cultural heritage and transportation

Today is Heritage Day in South Africa. Most countries, whether or not they dedicate a public holiday to it, celebrate cultural heritage in one way or another. It might be poorly defined, subjected to endless arguments, considered differently by groups in society who feel they should be identified as different from others, and even co-opted to political ends. But most people seem to assume that it somehow defines who we are, and is therefore worth preserving. What is not fully recognized in the planning fraternity though, is the range of ways in which transportation and the built environment affect culture in its present incarnations.

Many countries, including South Africa, use environmental impact assessments - or some similar mechanism - to check that planned changes to transportation infrastructure don't adversely affect cultural heritage resources. This is usually considered to mean that built heritage features such as historically significant buildings or other human artifacts should not be compromised.

Transportation corridor design and construction can affect these resources in a number of ways. In the 2003 Draft Cultural Heritage Work Plan for the planned extension of Highway 407 in Ontario, it was noted that "[t]he effects may include displacement through removal or demolition and/or disruption by the introduction of physical, visual, audible or atmospheric elements that are not in keeping with the character of the cultural heritage resources, and/or their setting."

While it is notoriously difficult to quantify some of these impacts, they are at least reasonably tangible. Things start to get a little more interesting when we consider that "[a]ggregations of individual cultural features usually form areas of homogenous character such as a rural area, a village, a streetscape, etc. The attributes for built heritage features are derived from historical associations and/or architectural or engineering qualities." And it's even more challenging to incorporate the role of memory in cultural heritage, something that has recently entered the heritage debate in South Africa.

All of this is no doubt important, but it's missing a crucial element in the consideration of transportation's impact on cultural heritage: the present.

It is true that present lifesyle is partially considered in environmental assessments. Ontario's Environmental Assessment Act defines "environment" to include "...cultural conditions that influence the life of humans or a community." So, for example, if a new road will force relocation of households, or a new dam will wipe out the livelihoods of a community, these are registered as impacts that must be considered.

The cultural conditions of community life should, however, be defined more broadly than is generally done for environmental assessments. At a workshop of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Project on Environmentally Sustainable Transportation, held in Ottawa in 2000, John Adams noted in his paper "The Social Implications of Hypermobility":

It is transport - and communications - that connect everything in society to everything else. The length, strength, quality and complexity of the connecting strands, and the patterns into which they are woven, are the physical manifestation of the social fabric - a metaphor for the myriad ways in which people and institutions relate to each other.

The OECD project looked at two alternative scenarios that countries could aim for in their policies and planning practices: Business as Usual (BAU) and Environmentally Sustainable Transport (EST). As defined by OECD, BAU is simply an extrapolation of past trends, while EST is "transportation that does not endanger public health or ecosystems and that meets needs for access consistent with (a) use of renewable resources that are below their rates of regeneration, and (b) use of non-renewable resources below the rates of development of renewable substitutes." Adams suggested that the BAU scenario would make countries richer (measured by GDP), but poorer by most other social and environmental indicators. "BAU countries will be:

• more polarised (greater disparity between rich and poor);
• more dispersed (more suburban sprawl);
• more anonymous and less convivial (fewer people will know their neighbours);
• less child-friendly (children's freedoms will be further curtailed by parental fears);
• less culturally distinctive (the McCulture will be further advanced);
• more dangerous for those not in cars (more metal in motion);
• fatter and less fit (less exercise built into daily routines);
• more crime ridden (less social cohesion and more fear of crime);
• subject to a more Orwellian style of policing (more CCTV surveillance); and
• less democratic (the majority will have less influence over the decisions that govern their lives)."

In other words, the way we approach transport planning has a significant impact on cultural heritage in the here and now. It's not something removed from present reality. Present reality is already evolving under the hands of planners, engineers, developers and politicians, so the question is not whether society should change the way it is culturally defined, but how.