IN-PERSON: Prague – Section B

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing demand by Chilean citizens for the right to actively participate in decision-making, where the Chilean architectural heritage has been an important issue for community engagement. In order to develop participatory policies that regulate and establish the minimum actions for effective citizen participation in heritage, it is essential to consolidate people’s rights. Currently, laws do not guarantee truthful and satisfactory participatory processes for community members as legal subjects. For this reason, heritage rehabilitation remains exempt from the engagement of the communities associated with it. As a result, in several cases, the management of heritage has failed because it is not representative of its community and therefore does not contribute to enhancing its cultural development. Through the study of cases of heritage rehabilitation management with citizen participation in Chile, successful examples have been evidenced. In several of the studied cases, it is observed that citizen participation was used as an end, not as a means. Where the purpose of management, in principle, is to develop and strengthen people’s participation capacities in the various stages of rehabilitation, aspiring that the rehabilitation process goes beyond the minimum actions established by laws. Thus demonstrating the success of a heritage rehabilitation project that includes its community. Based on the evaluation of the study cases, this work proposes a set of recommendations for good practices to reach effective participatory processes, where the community is involved in the four stages of heritage rehabilitation, diagnosis, design, construction, and habilitation.