Systems Approach in Heritage Management

Urban centres of the Indian subcontinent have been founts of its culture and served as active nodes in the network of trans-cultural trade routes and as the foci of artisanal migration for centuries. The disjunction they have suffered from the archetype shift in settlement planning during the colonizing process and the subsequent post-independent town planning based development has reduced them to cities of ancillary status in the modern Indian canvas of urbanization. The authors observe that conventionally, Cultural Heritage-Management appears to suffer from resource fragmentation. Problem-solving in the field tends to be reductionist, based on the dogma that the sum of its parts can define any whole or problem. To undo this damage, urban agglomerates need to be considered in a holistic manner, whereby the soul of the settlement is preserved by protecting its heritage, and its body nurtured in a planned way for future growth. It is crucial that efforts are made to provide a conceptual framework for the integration of a wide variety of resources needed for a practical management approach to cultural heritage preservation and enhancement. Given that, an attempt has been made in this paper to emphasize the need for an alternative approach to resource integration in the complex intertwined issues of heritage management and use it to galvanize urban development