conceptual and visual tools such as historical interpretative mapping and typo- morphology analysis, it also offers ways to ease the constraint of textual dependence in engaging with spatiality and materiality.
Key words: urban conservation, postcolonial city, local heritage, preservation and habitation, architecture and interior spaces