Patricia Green | Prioritising culture-appropriate Jamaican identity

I returned from Brazil in November after participating in the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) annual general assembly and scientific symposium. The symposium aimed to re-examine the Venice Charter in the light of contemporary challenges and had five key subthemes. The theme “Disaster and Conflict Resilient Heritage” was of significance to our Caribbean cultural context.

ICOMOS is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) responsible for monitoring tangible cultural heritage that include monuments (architectural works, etc), groups of buildings (separate or connected, etc), and sites (works of man or the combined works of nature and man, etc). ICOMOS monitors, globally, the Jamaica “Blue and John Crow Mountains” 2015 inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage (WH) List, designated a mixed heritage site with tangible cultural plus natural heritage outstanding universal value. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), another NGO of UNESCO, monitors, globally, its natural-heritage components. Jamaica has a proposal to inscribe the “Underwater City of Port Royal” a cultural heritage site on this WH List that is being monitored by ICOMOS.

The charter developed 1964 in Venice, Italy, sets out principles to guide the preservation and restoration of ancient buildings internationally, with each country being responsible for applying this within the framework of its own culture and traditions. Some key political issues arise globally around notions that the Venice Charter appears to carry a Eurocentric bias.

What does this mean for Jamaican heritage and its wider Caribbean colonial legacy? What is the definition of ‘ancient building’ in the Caribbean? Are these what Jamaican and Caribbean persons-in-the-street term ‘slavery buildings’?

Brazil received, in 1980, the inscription of the “Historic Town of Ouro Preto”, which was founded at the end of the 17th century. Ouro Preto [Black Gold] was the focal point of its 18th century gold rush, and the recent ICOMOS assembly was hosted there. Also inscribed in 2016 on the WH List is the “Pampulha Modern Ensemble Cultural Landscape”, a visionary garden-city project designed by Brazilians - architect Oscar Niemeyer, landscape architect Burle Marx, and artist Cândido Portinari. It was created in 1940 in the city of Belo Horizonte, where we also held some ICOMOS meetings.

OUTSTANDING UNIVERSAL VALUE

Allow me, therefore, to nominate for Jamaica as outstanding universal value modern architecture and settings: the City of Kingston reconstructed after the 1907 earthquake; Kingston Technical High School; the Ministry of Education at Heroes Park; the National Stadium; the University of the West Indies Mona Campus; Cornwall Regional Hospital, Montego Bay; Turtle Towers, Ocho Rios; some prefabricated affordable housing developments in Kingston - Trench Town, Mona Heights, Duhaney Park, Harbour View, containing over 1,000 units at their inception. All demonstrate models of sustainable development, including hurricane and earthquake mitigation technology, with efficient modern tropical architecture designs and planning principles.

As we entered 2025, Prime Minister Holness stated in his New Year’s message that he has heard the cry of the people. Rapidly, he plans to increase support to encourage the construction of achievable and affordable housing through policy directives, financing and incentives for the National Housing Trust, which has only constructed just over 120,000 units since its establishment in 1976. The PM said he has now mandated building 43,000 housing starts by 2027.

Contemplating these, alongside disaster and conflict, I share that as a member of ICOMOS and former president of its Jamaica National Committee, I organised at the Brazil symposium “Caribbean Historic Urban Landscape: Disaster and Conflict Intergenerational Dialogue” with heritage colleagues: Japonesa Capellan president of ICOMOS Dominican Republic; Michael Newton, member of ICOMOS Netherlands in Curaçao; Steve Devonish and Rudylynn Roberts, former ICOMOS presidents of Barbados and Trinidad & Tobago, respectively; plus, Rachael Deekman, acting director of Stichting Gebouwd Erfgoed Suriname.

TANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE

As the Caribbean, we debated the importance of publicising that the tangible cultural heritage from the colonial periods was designed and built by Caribbean persons, also the need to record technologically this tangible heritage for posterity.

Roberts shared on Port-of-Spain, capital city of Trinidad, founded by Spain ca. 1531, that while undertaking restoration of its magnificent 19th century neo-classical Parliament, the “Red House”, she discovered human bones under its foundations. After archaeological excavations and carbon-dating, they realised that the British had built directly on the burial site of the Indigenous people. The Government reinterred the bones and artefacts ceremonially and declared the site sacred.

I delivered on Kingston, established 1692 as capital city of Jamaica after an earthquake destroyed Port Royal. By 1702, most plots along the Kingston Harbour were acquired. The Kingston merchants began to vie over who could build the most elaborate architecture from their slave-trading wealth concurrently with other developments by African entrepreneurs.

Capellan described the capital city of the Dominican Republic, called the “Colonial City of Santo Domingo”, inscribed in 1990 on the WH List, being the first town in the New World founded in 1498 by Spain. The outskirts of the city has an organic layout of narrow winding streets and resilient wooden vernacular architecture, mitigating natural disasters that generationally housed persons who laboured as stonemasons and other craftspersons to build the historic grid colonial city.

Newton discussed the capital city of Curaçao, inscribed in 1997 on the WH List as “Historic Area of Willemstad, Inner City and Harbour,” founded ca.1634. The Otrabanda [Other Side] architecture influenced by the Dutch has tropical adaptations and styles from across the Caribbean. He addressed the impact of tourism and the challenges of maintaining the integrity of historic architecture amid modernisation.

Deekman outlined ‘Alakondre’, where different ethnicities, cultures, traditions, beliefs, values, practices, tangible and intangible, come together as heritage in the capital city of Suriname, inscribed in 2002 as “Historic Inner City of Paramaribo” on the WH List and founded on an Indigenous settlement. Records show that most of the urban fabric comprising wooden architecture dates from 1680-1800 and still survives mostly intact. Sadly, preservation lacks financial incentives, and fires are the biggest challenge, including people seeing the buildings as a remembrance to the oppression of slavery that should be replaced by modern architecture.

Barbados capital city inscribed in 2015 on the WH List as the “Historic Bridgetown and its Garrison” contains 17th-century street layout in an organic serpentine pattern and the “Chattel-House” architectural evolution. Devonshire described this as movable architecture of landless persons who carried their houses to where they worked. Starting as a porch and gable roof structure, the house grew sustainably with additions upon finally gaining land ownership.

Let us hope that these debates will result in tangible cultural heritage designations of the Jamaican and the Caribbean cultural landscape, sustainability in design and planning layout, and worthy of modern tropical architecture international inscriptions.

Patricia Green, PhD, a registered architect and conservationist, is an independent scholar and advocate for the built and natural environment. Send feedback to patgreen2008@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com.