Universal value

Abstract: Introduction: Dissecting Outstanding Universal Value Chapter 1: Theoretical Perspectives on Outstanding Universal Value Chapter 2: Outstanding Universal Value: International History Chapter 3: National Constructions of the Past Chapter 4: Cultural Diversity and Inclusion Chapter 5: Sustainable Tourism and Development: Realistic Outcome or Wishful Thinking? Chapter 6: Authenticity and Post-authenticity: Keeping It Real? Chapter 7: The Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention: Complementing World Heritage? Conclusion: The World Heritage Convention at 40 Appendix: Nomination Dossiers Selected Bibliography Index About the Author

Abstract: In this article, I examine systems of care aimed at improving citizens and ruined colonial buildings in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil's Pelourinho World Heritage Site. Such UNESCO-sanctioned trusteeship, or the identification of buildings, bodies, and practices in need of a tutelage that would recuperate them as signs of a common humanity, maintains and exacerbates segmentations of knowledge essential to imperial control. I thus work to reconsider the Pelourinho, and cultural heritage, as imperial formations in light of UNESCO's system of producing world heritage through the specification of “exceptional universal value” in which the exceptional object obfuscates not simply as an emergency, but through its monumentalization as an ostensibly shared property. This attempt to gain a clearer understanding of empires' real effects is catalyzed by a number of residents of the Pelourinho who, in their subjection to decades of state-directed surveillance intended to make them into living human ancestors, have come to reject sentimental attachments to buildings or the purveyors of philanthropy. Yet the ways they do so are revelatory of new approaches to exceptions: Residents reject victimhood as a state of being injured and instead weave accounts of the structures that engender, and continue to reproduce, such violence. I follow in the path of this quite iconoclastic version of “historical reconstruction” as a way to draw out an ambivalently postcolonial Brazil whose own claims to exceptionality may be understood, like those put together by the woman I call Topa, as forced by entwined historical processes, rather than isolated emergencies or remainders beyond the political. My aim is to show how empires can be linked across space and time, without relying on empirical mapping of their constitutive parts and ideological props—recognizing, instead, the specificity of empire's effects.

Abstract: Planning theory has shifted over time in response to changes in broader social and philosophical theory as well as changes in the material world. Postmodernism and poststructuralism dislodged modernist, rational and technical approaches to planning. Consensualist decision-making theories of the 1980s took forms of communicative and collaborative planning, drawing on Habermasian concepts of power and society. These positions, along with refinements and critiques within the field, have been hegemonic in planning theory ever since. They are, in most cases, presented at a high level of abstraction, make little reference to the political and social contexts in which they are based, and hold an unspoken assumption that they are of universal value, i.e. valid everywhere. Not only does this suggest important research methodology errors but it also renders these theories of little use in those parts of the world which are contextually very different from theory origin—in most cases, the global North. A more recent ‘southern turn’ across a range of social science disciplines, and in planning theory, suggests the possibility of a foundational shift toward theories which acknowledge their situatedness in time and place, and which recognize that extensive global difference in cities and regions renders universalized theorising and narrow conceptual models (especially in planning theory, given its relevance for practice) as invalid. New southern theorising in planning is drawing on a range of ideas on societal conflict, informality, identity and ethnicity. Postcolonialism and coloniality have provided a useful frame for situating places historically and geographically in relation to the rest of the world. However, the newness of these explorations still warrants the labelling of this shift as a ‘southern theorizing project’ in planning rather than a suggestion that southern planning theory has emerged.

Abstract: Two centuries ago Immanuel Kant published one of his most celebrated political writings, To Perpetual Peace. A Philosophical Project. He introduced cosmopolitan law, which has puzzled various generations of scholars. This concept is examined by way of a comparison of Kant's contemporary international theories. It is argued that it plays a crucial role in Kant's system of International Relations. While on the one hand cosmopolitan law safeguards a state's sovereignty vis-a-vis other states, on the other it is an innovation which allows the international community to monitor the internal affairs of its members. The concept can be seen as a forerunner of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, sharing with it the idea that some rights have a universal value even if they are not actually protected by any secular institution.