Site Protection Boundaries: A Double-Edged Sword
The creation and enforcement of site protection boundaries can help preserve cultural heritage within these boundaries. We examine the processes by which these boundaries are created and demonstrate the heightened risk to structural remains excluded by ov
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Site Protection Boundaries: A Double-Edged Sword
Preamble The protection and preservation of built heritage are particularly challenging in densely populated developing countries such as India, where the rapid expansion of towns, industries, and transportation networks places an immense premium on land. Local, national, and international authorities tasked with protecting cultural heritage sites have sought to limit development in the vicinity of these sites. Simple definitions of boundaries that demarcate the vicinity are important for two reasons. First, after identifying an individual structure (or a set of structures) as built heritage, protection boundaries can be defined straightforwardly. Second, simple definitions can streamline the resolution of actual or potential conflicts and impose clear mandates on authorities to protect structures within these boundaries. On the other hand, overly simplistic definitions may exclude known or hitherto undiscovered remnants of built heritage (perhaps camouflaged by modern landcover) from the protected region. Note that the second advantage of simple definitions is less compelling given the widespread adoption of GIS tools that can define incredibly complex boundaries (e.g. gerrymandered political boundaries, Shashidhar 2019) and GNSS tools that can accurately indicate whether a location is within or outside these boundaries. Hence, a simple definition of boundaries trades the advantage of rapidly defining protected regions against the risk of exposing excluded structures to unfettered development. In the first part of this chapter (Sect. 6.1), we will explore this trade-off in the context of the definition of boundaries given by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention (WHC). In the rest of this chapter, we will propose two policy recommendations that would greatly assist in preserving the fragile remnants of our built heritage: using geospatial analysis to create more nuanced and meaningful site protection boundaries (Sect. 6.2) and creating a nationallevel geospatial database for built heritage (Sect. 6.3).
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 M. B. Rajani, Patterns in Past Settlements: Geospatial Analysis of Imprints of Cultural Heritage on Landscapes, Springer Remote Sensing/Photogrammetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7466-5_6
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6 Site Protection Boundaries: A Double…
6.1 ASI and WHC Boundaries The ASI was created in 1861 and tasked with undertaking “a complete search over the whole country, and a systematic record and description of all architectural and other remains that are either remarkable for their antiquity, or their beauty or their historical interest”1 . Today, the ASI looks after over 3600 sites, and the Department of Archaeology of each state typically takes care of a few hundred sites. The sites protected by ASI and the states are governed by the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains (Amendment and
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