HKU Division of Landscape Architecture
Spring 2023 Lecture Series
“ASSEMBLING FUTURES”
Transformative Heritage Conservation in Hong Kong, Macao and Mainland China – 25 years of an Evolving Model
Lecture Abstract
The UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Conservation Awards were launched in the year 2000, coinciding with the beginning of the new millennium, to address the two key questions underlying all heritage safeguarding: “What, of the vast and varied legacy of built heritage that we have inherited from the past millennium, do we wish to preserve into the next millennium to pass on to future generations?” and “What is the most effective way of protecting and ensuring the long-term survival of this irreplaceable inheritance?” In the more than two decades of the Awards programme, a total of 278 projects from across the length and breadth of the Asia-Pacific region have been selected to provide answers to these questions. Of these Award-winning projects, 83 are located in Hong Kong, Macao, and throughout Mainland China. In his presentation, Prof Engelhardt – who founded and serves on the selection panel for the UNESCO Awards Programme – discusses how the Award-winning projects from China have defined and set new international standards of best practice in this high-profile profession, where preservation of the past meets — and not infrequently challenges – ingrained assumptions of development.
The event will be conducted in English, with simultaneous interpretation from English to Cantonese available.
About the Speaker
Educated in anthropology and history at Yale (BA) and Harvard (AM, PhD) universities, Richard A. Engelhardt, Jr. has been a leader in cultural heritage research and conservation efforts throughout Asia for the past four decades, teaching at universities throughout the Asia-Pacific region and serving in senior leadership positions with UNESCO and other UN agencies. In 1991, he established the UNESCO Office in post-conflict Cambodia and initiated the International Safeguarding Campaign for Angkor. From 1994-2008, he served as UNESCO Regional Advisor for Culture in Asia and the Pacific, and subsequently from 2008-2020 as UNESCO Charge de Mission and Senior Advisor for Culture and World Heritage Mentor. During his years of service with UNESCO, Engelhardt initiated the flagship UNESCO Heritage Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation in Asia; established the UNESCO-ICCROM Asian Academy for Heritage Management; and, spearheaded the effort to extend impact assessment to cultural heritage sites throughout Asia and the world. After retirement from UNESCO, Engelhardt remains active in academia as UNESCO Chair Professor of Heritage Management.
About “Assembling Futures”
The DLA 2022-23 Lecture Series “Assembling Futures” brings together distinguished academics and professionals in the fields of landscape architecture and heritage conservation to discuss recent works concerning environmental futures. Although landscape and heritage practices have long engaged with the regeneration of existing environments for future use, the precise relationships between such works and the future remain underexamined. Lectures in this series explore landscape architecture and heritage conservation as future-making practices that condition how future environments are managed, valued and imagined. By attending to how different projects reassemble the relationships between human and non-human agents and evolving socio-material engagements across different scales, the series encourages critical reflections on the competing visions of building future worlds in the face of growing uncertainty and unfolding environment crises.
This lecture is co-organized by the Division of Landscape Architecture at HKU, Tai Kwun, Docomomo Hong Kong, and the Built Heritage Research Collaborative, HKUrbanLabs, Faculty of Architecture, HKU.