A Sustainable Approach for Post‐Disaster Rehabitation of Rural Heritage Settlements

This paper is an attempt to rethink the concept of ‘cultural heritage’ in general and ‘living heritage’ in particular as applied by the conservation community, for example by the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property ( http://www.ic crom.org/priority‐areas/living‐heritage/ ).The arguments are informed by my investigation into the reconstruction of the heritage village of Taoping, damaged in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In reviewing the evolution of theories conceptualizing heritage and its conservation, the inherent links to the ontology of modernity become apparent, and carry consequences particularly for heritage settlement conservation. Whereas rural settlements emerged from a long‐term communication between nature and people, in today's rural settlements this relationship is skewed by the inhabitants' own drive towards modernization. We see a confrontation between the modernity‐grounded heritage conservation and the likewise grounded modernization of the rural settlements. Modernity generated two contesting, even contradictory, movements: (1) generating the concept of (rural) heritage and heritage conservation intrinsically resting on habitation, and (2) the practice of modernization as performed by the inhabitants. The concept of ‘living heritage’ cannot interpret this dualism, as the initial (conservation‐worthy) relationship between land and people no longer exists. The appropriate term would be ‘lived‐in cultural heritage’, as becomes apparent in reconstructing a rural heritage settlement, a process that is complex, where the attitude of the community is volatile, and results of the reconstruction are uncertain. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment