The Model American Foundation Officer: Alan Gregg and the Rockefeller Foundation Medical Divisions

From 1919 to 1951, Alan Gregg and his mentor, Richard Pearce, directed the Medical Education and Medical SciencesDivisions of the Rockefeller Foundation. Although they oversaw the expenditure of millions of dollars, today they are forgotten. Yet, the system that Gregg administered became the model for the funding of biomedical research after the Second World War. This paper draws on the records of the Rockefeller Foundation to assess Gregg and his impact on biomedicine and philanthropy.     

The coastal cultural heritage facing coastal management

This paper is concerned with the role of cultural heritage in coastal areas, including land belts and coastal marine waters in the prospect of operating sustainable development-aimed strategies. It is a part of the investigations carried out in the framework of the Progetto Finalizzato Beni Culturali (Special Project Safeguard of Cultural Heritage) convened by the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR, the Italian National Research Council). Essentially, it aims at contributing to the discussion on how the mise-en-valeur of the coastal cultural heritage may be framed within integrated coastal management programmes. In this view, the discourse on the coastal cultural heritage runs along this pathway: (i) global (climatic) change and globalisation are assumed to be the key components of the external environment with which the coastal area interacts; (ii) the conceptual framework of coastal management, as it can be deduced by the background guidelines from Agenda 21 (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, UNCED), is considered; (iii) the legal framework, which the coastal area is characterised by, is taken into account by focusing on its implications on the management patterns. At this point, attention is concentrated on the role of cultural heritage in the framework of integrated coastal management approaches. It is considered, how this pivotal component of the coastal area has been dealt with bythe intergovernmental organisations. Special consideration is attributed to the European Code of Conduct for Coastal Management Zones, since it considers the ecological patrimony and cultural heritage as giving shape to a unique ethically-endowed reality, which materialised through landscapes and seascapes. The final step consists of the design of a tentative Code of Conduct for Coastal Cultural Heritage consisting of some background and operational principles.     

The “manifest destiny” of the performing arts by A. Peacock

Journal of Cultural Economics -     

The role of cultural heritage in attracting skilled individuals

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role played by built heritages and cultural environments, alongside other locational factors, in explaining the growth of human capital in Sweden. We distinguish between urban, natural and cultural qualities as different sources of regional attractiveness and estimate their influence on the observed growth of individuals with at least three years of higher education during 2001–2010. Neighborhood-level data are used, and unobserved heterogeneity and spatial dependencies are modeled by employing random effects estimations and an instrumental variable approach. Our findings indicate that the local supply of built heritages and cultural environments explain a significant part of human capital growth in Sweden. Results suggest that these types of cultural heritages are important place-based resources with a potential to contribute to improved regional attractiveness and growth.     

Building Bridges: Alan Gregg and Soviet Russia, 1925–1928

Minerva - In December 1927, Alan Gregg,Associate Director of the RockefellerFoundation's Division of Medical Education, setoff from Paris on an exploratory mission toRussia. After a...     

Identification and assessment of engineered road heritage: A methodological approach

Roads built by civil or military engineers from the 18th century onwards form an essential part of our heritage, but currently considered on a very infrequent basis. They represent one of the main turning points in the development of the transport system and serve to gain a better understanding of the historic construction of many landscapes and their current arrangement and operation. Their consideration as heritage has to be made on a territorial scale. This approach regards landscape as a cultural artifact, which is undergoing constant design, construction and transformation, where the road is considered as an axis that shapes the landscape and that contains individual elements such as associated structures or buildings. One of the most important characteristics of historic roads undoubtedly lies in the fact that they are a heritage that is still in use. Many of the roads built for carriages or the first automobiles have, in fact, served to trace the current network of roads and motorways. For this reason, many historic routes have undergone considerable modification and a large percentage of their heritage has disappeared. Likewise, their original or more intact sections, that is to say those that were replaced during their gradual adaptation to the automobile in the 20th century, are not always easy to identify. The distinction and undoubted documental value of historic roads, together with the neglect and vulnerability of these assets, makes it essential to define specific strategies with some degree of urgency in order to appraise this heritage. In this respect, the purpose of this article is to establish a methodology with which to identify sections of historic roads that were replaced by new alignments. The decision to focus the work on these sections is based on the fact that the infrastructure of these and particularly the older sections, have undergone a smaller degree of change and subsequently retain their original routing and geometry and a far higher number and variety of heritage elements more intact. This has made it possible to ascertain the diversity of elements composing the heritage of historic roads and enables the classification of the same. The identification methodology has been applied to a significant proportion of the Spanish main road network on selecting some 15 sections of historic roads of very different characteristics. Files have been prepared for each of these sections on the basis of cartographic analysis and detailed field work, these files including data related to location, characteristics and inventory of historic elements forming the road's heritage and will subsequently include references to road layout (both longitudinal and cross-sectional), structures (essentially drainage works), auxiliary elements (signalling) and associated buildings (inns, roadworkers’ houses…). Finally, and on the basis of the experience gained during the research, an initial proposal is laid out for the heritage assessment of these assets, considering aspects such as historic, technological and documental singularity which will depend on the degree of transformation and definition of the section in question.     

Cultural heritage and the attractiveness of cities: evidence from recreation trips

Many cities are trying to attract tourists by investing in urban amenities. Cultural heritage is an important example, and substantial investments are needed to keep ancient inner cities and characteristic monumental buildings in good shape. The costs of these policies are usually clear, and the benefits are often much more difficult to assess. This paper attempts to fill part of this gap by studying the destination choices of urban recreation trips that have urban recreation as the main travel motive. We estimate a discrete choice model for destination choice that takes into account the potential importance of unobserved characteristics. The model allows us to compute the marginal willingness-to-travel for destinations offering more cultural heritage, which we measure as the area of the inner city that has a protected status because of the cultural heritage that is present there.     

The heritage chain management. General issues and a case study,China

The paper proposes a framework for the study of cultural heritage management issues: the “heritage chain”. The notion translates the concept of supply chain derived from industrial organization, investigating the set of activities taking place in the heritage sector (from preservation, to archaeological excavation, conservation, research, and museum presentation) in their relationships and abilities to impact performances. The concept can be used both to address problems and inconsistencies within an individual case and, in a comparative perspective, to understand how heritage became structured differently in different countries. In this paper it is applied to a specific case of heritage preservation and management in China: the “Horse and Chariot” Museum. While investigating several aspects of management of the Chinese heritage (a rather unusual field research made possible by an attitude toward international collaboration), the case highlights the ability of the “heritage chain” to grasp a single case of heritage management with a holistic view, opening up possibilities of development for the new framework.     

The socio-economic impact of built heritage projects conducted by private investors

Drawing on the existing research on the socio-economic impact of cultural heritage on local and regional development, the author's aim is to further the scientific discourse in two ways. Firstly, she focuses on the economic and social significance of private investors as important actors implementing heritage restoration projects. Although these initiatives are often primarily commercial in character, they may nonetheless exert a strong, broadly positive influence on local and regional development processes, especially if a cluster of such projects develops within a relatively small area richly endowed with a specific type of heritage. Secondly, she provides empirical evidence from Central and Eastern Europe, a region little explored to date by studies of this type. Accordingly, the article examines the specific context of post-1989 private heritage-oriented investments in historic palace and garden residences in the region of Lower Silesia in Poland, a heritage previously unwanted, ethnically and ideologically dissonant, but nowadays being rediscovered to an increasing extent.     

Cultural heritage in geosciences, mining, and metallurgy

Seven conferences devoted to the documentation and history of geosciences, mining, and metallurgy took place from 1993 to 2003 mainly where the first Schools of Mines were founded. More conferences are planned in the future. It is hoped that those interested in the preservation of this heritage support such effort.     

Recording and documenting the chromatic information of architectural heritage

One essential approach in preserving architectural heritage is the documentation of 3D geometries and surface textures of historic buildings. For example, precise colour information, excluding lighting effects, is an intrinsic property of the surface materials of building interiors and exteriors. However, while colour information has been recorded for small sample areas, it has not been accurately documented on the scale of entire building surfaces. This is critical, because building materials decay and their colours fade with time. The goal of this project is to develop a method to assist in recording and documenting the chromatic information of interiors and exteriors of historic buildings with low cost and high efficiency. The method takes advantage of emerging high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) technology, which can store rich information about colour and illumination through digital photography. By recording the colour information, in addition to the geometry and texture information obtained through other existing technologies, we can achieve more complete documentation for architectural heritage. In this paper, we discuss an overview of the problem and present our algorithms for utilizing computer vision techniques to retrieve chromatic information of historic buildings. We also present and discuss our experiments and results of applying our method to studies of lab objects and the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City, Beijing.     

A definition of cultural heritage: From the tangible to the intangible

The aim of this work is to analyse the evolution of the concept of cultural heritage in West European states. In the last decades of the 20th century, the term “heritage” was characterised by expansion and semantic transfer, resulting in a generalisation of the use of this word, frequently used in the place of another, such as, monument and cultural property. However, all these terms are not able to cover the same semantic field. Starting by the reflection on the semantic evolution of the notion of cultural heritage in France, we approach to the international definition of heritage given by the directives, charters and international resolutions in order to define a global outline of the meaning of heritage that is not just limited to a particular national dimension. From a purely normative approach, one went to a less restrictive approach, one based on the capacity of the object to arouse certain values that led the society in question to consider it as heritage and therefore, to a further step in which heritage is no longer defined on the basis of its material aspect. This development has also made it possible to recognise intangible cultural heritage, which was ignored for a long time, as heritage to be protected and safeguarded.     

Cartographic heritage: Toward unconventional methods for quantitative analysis of pre-geodetic maps

Historical cartography all over the world is a fundamental part of Cultural Heritage, and it needs to be preserved from damage of its analogical support due to ageing. Regeneration of ancient cartography in digital form is an interesting way not only to preserve historical cartographic documents as Cultural Heritage, but also to allow new chances of understanding and using the historical information they record. In such a way, modern digital techniques, in particular study of map deformations and map georeferencing, help in metric analysis of ancient cartography, and at last they appear to be useful for researchers to derive historical information for their studies, for example related to urban development or to geomorphological and environmental topics. The present research would give an example of the usefulness of the digital regeneration of ancient cartography, but also an example of possible difficulties in correctly interpreting information preserved in historical cartography, especially the pre-geodetic one. The study subject consists in three contemporaneous pre-geodetic maps (late 16th century) from the ancient Po river delta area (Italy), by means of which a geometrically correct representation of those parts of the landscape, not preserved today because of sea erosion, was tried. In fact, standard georeferencing methods, that use reference control points to compare historical cartography with the present one, in this specific case demonstrated to be not successful in describing the real location of disappeared landscape details with an adequate level of accuracy. For these reasons, in order to define which map among the others was the most faithful to the contemporaneous physical reality, a compound methodology, consisting of a three-step analytical process, is here applied to the three samples. Starting from measurement of sighting angles and distances applied to a number of landmarks, a splitting of the old maps in sub-areas, probably corresponding to the set of original surveyed zones, was performed. In the area of main concern, the use of absolute measurements was avoided in order to check the level of inner congruence of the representation. Finally, a new specific error index, that can also be applied to maps lacking an explicit graphical scale, is proposed to evaluate the map truthfulness degree. The proposed method can be applied to other similar examples from ancient cartography.     

Documentation of cultural heritage using digital photogrammetry and laser scanning

Precise documentation of cultural heritage status is essential for its protection and scientific studies carried out during the restoration and renovation process. The close range photogrammetry has been used successfully for documentation of cultural heritage. With recent developments in computer and information technologies, this well-known traditional method has been replaced with digital close-range photogrammetry. This new method offers us new opportunities such as automatic orientation and measurement procedures, generation of 3D vector data, digital ortho-image and digital surface model. Terrestrial laser scanning is another technology that in recent years has become increasingly popular for documentation which provides very dense 3D points on an object surface with high accuracy. In addition, the 3D model and digital ortho-image can be easily generated using generated 3D point cloud and recorded digital images.