Adapting heritage buildings for new purposes
How can people who live in a world heritage city rehabilitate their historic buildings and use them for new appropriate purposes, for example for tourism and in turn to maintain them? This is the question at the basis of the workshop ”Living in a world heritage city - rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of historic buildings – a case of Patan” to be held on 20 February 2013 in Patan as part of a project carried out by University of Tsukuba in Japan in cooperation with Institute of Engineering (IOE) of Tribhuvan University and Khwopa Engineering College.
The workshop which is supported by UNESCO will discuss the survey report, which was responded to by heritage building owners, users, managers, architects and artisans involved in the rehabilitation of heritage houses within the boundaries of the Patan monument zone of Kathmandu Valley World Heritage site and its buffer zone.
Nepali students from IOE and Khwopa Engineering College coordinated to distribute and explain the survey questionnaire prepared by Tsukuba University students to the eighteen respondents from sixteen selected cases in Patan in December 2012-January 2013.
About 45 participants will attend the event including site managers from Kathmandu Valley. The event will end with comments on the survey report, discussion with the concerned stakeholders- representative of Lalitpur Sub-Metropolitan City, Department of Archaeology etc.
Earlier, UNESCO has published a “Heritage Homeowner’s Preservation Manual for Kathmandu Valley World Heritage Site, Nepal” in 2006. It is a trilingual manual (Newari, Nepali and English) aimed at disseminating practical conservation guidelines and local maintenance techniques to house owners. It was distributed to the targeted cases together with the survey questionnaire prepared by the Tsukuba University students to seek house owners’ perspective on the manual to help guide future use of the manual.
The manual is available online at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0016/001619/161932m.pdf.
UNESCO welcomes and supports the collaboration among the partner universities in the survey which will demonstrate successful examples living within a World Heritage City.
For more information, please contact:
Nipuna Shrestha
Email: s.nipuna(at)unesco.org
Tel: + 977 1 555 4396 Ext: 26
UNESCO Office in Kathmandu
Sanepa-2, Lalitpur
Junko Okahashi
Email: junko_okahashi(at)heritage.tsukuba.ac.jp
Associate Professor
World Heritage Studies
University of Tsukuba, Japan