The designation as a cultural heritage building : a longterm sustainable protection?

There are currently 2160 buildings in Sweden that are protected by law with the designation as a cultural heritage building, which is the strongest protection that can be obtained for a building of cultural historic significance. The purpose of this thesis is to research how strong and sustainable the protection of such a designation is and how you can motivate a revocation. Furthermore, this thesis aims to give an overall insight into all cases where there has been a revocation. To achieve the protection of a designation as a cultural heritage building, the object has to be of outstanding interest on account of its cultural historic value. In the first part, this thesis gives a short historic background of the cultural heritage law and its terms, like outstanding interest and cultural historic value. The County Administrative Board's documents about revocation are the main source for this research. There have been 24 cases of revocation and the frequency of such cases has increased in the past ten years. This possibly indicates a change of the general attitude towards revocation of a designation of cultural heritage buildings. In the geographic distribution of the cases the County of Skåne is overrepresented. The research also indicates that in many cases a building was a former publicly owned listed building. The fact that a buildings cultural historic value has been reduced is a frequent motive for a revocation. A reduced cultural historic value is often the consequence of modern additions to the building. The bases of this problem can be found in the formulation of the protective regulations, which often are too general. The Heritage Conservation Act, where the rules for the designation of a cultural heritage building can be found, is considered to be a strong legislation. However, this is not always reflected in the application by the County Administrative Board