Advocating a Cultural Response to Natural Disasters Lessons Learnt in Bam (December 2003) & Borujerd (March 2006) Earthquakes

The experience of past decades in post-disaster response throughout the world reveals increasing attention to socio-economic and institutional restoration rather that just reconstruction of tangible assets. In the Gilan and Zanjan earthquake (1990) reconstruction for example, even religious monuments were reconstructed with new materials, in new forms, often at a larger scale but with little attention to cultural heritage values, authenticity and integrity of the heritage space. However, since the last decade, the importance of culture within the process of sustainable development is gradually being recognized. UNESCO increasingly advocates the integration and due consideration of the culture of the local community in all post-disaster programming. The new approaches emphasize the cultural values of the disaster-stricken society and its cultural heritage within the post-disaster response. Concurrently with the new approaches, new concepts are developing for cultural heritage management. The notion of cultural landscapes is a relatively new concept which identifies the interaction between human beings and their environment, striving to integrate territorial and urban planning dimensions with conservation requirements for certain heritage structures. This paper briefly presents the UNESCO experiences in two recent post-earthquake situations in Iran. The Bam 26 December 2003 earthquake devastated not only a historic oasis city but much of its rich patrimony of historic structures including one of the largest mud complex in the world—the Arg-e-Bam. The efforts in the aftermath of this catastrophic event led to the inscription of “Bam and its Cultural landscape” on the List of World Heritage in Danger on 17th July 2004 at the 28th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. The other disaster is the earthquake of 31 March 2006 in Borujerd, Lorestan Province where a UNESCO Tehran Cluster Office technical mission visited with special attention to cultural heritage. A comparison of these two experiences with respect to the political environment, reconstruction procedures, and decision-making processes, reveals lessons for the integration of the culture within the pre and post-disaster planning.

کلیدواژه ها:

Cultural Heritage ، Cultural Landscape ، Post-Disaster Management ، Cultural Diversity Programming