Paper short abstract:

Considering the Historic Urban Landscapes recommendation adopted by UNESCO, we'll put in question the heritage policies towards the uncertain territorial situations arising in a globalization context. Taking brazilian context, we’ll focus on how those policies are considered by an emerging country culture.

Paper long abstract:

UNESCO progressively reviews its normative schedule to insure the perpetuity of the Human World Heritage sites. Today, the new heritage territories situations between identity markers and urban development, generated by the effects of globalization, no longer fit in UNESCO's normative frame whose last recommendation about urban sites dates from 1976.

The proposed paper focuses on the recent recommendation on Historic Urban Landscapes, passed by UNESCO in 2011 as a possible measure to both insure a control on unstable evolutions of urban and historic sites and to prepare those sites for future urban challenges.

We'll then focus on the rejected proposition, for the reorientation of this recommendation towards a new category entitled Urban Cultural Landscapes, proposed by some Brazilian institutional actors during the 34th session in Brasilia in 2010. Our aim will be to underline the contradictions and missed subjects of this recommendation in relation to the local context of the emerging countries.

Finally, we'll question UNESCO's role as major actor of the international cultural policies. Can a culture be considered vulnerable only on the base of its unpredictable evolutions? What happens to cultures which make uncertainty their main characteristic? Is an increased production of normative texts a solution for disquiet? How the statutory answer proposed by UNESCO to face heritage uncertainties can create exclusions and lead to cultural homogenization?

This paper is based on an ethnographic fieldwork made in UNESCO, the Heritage Brazil National Institute (IPHAN) and Rio de Janeiro habitants' daily context since 2010, through interviews and textual analysis.