Peter Phillips – The vice-president of ICOMOS| ‘It’s really important to map the whole place’

Peter Phillips

The vice-president of ICOMOS
Peter Phillips recognized the local government’s efforts to keep the region’s culture alive over the past decade. However, given the rapid development from the growing population, the conservation architect based in Sydney argues that the entire city must be mapped in order to determine the impact of development on heritage sites. Mr Phillips attended a seminar to mark the ten years after the listing of Macau’s historical center as a UNESCO World Heritage site. On the sidelines of the event, he was interviewed by a group of local journalists. Here are excerpts of what he said:

–  How does the government strike a balance between heritage preservation and reclaimed land under the rapid development?
– The right way is to look at what you have now and what needs to be done to protect that. When you resist the different values of a place and the components that make up the values, you should also be looking at the tolerance of those components for change. In other words, could we change these components and still retain the values? If so, how could we change and how much? So if we’re talking about view, for example, how much of that view could we compromise and still not lose the important connections between places? When you get an answer from statistics, you look at it to see how much it would vary if you change one variable. That’s kind of the analysis you need to do. Once you’ve done that, you can identify the less significant places, where development won’t have too much of an impact on heritage.

–  How should the heritage sites, which are excluded from the government’s protection list yet highly valued by the public, be treated?
– There’s always difficulty. It goes back in a way to the old approach to the heritage, which was to look at what I call monuments and size. Like there are plums in the pudding, so the individual sweet bits and the rest of the pudding don’t matter, but the whole of the pudding does. It’s not just the plums or sweet bits in between. It’s like what I said that it’s really important to map out the whole place.

–  Did you have the opportunity to visit Macau during your current stay? What is your impression on the local heritage conservation efforts?
– I walked around Macau yesterday [Saturday] afternoon, and I could see that some of the buildings have good relationships with the historic buildings, some not so good. So what you do in the mapping process is that you make a judgment about whether or not they’re contributing. Over time, you try preserve the ones that add to the quality and change the ones that don’t improve the quality. Staff reporter