Intangible Cultural Heritage in architecture and urban planning

Abstract

This article reflects several observations of our cities during the COVID-19 pandemic — particularly the initial lockdown that most parts of the world experienced since March 2020. One of the impacts of COVID-19 has been the forced closeness of people with their homes wherever they were. In the present age, perhaps, many of us have rarely experienced our own homes or shelters or architecture so closely. The pandemic may have brought us an extended moment to experience and reflect on architecture and urban planning on a very personal scale — from a room, to an apartment or a house, a neighbourhood, and then perhaps a city on a limited scale. This is an interesting moment in history to reflect on architecture and space, and how they are designed and planned. COVID-19 has exposed the limitations of many of our thoughts and practices. Apart from the author’s own self-reflections at “home”, observations include the context of South Asian cities where the globally accepted measure of lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19 triggered the plight of millions of migrants on the momentarily empty roads and highways for a long-march towards rural and semi-urban segments of countries. This led to the author’s re-thinking of architecture and planning in urban contexts. In (re)thinking architecture and urban planning, the article uses the notion of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) as espoused by the 2003 UNESCO Convention, and discusses whether ICH could offer useful insights to achieve better results in our contemporary architecture and urban planning thinking and practice. Can the ICH perspective help us to understand these bitter realities of the 21st century? The author attempts to reflect on some of the questions.