Managing World Heritage Cities in the UK

Join urban conservation expert John Pendlebury for a lecture exploring the management challenges that World Heritage Sites within UK cities are facing. Learn how the evolving landscape of historic environment management in the UK is shaped by extensive regulations and the growing expectation for heritage to contribute to broader public policies, particularly in economic revitalization. Pendlebury will discuss the tensions that arise when conservation clashes with economic interests in World Heritage Sites, as seen in cases like Liverpool's Maritime Mercantile City, which lost its UNESCO designation in 2021. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:


John Pendlebury is Professor of Urban Conservation at the Newcastle University School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape in the UK. He teaches and researches on issues of heritage, conservation, development, planning and governance. He focuses on the interface between contemporary cultural heritage policy and other policy processes, as well as undertaking more historical work on how conceptions of heritage have been balanced with modernizing forces. Pendlebury's principal publications include Conservation in the Age of Consensus (2009) and the edited collections Valuing Historic Environments (2009 with Lisanne Gibson) and Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction: Creating the Modern Townscape (2015 with Erdem Erten and Peter Larkham). His most recent book, with Jules Brown, is Conserving the Historic Environment (2021). His current interests include adaptive reuse, industrial heritage and the conservation of the buildings of the welfare state. 

This lecture is supported by the Kelly-Tukey endowment.