This small book by Gábor Oláh, Gábor Sonkoly, members of the Géographie-cités Joint Research Unit and Luciano Torres Tricárico examines the conceptual evolution of the urban landscape in World Heritage cities. More specifically, it focuses on two cities that became pioneers in this process and positioned themselves at the intersection of local discourse and that of UNESCO at the time of their World Heritage inscription.
Budapest was the first city, in 1987, to receive a designation that did not refer to a historic centre or district, but rather to a view. As will be discussed in the first chapter, this definition emerged from a local debate on the heritage recognition of an urban fabric that was relatively recent, dating from the nineteenth century. Whereas most historic European cities were legitimised as urban heritage sites by virtue of their large number of monuments (tangible heritage), Budapest lacked significant architectural structures predating the nineteenth century. Its heritage recognition therefore demanded alternative forms of justification, grounded in the unity of its homogeneous urban core and in the harmony between its natural setting—both banks of the Danube—and its dominant monuments, such as the Royal Castle and the Parliament building.
For this view, which became inscribed on the World Heritage List, the notion of urban landscape was adopted early on by Hungarian architects, informed by the contemporaneous international debates surrounding urban landscape. Thus, a particular convergence of political and intellectual circumstances encouraged the development of the concept of urban landscape as a heritage category in Hungary, a notion that would later be used in international debates on the preservation of urban heritage from the mid-twentieth century onwards.
Twenty-five years after Budapest’s recognition, Rio de Janeiro also became a World Heritage site. The city was designated as a (Carioca) landscape — that is, not as a historic centre, but as an exceptional vista defined by a series of elevated viewpoints situated “between the mountain and the sea.” This definition was the outcome of a long negotiation between UNESCO and the municipal authorities, following the postponement of the city’s first nomination in 2003.
From a certain perspective, Rio de Janeiro found itself in a situation similar to that of Budapest decades earlier. It lacked outstanding pre-modern architecture, unlike other historic Latin American cities listed as World Heritage sites — such as Quito, recognised in 1978 among the first inscribed sites, or Salvador da Bahia, in 1985. Yet, since the nineteenth century, Rio had been one of the most visually represented urban landscapes in the world.
This approach enabled a fuller integration and acknowledgment of cultural elements in the definition of the heritage site, and it established a new model subsequently followed by other Brazilian inscriptions. Nevertheless, the unifying cultural elements of the Paisagem Carioca were not entirely or comprehensively recognised in this second nomination.
