published_or_final_version / Urban Design / Master / Master of Urban Design

The urban renewal is the inevitable product during the urban development process. Chongqing has been carrying out a serious of reconstruction and urban revitalization during these years, and the SHI-BA-TI area is included in the process. SHI-BA-TI area is one of the most famous sight-spots of Chongqing which represents the traditional culture spirit of the city. So that the high-valuable culture features of the site should be reserved in the reconstruction project and expressed in new way with creative method. The concept of my design is reserving the “old core and skin” while adding in the “new core and skin”. This reconstruction design achieved the objective that reserving the historic and cultural core of the site while adding some urban public functions upon the site, which makes the site correspond to the land value of the city center and help with enhancing the status and image of the city center. / published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Landscape Architecture

This dissertation focuses on the military heritage in Hong Kong. It specifically covers a case-study military site – Pak Sha Wan Battery on the east of Hong Kong Island, an abandoned defensive mechanism and one of significant battlefields in the Battle of Hong Kong in 1941. This research dissertation is to examine military heritage as a Cultural Heritage with both tangible and intangible elements. By the Pak Sha Wan Battery as a case study, this is also to recognise the importance of the military heritage site in the history of Hong Kong, and the war relics deserve to be preserved for our future generations. To a certain extent, military heritage is neglected by people in Hong Kong. Part of the reason is perhaps because of a lack of a local military tradition. There has never been compulsory military service in Hong Kong. Additionally, Hong Kong does not involve in direct war conflict after the World War II. Military and war are concepts far away from Hongkongers. Few people could tell the location of military compounds and battlefields in Hong Kong. Military heritage may not even be considered as an important heritage because those military relics are just pieces of abandoned ruins to them! Owing to being neglected for long time, most of the Hong Kong war relics are overgrown and witnesses of the war become invisible to the people, though some military heritage sites are not actually hard to access, e.g. Pinewood Battery on Victoria Peak and the disused military structure on Devil’s Peak, and the former Lyemun military installations at the present-day Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defence (HKMCD). As an assistant curator in a military theme museum in Hong Kong, the author find few publications on the Hong Kong military, and it is believed that many military relics in Hong Kong are still to be uncovered and documented. Pak Sha Wan Battery, inside the closed area of the HKMCD, is hardly accessible, and therefore it was least mentioned in publications. Most likely it is just mentioned the location name in publications but few further details information about the Battery can be found. It is hoped that this dissertation with the Pak Sha Wan Battery as a case study could help to document the gap of record in the military history of Hong Kong. / published_or_final_version / Conservation / Master / Master of Science in Conservation

This dissertation examines the notion of ‘sense of place’, which is the collection of meanings, beliefs, symbols, values and feelings that individuals or groups associate with a particular locality. Hong Kong is a city where changes and transformations happen frequently, and these changes have great influences on the overall image of the city. Realizing that all true places have distinctive identities and characters, urban planners and designers start to see the importance of engendering a ‘sense of place’ in the urban landscape through heritage conservation, so that a historical urban identity and authentic urban identity can be preserved and to enrich the overall landscape. The new understanding that heritage conservation should not only focus on restoring the authenticity, but also to conserve the overall urban experience has led to the inquiry of people’s behavior in the place, and how their emotional ties to a place is formed. Understanding that people’s place attachment can be studied through their ability in imaging the place, this dissertation introduces environmental mapping – a qualitative research method in gathering spatial information of a place from the conscious and unconscious behaviors and minds of people. Through a case study on Cattle Depot Artist Village, we will be able to understand how a sense of place is developed, and how the environmental mapping method can be applied in urban planning and conservation projects. / published_or_final_version / Urban Planning and Design / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

While historic sites have been used and operated as educational tools in the form of museums and public spaces since the emergence of the field of preservation, educational outreach frequently fails to include preservation concepts within these efforts. This thesis attempts to answer the question of “Why is preservation education lacking or absent at historic sites, and how can it be an integral part of a historic site’s programming, presentation, and interpretation?” To investigate this question, scholarly research was combined with first hand experiences of sites and interviews with stewarding organization staff members. Through this investigation, emerged a contextualization of historic sites within the fields of preservation and museum studies, a relation of the current state of preservation education to the opportunities available by means of physical sites, and a connection of preservation concepts to museum education theory. Multiple means of educational implementation and execution were explored, as were target audiences and organizational management structure. The result is a collection of examples in practice, explanations of missed opportunities, and recommendation for effective implementation. Collectively, these results reinforce the importance of using physical sites available to the public for educational purposes not limited to historic significance, but including preservation in all facets, as a means of introducing the field along with its impact and importance to the general public as a means of generating an interest that will be redirected into their communities. / text

No description available.

Many communities today look to Heritage Tourism as an income resource. The first step that any community must take in the development of a heritage tourism program is to compile an inventory of their heritage resources. This project is going to select a small town, develop a resource inventory, and evaluate its potential to support a heritage tourism program.' The project will concentrate on "Step One - Assess the Potential" of the "Four Steps" established by the National Trust in their booklet, Getting Started: How to Succeed in Heritage Tourism. 2 The project will also evaluate other criteria necessary to support a heritage tourist program such as, availability of over-night accommodations, restaurants, recreational activities, night life and festivals to help determine the feasibility of the chosen town's ability to develop and support a Heritage Tourism program.The National Trust 'guidelines are just that, they provide no criteria for the evaluation process and is left to the individual to formulate. This project will approach "Step One" of the Trust's guidelines and develop a rating process to assist in the evaluation of the selected town's heritage tourism potential. / Department of Architecture

The thesis focuses on the way heritage is presented by two Greek state organisations, the Greek Ministry of Culture and the Greek National Tourism Organisation. It aims to explore the way practices are initiated for the presentation of the World Heritage Sites that Greece has nominated to the World Heritage List of the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Archival analysis, interviews with people in the initiation and implementation processes and printed promotional material aimed at national level comprised the method of enquiry including primary and secondary sources and following a case study design. This mixture of sources was adopted in an attempt to identify and critically examine the association of World Heritage Sites with cultural, economic, educational, social and political values. Considering the socio-historical context within which the presentation of the World Heritage Sites is implemented, it was found that a specific image of Greece is promoted nationally and internationally. There is an attempt by the Greek state to redefine Greekness in the West with nominations of Byzantine Heritage Sites to the List that goes beyond the stereotypical view of Greece as a country of classical heritage. This is initiated at a time when the position of Greece in the West has been questioned. The findings revealed the role attributed to the international community, acting as the significant other, that provides a way for the presentation of specific World Heritage properties. Although it was found that there is not an intensified presentation of World Heritage Sites at national level by the two organisations, the way it is decided to present sites aims at giving a point of reference for people to imagine themselves culturally but also politically. Our focus, then, is based on the social organisation of Greek identity as was found from the promotion of the Greek World Heritage Sites initiated by two state bureaucratic organisations. The critical examination of the communication activities of the two organisations, indicated their role in the presentation of notions of nationality that are connected to heritage. The state takes the role of the nation, promoting through a nationalist ideology 'constituent elements of Greekness'. In fact, the two organisations actually base their decisions on the power of the tangible sites and initiate their communication activities accordingly. Conflicts towards the presentation of the World Heritage Sites exist between the Ministry of Culture and Greek National Tourism Organisation which are associated with the allocation of power that heritage entails, yet both organisations have a role to play in the presentation of Greekness. The significance attached to specific cultural heritage, associated with the past, centres around sites of classical antiquity and the Byzantine epoch, which, although different traditions, are heritages which the state of Greece presents as unitary through the presentation of World Heritage Sites and which come to define the bipolar identity of Greece at national and international level. This, though, has implications for the process of social organisation of identity in the multicultural world that we live in.

Aboriginal Australian heritage forms a significant and celebrated part of Australian heritage. Set within the institutional frameworks of a predominantly ??white?? European Australian heritage practice, Aboriginal heritage has been promoted as the heritage of a people who belonged to the distant, pre-colonial past and who were an integral and sustainable part of the natural environment. These controlled and carefully packaged meanings of Aboriginal heritage have underwritten aspects of urban Aboriginal presence and history that prevail in the (previously) colonial city. In the midst of the city which seeks to cling to selected images of its colonial past urban Aboriginal heritage emerges as a significant challenge to a largely ??white??, (post)colonial Australian heritage practice. The distinctively Aboriginal sense of anti-colonialism that underlines claims to urban sites of Aboriginal significance unsettles the colonial stereotypes that are associated with Aboriginal heritage and disrupts the ??purity?? of the city by penetrating the stronghold of colonial heritage. However, despite the challenge to the colonising imperatives of heritage practice, the fact that urban Aboriginal heritage continues to be a deeply contested reality indicates that heritage practice has failed to move beyond its predominantly colonial legacy. It knowingly or unwittingly maintains the stronghold of colonial heritage in the city by selectively and often with reluctance, recognising a few sites of contested Aboriginal heritage such as the Old Swan Brewery and Bennett House in Perth. Furthermore, the listing of these sites according to very narrow and largely Eurocentric perceptions of Aboriginal heritage makes it quite difficult for other sites which fall outside these considerations to be included as part of the urban built environment. Importantly this thesis demonstrates that it is most often in the case of Aboriginal sites of political resistance such as The Block in Redfern, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra and Australian Hall in Sydney, that heritage practice tends to maintain its hegemony as these sites are a reminder of the continuing disenfranchised condition of Aboriginal peoples, in a nation which considers itself to be postcolonial.

Thesis (MFA)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1989. / Includes bibliographical references.