A study on Urban & Architectural Conservation in Penang, Malaysia

(ar5756. completed in 2006)

Abstract

Georgetown of Penang, founded in 1786 by Captain Francis Light is famous with cultural diversity, old colonial buildings and traditional roofscapes mixed with new high-rise. The Town has been experienced ups and downs of political, socio-economic change last few centuries. Up to now, conservation of urban fabric and cultural heritage is the burning question of the day after UNESCO returned “the Historic centres of Malacca and Penang dossiers” in 2005. The aim of the research, thus, was to understand current conservation of Penang’s built heritage as well as to assess dossier of Penang historic center. Practically, analytical process, which relied on UNESCO criteria, implied many actual causes influenced the submitted application’s content. Therefore, to deal with these problems, appropriate measures are proposed to definitely tackle these problems in the revising dossier of Penang for the second submission.

Keywords: Penang’s built heritage, dossier of Penang historic centre, conservation

Examining Conservation Possibilities on Reciprocal Relations between the built Environment and Heritage User: A case study of 36 Old Streets Quarter in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Ngo Minh Hung, Wong Yunn Chii, Heng Chye Kiang

(Accepted in: HERITAGE 2008 International Conference, Portugal)

Abstract

The Old Quarter of Hanoi, implies the commercial area- “Kẻ Chợ” outside the Royal Citadel, is considered the best place to experience the spirit of the one thousand year old Hanoi with values- tangible: urban fabric, tube-house architecture and historic-cultural- religious buildings; – intangible: lifestyle and ethnic standard of natives, traditional guilds with its streets (Hàng) bearing the names of the goods manufactured on them. Change of the built environment in the Ancient Quarter has been challenging heritage users (local authority, native, merchant) before current market-oriented mechanism of mega-city like Hanoi. Over the past 25 years, such three pilot projects of building preservation within Hanoi Ancient Quarter (HAQ)- covering over 800 relics that need to be urgently preserved, have been conducted by applied “reproducible preservation method” with the international assistance.

To Hanoi city, community participation plays a vital role in retaining the built heritages, which provide significant functions to the users – who enable to grasp opportunities in use of physical settings. The research aims to assess reciprocal relationship of both key elements (material elements and user’s behavior) in heritage environment (in-outdoor and sharing spaces) of 36 Old Streets Quarter that affords inhabitants (i) perceiving the environment qualities to spring potential opportunities in (ii) utilizing physical settings and; (iii) shaping variously spatial forms; and a cross- comparison of those layers is logically analyzed to formulate a notion of “interplay- preservation” at town and architectural level. It argues that for a sustainable development that would retain the identity of the heritage city, a ground-up framework (GUF) is conceptualized to emphasis on integrating actual heritage condition with traditional methods of indigenous community is recommended.

Keyword: community participation, potential possibilities, GUF, urban heritage

Affordances of Heritage Environment: A Conservation Approach to Hanoi Ancient Quarter in Vietnam

Tuesday, 24 April 2007
3:00 – 4:00 pm

Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture
Department of Architecture
National University of Singapore

Abstract

Heritage conservation plays an important role above all others in rapidly developing cities, towns and quarters to connect the past with the present as well as protect our roots, historically, culturally, architecturally, socially and so forth. Value of conservation of built environments has been acknowledged and illustrated through numerous instances mostly in developed countries (United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and Singapore…) beneath public and private interest and support. Seemingly, this process, at developing countries, is not easy-going with restoring and rehabilitating historic and ancient quarters to which governments pay attention but lacking necessary capabilities for, whilst other resources, critically, are available inside local communities themselves for improving living conditions by demolishing old constructions (Malacca and Hanoi…) to build up new modern ones relatively.

In recent years, community involvement to preserve and develop Hanoi Ancient Quarter is still a controversial issue beyond seriously worrying conditions of the built environment, urban elements and remaining heritages. The visible reasons, which could be explainable, are the Quarter’s attractiveness involving people in economic, trading activities more than protecting, retaining its cultural and historic heritage values as their behaviors, actions toward perceived spaces and functional properties of the built environment through reciprocal relationships between heritage environment and users.

The aim of this paper, using J. Gibson’s “affordance” term, is to examine significant characteristics of the 36 Old Streets Quarter which support users’ actions, behaviors for urban and architectural preservation works, in other words, conservational potential affordances (CPAs) covering various sub-affordance levels (perceiving, utilizing, sharing (Kytta, 2002: 109) and so forth), as my argument, through social activities that have never been done before. To response to these within outdoor and partly indoor (the sharing spaces) context, semi-structured and key informant (informal) interviews, participant- observation and behavior mapping methods are used to collect qualitative data to explore different affordances of residential blocks- basic heritage units of the Ancient Quarter. The main factual problems, regrettably, are misperceiving and misuse of affordances of the heritage environments, causing consequences as captured today.

After data analysis, a CPAs profile will be constructive to suggest potentiality and availability of affordances of the residential block and its distribution as well. Then, behavior schemata will also figure out social activities regarding use of urban layouts and objects, which constituted the past and present functional properties of 36 Old Streets Quarter. Finally, a heritage conservation program, supposedly, will be implemented to guide people to perceive and use the affordances to gradually adjust presently perceived environments so as to lead to appropriate rehabilitative actions to foster identity and vibrancy of this cultural heritage at level- community initiative.

A Schema for the Conservation of Tube-Houses (Hanoi, Vietnam)

Ngo Minh Hung and Wong Yunn Chii

(Full paper- Presented in: CONSERVATION IN CHANGING SOCIETIES: Heritage development- International Conference 2006, Lueven, Belgium)

Abstract

The city of Hanoi is celebrating its 1000th anniversary in 2010. It is an ancient city with a structure based on both original Vietnamese and French colonial architecture. The tube-house, an ubiquitous typology in its urban context, is a vital built heritage that has been impacted by urbanization, socio-economic changes, and high population density. These changes affected both its architecture and housing function. There are no successful conservation projects of the tube houses and their precincts. This paper proposes schema, as a set of conservation strategies, for this traditional house typology based on its architectural features, urban and social function and land use. It argues that for a sustainable urban development that would retain the character of the city, a staged approach based on community participation and the clarification of the “Inside-to-Outside” intervention is required.