Sustainable Develoment of Urban Heritage At Fort Kochi, Kerala, India

Many historic buildings and areas are being lost due to population growth, spatial expansion and area improvements in countries and cities that have expanding economies. Attempts at conserving such heritage have more, often than not, used tourism as the key to preservation. Indeed tourism can help preserve built heritage and revenues from tourism can fund and sustain conservation efforts. However, attracting tourists to historic built-form requires development of new infrastructure that can comprise the historical integrity of the main draw. In other words, a sustainable approach to historic preservation is often very complex. In this paper, we present a case of sustainable conservation of a historic area in a developing country - India. Using this location - Fort Cochin/Mattancherry in the south Indian state of Kerala -- we choose to highlight the differences in the policy context in which historic preservation happens in the West and the rest of the world. Given the ongoing economic growth in China, India, Indonesia and Philippines the locus of preservation struggles to save historic heritage is shifting from the West to the East. Current knowledge about such struggles is clearly focused on the West and may not provide good guidance for effective strategies in the East. We believe this paper is a first step in filling an increasing felt void in existing literature. We employed a qualitative case study approach for the research reported in this paper, using ethnographic surveys combined with data from secondary sources. We compare historic preservation efforts in two US cities and show that the highly successful approaches used there would not serve Fort Kochi/Mattanchery very well. Instead we propose a more contextualized approach that locates historic preservation within the broader framework of sustainable regional development. We believe that this approach could serve as a model for historic preservation-through- tourism efforts in developing countries of the East.