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This article is part of a special report on the Art for Tomorrow conference in the Italian cities of Florence and Solomeo.
MOMBASA, Kenya – It’s a tale of three cities.
To the north on the Kenyan coast is Lamu Town, its small streets ringing with the sound of chisels and hammers making Swahili doors, and donkeys carrying loads of coral limestone. Locals and tourists jockey for space in the zigzag alleys, with shops selling everything from silver jewelry to body products made from locally grown baobabs.
On the coast, in the neighboring country of Tanzania, there is Stone Town of Zanzibar, with a bustling fish market, where octopus and snapper arrive daily from dhow boats, and many Polish, English, Italian and Mandarin-speaking people stroll the streets. a tour that also takes them to a memorial near the site of the city’s former slave market.
And between the two lies Old Town Mombasa and at its eastern tip, Fort Jesus, an imposing 16th-century structure built by the Portuguese, various openings offer glorious views of the Indian Ocean, and soft breezes that help stave off the coastal heat.
But when these streets are busy too, here in Old Town Mombasa, it is mostly residents, unlike in the other two localities, where throngs of tourists flood the streets.
Lamu Old Town, Stone Town of Zanzibar and Fort Jesus are all UNESCO World Heritage Sites, with Old Town Mombasa as a buffer zone, but Mombasa, unlike Lamu and Stone Town, is more of a stopover point to the Swahili coast, a stretch of coastline from Somalia to Mozambique . So, any hopes that the local residents might have, regarding the tourism coming from Jesus Fort becoming a World Heritage site, have not been fulfilled.
“We can be like Zanzibar, like Lamu for tourism,” said Peter Tolle, a local historian who guides tours in French, English and German. “Local people don’t want to talk about being a World Heritage site anymore and they feel less. Our houses are broken, we have money, but we can’t fix them.
“We are trapped by the rules but there is no funding,” he said, referring to UNESCO’s regulations on what changes can and cannot be made in and near World Heritage sites.
Kutha Lamu, Kutha Batu and Benteng Jesus are examples of expert critics who work at the level of preservation and tourism on the UNESCO World Heritage List — a list of landmarks or natural areas that have been designated by multilateral organizations as having historical, scientific or cultural significance. These places include Machu Picchu, the historical center of Florence and the Taj Mahal.
He says being on the list can be a poisoned trophy, from overtourism or undertourism. On the one hand, there is, as suggested by Mr. Tolle, the hope that being added to the list will be a game changer for the community, bringing money not only from UNESCO but also from investments and infrastructure projects focused on tourism. But Mike Robinson, professor of cultural heritage at Nottingham Trent University in England, noted in an interview that, in fact, “there is no money and we have to rely on donors.”
In addition, the international agency has been blamed for what the Italian journalist Marco D’Eramo considered UNESCOcide, when he wrote that being added to the list is the “kiss of death” and “too often cures the disease by killing the patient”; that, in recognizing that the site is worth protecting, UNESCO can, alone, drive unsustainable levels of tourism.
Florence, Italy, where the Art for Tomorrow conference is being held this week, became a World Heritage site in 1982, and has long suffered from overtourism. It is estimated that in 2019, 15 million tourists – 20 times Florence’s population of 708,000 – visited the city that is home to the Uffizi Gallery and the Duomo di Firenze.
Naturally, the subject of UNESCO sites will be explored at the conference. This annual event was founded by The New York Times, and is now hosted by the Foundation for Democracy & Culture, with panels moderated by Times reporters.
The conversation will contribute to the debate about the heritage list, about what benefits are there, if in some places, the tourism of the designation will destroy the local charm, while in other cases, being included in the list brings unrealistic expectations. greater change.
A History of Preservation
The idea for the UNESCO World Heritage list, which currently has 1,157 sites, grew out of a project to save Nubian monuments, including Abu Simbel, the site of two temples carved into the sandstone cliffs of the Nubian Valley in Egypt in the 13th Century BC In the 1950s, local engineers plan to build a dam along a section of the Nile to control floods and generate electricity.
However, the dam would flood the valley and melt hundreds of ancient monuments, prompting the governments of Egypt and Sudan to ask UNESCO for help. The resulting project, in which Abu Simbel was moved, piecemeal, to higher ground, helped spur the 1972 Convention on the Protection of the World’s Cultural and Natural Heritage, which established the heritage list.
Interestingly, tourism was mentioned only once in the document that emerged from the convention, in relation to the possible threat to the site.
“But, of course, we do not have the scope of international tourism,” said Professor Robinson, who has consulted with UNESCO on sustainable tourism, and who admits that tourism – in itself – is not necessarily harmful. . “Time has progressed, we must update that tourism is not only a threat, but also an important opportunity.”
It is difficult to assess the direct economic impact of being a World Heritage site. For example, Dubrovnik, Croatia, is on the list, but the city’s tourist invasion is also related to its role as a filming location for “Game of Thrones.”
However, a 2015 report by the British National Commission for UNESCO found that Scotland’s UNESCO project generated approximately 10.8 million British pounds (or $13.4 million) from 2014 to 2015 through connections with the heritage list.
This means that some countries, often in developing countries, want to make the site on the list. Professor Robinson said that is partly because the state “sees it as a way to promote tourism” and “the motivation has shifted from site protection to site valorisation.”
UNESCO Looks Ahead
There is criticism that there is a change in who sits on the World Heritage Committee – a group of representatives of 21 countries who have the final say on the sites added to the list – has led to the list of politicians.
“You’ve got a place going forward for an inscription that an advisory body recommends not going forward because the treatment is inadequate,” said Susan MacDonald, head of buildings and sites at the Getty Conservation Institute. “When that place goes on the list, when it’s clear they don’t have the right systems and policies and processes in place, there’s always a problem.”
However, he added that almost 50 percent of heritage sites are in Europe and North America, so there is a sense that the list should be more representative.
UNESCO recommends that representatives of the World Heritage Committee become experts in preservation and conservation, but leaves the main choice up to the countries themselves. “So, you start to get this shift from a completely expert body to one that is sort of mixed,” Ms. MacDonald said. “And when that happens, you’re going to lobby.”
What is often not well communicated to local communities is that when a site – which includes cultural sites, such as the city of Hoi An in Vietnam, and natural sites, such as Yellowstone National Park – enters the list, it is a local and national obligation. the country’s government takes care of everything from maintaining and marketing the site to controlling the number of tourists who visit.
“Once the site is inscribed, it is the responsibility of the government of the country where the site is located to take all measures to protect the site,” said Lazare Eloundou Assomo, director of UNESCO’s World Heritage Center, which maintains the list.
So, while UNESCO helps countries develop sustainable tourism practices and provides advice, being on the list does not automatically provide solutions in terms of conservation or community development and investment.
“When you get written on the World Heritage List, it’s not the UNESCO police who suddenly come in,” joked Joseph King, senior director in the director general’s office at the International Center for Conservation and Restoration Studies. of Cultural Property, who in the 1980s and 90s was a consultant for UNESCO. “You’d be surprised how many people think like, ‘Why didn’t UNESCO stop this from happening?'”
People like Mr. Tolle, a tour guide in Mombasa, find the whole process complicated and bureaucratic, and often misunderstand what it means to be a site for his community. “They heard about it, and they knew it was like the goose that laid the golden egg,” Ms MacDonald said. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter, unless the government is careful to implement systems and practices that empower local communities to manage the space.”
Covid illustrates this point in places like the Omo Valley in Ethiopia, an area that was written on the list in 1980. Before 2020, and the beginning of the pandemic and the war in the north of the country, small remote villages like Dildi will get about 15 tourists. day, and the village becomes dependent on extra cash. But now, according to the local Mursi chief Baradi Birabi, the visitors have all dried up.
“With the money from the tourists, we can buy medicine for our people or our cattle,” he said, as one resident tried to sell a clay lip plate to a lone Israeli tourist. “But now we have to sell the cows, so we hope the tourists will come back.”
This is an issue that UNESCO is working on, including a visitor flow management tool that will be added to all sites by 2029, Peter DeBrine, who works on UNESCO’s sustainable tourism program, wrote in an email.
“Tourism can bring economic benefits to local communities and increase awareness of the importance of heritage preservation, but it can also have a negative impact on sites, such as overcrowding, community change, damage to fragile ecosystems and degradation of cultural monuments,” he added. “This is why UNESCO has strengthened its response and tools in this area, and is committed to the development of sustainable tourism.”
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