THE HERITAgE Of TECHNOLOgY AS A PARTICLE Of CULTURE Part II. Towards Sustainable Heritage

The article is a continuation of the author’s Dziedzictwo techniki jako cząstka kultury. Część I. W nurcie rozwoju zrównoważonego (The Heritage of Technology as a Particle of Culture. Part I. Within the Sustainable Development Current, ”Ochrona Zabytków”, no. 4/2008, pp. 60-84). Mention is made of the transformation inaugurated in Poland at the beginning of the 1990s and resulting in the emergence of useless post-industrial resources, the liquidation of state agricultural enterprises (PGR) as well as the appearance of vacant buildings due to the restructuralisation of the Armed Forces of the Polish Republic and the Polish State Rail, often encompassing monuments and sites listed in the register of historical monuments. The prime part of the article is a presentation of a monument-related analysis assessing historical monuments of technology, especially the immovable variant, based on a canon of 12 defined values comprising a set of cultural values (social identity, authenticity, integrity, uniqueness, historical and artistic value) pertaining to the past of the given heritage resource, and a collection of socioeconomic values (social usefulness, functional sustainability, economical, educational, aesthetic and political value) expressing contemporary reality as well as anticipating the requirements of future generations. Special attention has been devoted to questions that up to now have been appearing incidentally in the Polish valorisation of technological culture, such as the assorted aspects of social identity, aesthetics and politics. Moreover, the author proposed an additional value of special importance (e.g. the world of creative ingenuity; an illustration of important transformations in the development of technology, industry and engineering; exceptional evidence of technical artisan tradition, existing in present-day or past socioeconomic formations; an outstanding instance of a complex of technical objects or an industrial landscape, illustrating a meaningful stage in local or regional economic history; an essential component of the cultural diversity of a location or a landscape; a special example of the utilisation of natural resources, typical for a given site threatened with irreversible changes), in this way guaranteeing the open character of the proposed methods in contrast to a certain limited arbitrariness of specialist assessments, based on only three values mentioned in the Polish statute on the protection of historical monuments, i.e. historical, artistic and scientific. The article contains numerous interpretation examples from the Polish resources of historical buildings and complexes. The author introduced the concept of the stakeholders of technological heritage and discussed their potential interest in conservation as part of projects for revitalisation, renovation and revalorisation. While doing so, he indicated the crucial factors of impact upon attitudes or views concerning heritage resources, such as the perception of the values of cultural property, pertinent knowledge, a willingness to become acquainted with them or, on the contrary, a dislike of the past and a tendency to ignore its various issues. Mention has been made of fundamental international documents concerning stands in relation to the preservation of the technological heritage. An interpretation of the values of such heritage resources has been referred to the so-called three pillars of sustainable development, adding a fourth one, namely, culture. The author also suggested a list of twenty indicators of the evaluation of a sustainable conservation project. Upon the basis of the strategic targets of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee (the so-called ”5Cs” conception) the article ends with the formulation of five postulates for rendering the Polish system of the protection of technological monuments more efficient