A paisagem cultural na lista do patrimônio mundial: a consolidação de uma tipologia patrimonial entre rupturas e permanências na atuação da UNESCO

Abstract

The World Heritage Convention signed by several countries in 1972 formalized with its main provision, the World Heritage List, the protection of natural and cultural heritage considered to be of international relevance. With the annual registration of properties from 1978 onwards, the quantitative discrepancy between natural and cultural properties was made clear early on, with the predominance of the latter group. From the need to seek the elaboration of a more balanced list and from the efforts to discuss strategies to encourage natural heritage applications, the question emerged: how to contemplate sites that would be holders of interconnected natural and cultural values? At this time, the idea of rural landscape, later called cultural landscape, began to be thought of more strongly in UNESCO. Against this backdrop, this doctoral thesis discusses how and why landscape was thought of as a way to articulate nature and culture on the World Heritage List. To this end, our methodology consisted of an analysis of UNESCO's official documents, such as dossiers of nominations, reports of the annual sessions of the World Heritage Center to recover the trajectory of the idea of landscape in the organization. We analyzed the cultural landscapes inscribed from 1993, the year of the first inscription, to 2018, seeking to trace the profile of the recognized landscapes. We compare the cultural landscape with another category of the World Heritage Convention that also contemplates natural and cultural values in the same property, but without a clear relationship between these values. The central idea of the work is that the adoption of the typology of cultural landscape for the purpose of inscription on the list allows us to think about UNESCO's performance both in terms of rupture and permanence in its practice.