The Penang Story: A Successful Framework for Heritage Management

As we enter, with hope, into a phase where the global COVID-19 pandemic may be brought under control, if not eradicated, and a number of countries have started to loosen domestic and international travel restrictions, the future role of our heritage assets is very much at question. 

Over the past few decades, heritage conservation and the utilization of heritage assets has become hard-wired into local development strategies. Yet the pandemic has starkly demonstrated the weaknesses and dangers of development strategies that are over-reliant on flows of hot money arising from the fluctuating and unstable global tourism market.

While the terms pause and reflect have been overused over past months, the hard stop in global tourism represents an opportunity to re-evaluate and redesign strategies that preserved and marketed heritage assets for external visitors rather than local communities. To build back better by removing some of these structural weaknesses and mobilizing heritage for sustainable development. 

Doing so also requires a new approach to heritage conservation and new modes of thinking and education to accompany it. At the forefront of this new movement is the Think City Institute (TCI), with a mission to support and sustain a new generation of placemaking experts through education and advocacy. Experts whose work will advance the future prosperity of the communities they live in. 

TCI recently completed the first round of its Sustainable Heritage Management course, a six-month online learning programme organized in collaboration with UNESCO Bangkok. Designed to help upskill and reskill cultural heritage managers with the tools to meet these new demands, at its core is UNESCO’s Competence Framework for Cultural Heritage Management, a set of professional standards that are holistic, interdisciplinary and multidimensional.

The Citymaker spoke to one of the architects of that course, former UNESCO Regional Advisor for Culture for Asia and the Pacific, Dr. Richard Engelhardt. 

Richard has been an advisor and consultant to Think City for the past 10 years, helping to shape its ideas, policies and expansion. He is deeply involved with the Think City Institute and its mission to combine education and advocacy to create the next generation of citymaking activists and professionals. 

With a background in archaeology, anthropology and the history of East, South and South East Asia, Richard has directed heritage and conservation projects across the region for over 30 years, and launched the international safeguarding campaign for Angkor, for which he was bestowed the title of Commandeur de l’Ordre Royal du Cambodge by the Cambodian monarch, King Norodom Sihanouk.

Could you tell us about your background, as well as your role and involvement with Think City

Richard A. Engelhardt: I am currently a senior consulting advisor to Think City. This is a role I have had for the past 10 years now, ever since my retirement from UNESCO a decade ago where I had served for some 30 years in various capacities as the Country Director, Chief of the Culture Unit and Asia Pacific Regional Head. My work at UNESCO included responsibility for the conservation of cultural and natural world, Heritage Site management of intangible and tangible cultural assets, the promotion of cultural tourism and the integration of cultural heritage conservation into sustainable development strategies at the national and international level. 

But my history with Penang goes way back before I joined UNESCO. It goes back as far as 1969, when, as a young foreign exchange student in Southeast Asia, I had the opportunity to visit Penang. But in my UNESCO capacity, I was involved from as early as 1998, with the effort to nominate and inscribe George Town on the UNESCO World Heritage List. This successful effort was in fact, what we can say is the genesis of Think City as the unique social institution it is, whose mission is to bring to bear the lessons learned from the efforts to safeguard the heritage of George Town into the management and future development planning of cities throughout Malaysia and, in fact, across the wider region of Southeast Asia and beyond.

In this respect, I think we can look back upon the past decade with some degree of satisfaction as tourism, cultural industries and the groundswell to safeguard local heritage have flourished throughout Malaysia based on the conservation of each city’s unique constellation of cultural resources. Not only in George Town and Malacca, which have of course set the standard. But also now in Kuala Lumpur, Johor Bahru and Kuching to name only a few of the many examples. 

After more than a decade of experience, I think we can say with some high degree of confidence that is based upon the metrics developed and measured by Think City’s urban and analytical units that the strategy filed by Think City, whereby a city’s cultural heritage assets are purposely and strategically leveraged for their comparative advantage informing local development. This strategy is one that is not only working, but it’s gaining momentum over time as the impact of such a strategy is proving its value in generating economic growth. As well as providing a stabilizing effect in times of uncertainty, such as we have been experiencing during the COVID crisis and, therefore. contributing to more resilient communities in the long run. Penang is, of course the exemplar, but Malaysia is that standard for the region in this as well.

I think that we are now in a situation where heritage conservation and the utilization of heritage assets is an accepted part of local development strategy. But I think that the challenge now that we need to meet, is to ask the question: where are we going in the post-COVID environment and how can we deepen this dive into the idea that cultural heritage assets, as representing investment from the past, can be leveraged, and built upon for future prosperity?

Not only the quick return of economic prosperity, but a more long-term resilience strategy where prosperity is built into a regenerative system in all of the urban settings throughout the country. Here I think is an area where Think City is at the forefront of the thinking and experimentation with their various projects and data gathering so that we can start to measure the impact of this. 

I think one of the things we’re seeing is that the previous assumption that perhaps drove this strategy 20 years ago was that heritage conservation was good for tourism. And that tourism was a major driver of economic development. 

And this is an assumption that we now have to call into question?  

Richard A. Engelhardt: As I look at what’s happening around the region and World Heritage Sites across the world from Venice to Angkor, I think we could say, at the risk of being somewhat provocative, that the assumption that World Heritage Sites are prime drivers for economic growth based on their tourism potential is an oversimplification, if not perhaps, an overstatement of the assumed value of tourism. 

Now of course, prior to the COVID epidemic, it was common, even axiomatic, for politicians all over the region, all over the world – as well as the tourism promotion departments that were part of the political scene – it was very common for them to posit that tourism, unique among all growth sectors of the economy, was the only sector to show consistent year upon year growth. Regardless of the politics or other fluctuating economic factors, such as, for example, the price of oil. But now [with] the quick collapse of the global tourism industry within the past year and a half, and with it the loss of tens of million jobs worldwide, a huge crisis in employment, especially employment of the people who don’t have any safety net. This collapse of the tourism industry has called into question the assumption that tourism can be the panacea to all of our economic ills.

How do we overcome that overdependence and change this idea that tourism is the most reliable growth engine for many towns and cities?

Richard A. Engelhardt: I might want to gloss this a little bit by pointing out that tourism growth actually was never the intended outcome the World Heritage Convention, or of the UNESCO international backed heritage conservation movement. Increasing awareness of the relevance of tourism to human development was an intended outcome, but this was understood to be an educational outcome. Useful to inform investment, not as an excuse for our wholesale mindless exploitation of sites, inscribed on the World Heritage List.

This wholesale exploitation of these sites has overwhelmed them with visitor numbers far beyond their carrying capacity in whichever way you wish to measure that capacity; physical, environmental, economic, social, psychological, any other way. And of course, now this has been laid bare. We know this is no longer the assumption that we can rely on. Whether we look at Venice, whether we look at Angkor or anywhere in the world.

Now that we are approaching a time when we could reasonably argue for a reset of this approach, we have to ask: what are the questions that we have learned from this experience? What have we learned to avoid and what alternatives should we be planning for?

Those are exactly at the centre of what Think City has been thinking about and modelling and investigating and experimenting with over the past 18 months. Luckily, Penang does provide some of these answers compared with the many tourist destinations across Asia that have lost almost their entire income base due to the collapse of international tourism.Penang has not been hit as hard. And [the] why is important to understand and Think City has analyzed this, I think quite cogently. 

One part of the answer is that domestic tourism has taken up some of the slack, but this isn’t the whole story. Statistics do not bear out that the small upsurge in domestic tourism is compensated for the large economic inputs that have been lost from the disappearance of international tourism. The two don’t seem to actually compensate or balance one another precisely. And that leads us to the second lesson that I think that’s become very clear from Think City’s projects. 

And that is that the generative power of cultural assets in the city needs to be recognized beyond their contributions to tourism. Not so much as an external resource to be consumed by the tourists, but as an internal resource sustaining local economic activity, activities that were thriving before the tourist boom happened and has continued to thrive throughout the COVID crisis. And, if invested wisely in, will not only thrive, but grow, in the post-crisis. There is where we see that the Think City experience, whether it be with someplace like Fort Cornwallis, or with Armenian Street, or with the many other projects they have initiated over the past decade and more, is where the future will lie.

Based on that approach and mode of thinking, what kind of models would you like or expect to see emerging post-pandemic that will reduce this dependence on tourism and boost resilience?

Richard A. Engelhardt: Let’s start with Penang…[and] Fort Cornwallis. Fort Cornwallis is undoubtedly the most iconic, most visible, most well-known of all the cultural heritage attributes in Penang. If we think about the meaning of cultural heritage in the classic understanding of that term. You could say it was the jewel in the crown of the Penang’s character. Ironically, at least until the last year or two, it has been an unpolished jewel in this crown. Before World War Two, Fort Cornwallis was the centre piece of the colonial town, but after the war and the Japanese occupation, it languished without much of a function.

Now, why was this? I think it’s important to understand why before we can understand what the fix is. Well, one can observe that as George Town in particular, and Penang, in the larger sense, grew gradually as a tourism destination in the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and the past generation, its economic potential as a tourist destination was developed by individual merchants, whose intent it was to lure visitors to their individual shop, to their restaurant, to their hotel. 

From time to time, when some community group did coalesce around a conservation project, it was almost always the sectarian project. An Islamic mosque conservation project or refurbishment of a Chinese clan house or renewal of a Hindu temple. This effect could be ascribed to the fact that the traditional methods of resource mobilization were also organized along sectarian lines. And, I would say, to the fact that there was no common Penang story of the cultural heritage of the city that could serve to unify the messaging efforts of all of these different communities.

How did that shift in thinking occur, that transition from a sectarian approach to one that viewed these as assets of a shared Penang cultural heritage?

1998 is the watershed year for thinking about these things. Not only is this the year that World Heritage inscription was started to be taken seriously and worked on, but this of course also is the year that repeals the Rent Control Act. And this changed the rules of the game for financing heritage. 

At that time, I was very much involved in thinking about how to meet the challenge of this game change. I had a lot of dialogue with the then Penang state chief minister and he, through his political support network, got behind a new common strategy based upon the assumption of public stewardship over the state’s common shared heritage and recycling of public assets into a wide range of social uses for the entire community.

In other words, a move away from the competitive sectarian approach or, shall we say, the individual private sector, private business approach, to something that recognizes the added value of investment in public assets for public benefit. 

Now, at the same time, this local government initiative in the changing of the financing strategy, was complemented by the initiative of the Penang Heritage Trust. Which is, I have to say, an exemplar of NGO activity in the conservation field throughout Asia. And the Penang Heritage Trust launched this very imaginative vigorous campaign called the Penang Story to document and recount and retell the rich composite history of Penang and its people. Both initiatives, one on the part of local government, the other, and the partners, the NGO sector, were  directed primarily at the inhabitants of Penang, not visitors.

Their purpose was to invigorates the stagnating economy of the island’s local businesses on one hand, and added to that, to staunch the outflow of people and capital. This is where the flagship activity of the restoration of Fort Cornwallis came in because this was now figuring prominently in the narration of the Penang Story and the nomination document justifying Penang’s inscription on the World Heritage List. But the problem was that, at that time, [in] 1998, Fort Cornwallis still had no defined function in this strategy.

And so it was left to a concessionaire there to deal with as best they could until such a function could be defined. Move forward a decade to 2008. Think City came into the picture and the idea was mooted of maximizing the value of, not only Fort Cornwallis, but all of the historic properties in public ownership, as part of the common shared assets of the people of Penang. Rather than looking at them as white elephant that soak up investment, looking at them as assets to recycle into social use.

And this strategy was in fact intended to drive a new wave of interest in the historic value of Penang, both domestically and internationally. This strategy of generating new interest justified the use of public funds for the conservation of these properties and, therefore, Fort Cornwallis now came to figure as the jewel in the crown to be. But the problem still remained: as a tourism-only resource, Fort Cornwallis was still a problem.

Because of the role that it played in Malaysia’s colonial history? 

Richard A. Engelhardt: Its collective importance to Penang, and more generally to Malaysia as a whole, above and beyond the limited attraction it has as a symbol of colonial domination, was unclear. What was its story in the post-independence, post-colonial Malaysia? And because this story was unclear, its draw as a domestic tourism attraction was undefined, underutilized. Secondly, on the side of international tourism, because for decades, Penang had been promoted and promoted itself as an international backpacker destination, this had marked the island as valuable for its bars, for its restaurants, for its entertainment venues, but not for its cultural heritage. 

This was where Think City came into the picture. And Think City’s project team, with the support of George Town World Heritage initiative and input from the archaeology department of Universiti Sains Malaysia, Think City launched a project for the community’s rediscovery of their shared heritage in Fort Cornwallis through the archaeological excavation of the moat of the fort.

Why there? Because they could be certain that they would find artefacts [relating] to all parts of Penang society. And to ensure that this would be an intergenerational transfer of heritage values, the project was directed at secondary school students, who became citizen scientists. And I want to underscore this term, because this is going to be my conclusion.   

Secondary school students were identified as a new generation of citizen scientists. They were the one charged with the excavation of the moat and the discovery of the story told by the many, many small artefacts that had been discarded in the moat over the course of the past 100 years by passers-by, by soldiers, by refugees, by young men and women who had strolled along the moat as they were courting one another. Many, many different stories. The rediscovery of shared heritage is something to always build upon.

But we can say that the contribution of Fort Cornwallis to the Penang store has actually captured the imagination in Penang, the cannons that were discovered from the pre-colonial era, the evidence of the occupation of the barracks by Japanese soldiers during the war. And the many examples of what we could say is trash [but are] the simple artefacts of everyday life discarded into the moat by generations of passers-by. So, we could take this example as one of many in a wide range of projects that Think City has initiated and say that the point is that we’re looking at the contribution of the heritage resource.

On the subject of those citizen scientists, we understand that you’re deeply involved in the education programmes of Think City’s educational and advocacy arm, the Think City Institute. 

Richard A. Engelhardt: I am involved with Think City in a new project that looks at how to invigorate and build on the assets of the Lenggong Valley and the Bujang Valley archeological sites. Because these are definitely sites whose heritage value is well understood but whose role in economic and social development is underutilized. So, this is where Think City is now moving into a more holistic way of doing this. And as they move this way, they are also moving into the role of not only as a think tank, but as a training Institute.

Think City has recently established the Think City Institute. In fact, this is now my primary involvement with Think City and helps develop the Think City Institute, which is a training institute to socialize, to promote and to share the experiences that have been learned from the projects that Think City has tested and engaged with, as a model that can be replicated with adjustments according to local need by urban planners and local politicians in other cities throughout Malaysia, throughout Southeast Asia and all of Asia

In the development of the Think City Institute, Think City has partnered with UNESCO, with UN Habitat, World Bank. The Aga Khan Trust. Many global players in heritage conservation to develop a way to move the heritage conservation profession as a body of practitioners forward together. To become part of that group of professionals who are involved with planning a sustainable, resilient future of our urban communities. In this, Think City Institute has pioneered the rollout of the new UNESCO Competence Framework for Sustainable Heritage Management. Very, very successfully. 

We’re going to repeat this later this year and add to it with a layering of more technical, specialized courses. But I think that what we are looking at now in the post-COVID Environment is not only a new strategy, but an entire new approach to the heritage conservation profession.

It’s a sea change. The kind of sea change we saw in the medical profession at the end of the 19th, early 20th century, where a bunch of well-meaning, but perhaps not very well-trained and not very coherent medical practitioners coalesce into a profession of medical practice. With specialists, with networks, with training institutions, with documented evidence [of] what works, what doesn’t work.

And I think this is the really serious transformation that is happening in the post-COVID scenario. It’s not just a ‘more of the same’ or ‘a little bit less of the same’. It’s a shift in the paradigm, which, I believe, will result in a much more comprehensive role for heritage to play in the future development scenarios of cities in Malaysia an everywhere. 

For more information about Think City Institute and its courses, head to https://thinkcityinstitute.org

A version of this interview is available in audio form on The Reflexive City podcast.