Digitalising endangered cultural heritage in Southeast Asian cities: preserving or replacing?

ABSTRACT

In the last decade, the dramatic developments in digitalisation have reached cultural heritage. Digital archiving and reconstruction, virtual reality, and 3D laser scanning, modelling and printing, are influencing the way we consume, manage, and preserve it. As part of the latter, detailed virtual records of endangered urban cultural heritage, through digital archiving, capturing, and reconstruction techniques, can help preserve its memories and lengthen its life; particularly, once decision-makers resolve to end its tangibility. However, the application of digitalisation to cultural heritage is not always easy, faced with issues such as cost, lack of sources and skills, sustainability, and intellectual property limitations. This paper illustrates the challenges encountered by land-deprived and fast-growing Southeast Asian cities in amalgamating urban cultural heritage preservation with pressing development needs. Ultimately, it discusses the introduction of digitalisation in this debate by examining the broader consequences of the association.

KEYWORDS:

• Endangered cultural heritage
• digitalisation of culture
• Asian cities
• urban cultural heritage preservation
• Southeast Asian cultural heritage
• digital cultural heritage

Acknowledgments

I thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier drafts that helped improve and clarify this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Noting the subtle differences between close terms like ‘digitisation’, ‘digitalisation’ and ‘digital transformation’, for the purpose of simplicity this paper will use the term ‘digitalisation’ throughout to encompass all the digital actions discussed.

2. In the Krakow Charter on the Principles of the Conservation and Restoration of Built Heritage (ICOMOS 2000), a monument is defined as ‘a clearly determined entity, the bearer of values, which represent a support to memory. In it, memory recognises the aspects that are pertinent to human deeds and thoughts, associated with the historic time-line’. It is generally accepted in heritage studies that cultural heritage can evoke memories in a way that can be used to build or strengthen identity (Lowenthal 1998; Greffe 2004). However, not all authors agree with this affirmation. For instance, Josefsson and Aronsson (2016), affirm that heritage is not collective in the sense of producing common values and, as such, not always a definitive generator of collective identity.

3. In the 2000s, partly due to its integration into UNESCO frameworks and Conventions (2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions), the notion of cultural heritage expanded to include notions of immateriality and orality, such as customs, folklore, oral and performing traditions, religious or profane manifestations (Barrio et al. 2012).

4. ‘Only in our time has heritage become a self-conscious creed, whose shrines and icons daily multiply and whose praise suffuses public discourse’ (Lowenthal 1998, 1).

5. Another interesting debate sparked by the Notre-Dame fire is the ‘dissonant heritage’ disagreements (Ashworth and Tunbridge 2006) that affects the type of reconstruction. Many, included the cathedral’s chief architect Philippe Villeneuve, advocated for a faithful reconstruction of the cathedral (Kennicott 2020), as with the Stari Most bridge in Bosnia. Others, amongst them French President Emmanuel Macron, favoured innovative 21^st-century solutions, in the manner other historical buildings such as Berlin’s Reichstag (Laurent 2019; AFP 2019). A few, following John Ruskin’s precepts (1849), who regarded restoration as the worst form of destruction because it meant ‘a destruction accompanied with false descriptions of the things destroyed’, prefer to leave the cathedral without rebuilding (Viennot 2019), as in the case of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japan. Ultimately, over a year after the fire, the decision was to restore the cathedral to its last ‘complete, coherent and known’ state (Breeden 2020).

6. Plutarch points to Julius Caesar’s troops, which accidentally might have burned it down during or after the Siege of Alexandria in 48 BC (100). Gibbon marks the destruction during the outlaw of pagan practices by Coptic Pope Theophilus of Alexandria in 391 AD (1781), while De Sacy points to the Muslim conquest of Egypt around 642 AD (1810). For more about the different theories regarding the destruction of the Library of Alexandria see El-Abbadi, Mostafa, and Fathallah, Omnia Mounir (2008).

7. Apart from the heritage loss inherent in the damage caused by ISIL and war airstrikes, and the widespread looting, a number of heritage items, such as Greco-Roman busts, jewellery, and other artefacts were lost during the transportation from the Palmyra museum to Damascus for safekeeping. Some of them were even found later on the international art market (McGirk 2015).

8. The percentage of urban population in the Southeast Asian region has increased from 15% in 1950 to close to 50% in 2018, with Singapore (100%), Malaysia (77%), Indonesia (57%), and Thailand (52%), above the average. The estimation is that by 2050 this percentage will rise to 66% (United Nations 2018).

9. For the latter, for instance, the cultural division of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs donated 33 million dollars to UNESCO (Houtman 1999).

10. Among the groups were the Singapore Heritage Society (SHS), the Singapore Nature Society (SNS), the SOS Bukit Brown group, and All Things Bukit Brown. The first two produced position papers arguing why the road project should be halted, underscoring Bukit Brown’s several levels of heritage worthy of preservation, and its ecological value and biodiversity.

11. Especially polygon modelling -a method for modelling objects by representing or approximating their surfaces using polygons-, and non-automated or device-based methods.

Additional information

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David Ocón

David Ocón, PhD, has 20 years of experience in the arts, culture, and education sectors. He has led departments at organisations such as theAsia-Europe Foundation (ASEF, Singapore), the European Network on Cultural Management and Policy (ENCATC, Belgium), and Cervantes Institute (Beijing, China), where he was the head of culture. David is currently based in Singapore where he is an Assistant Professor at Singapore Management University’s School of Social Sciences. He teaches and researches Cultural Relations and Diplomacy in Asia, Urban Cultural Anthropology, Arts Marketing, and Cultural and Heritage Management. As an academic, he has worked, among others, at City University of Hong Kong, James Cook University, and the School of Technology for the Arts Singapore. For more than a decade he has been a visiting faculty member at University of Barcelona’s International Cultural Cooperation and Management Postgraduate Programme. David leads training and seminars at several Asian and European institutions. He is an evaluator of arts management programmes, and regularly provides strategic advice for cultural organisations worldwide.