ABSTRACT

This chapter move toward adopting heritage as ethical paradigms of proper development and new sustainable ways of life. The dominant paradigm of places in heritage preservation is that of the expressions of cultures in space, spatial leftovers of the past. Contrary to this prevailing paradigm, the chapter argues that each place, apart from being a mere sum total of monuments and sites and a historic palimpsest, is primarily self-constituted as an entity that showcases its own ethics and behavior out of its character in time. More than the current sustainable paradigm, heritage is not only embedded materials and energy to be reused, recycled, modified and transformed, but also embedded and embodied values of life that, it seems, finding so difficult to surpass today. In a sense, since valuing it, heritage is condensed ethics of good life. According to Aristotle, there can be no theoretical guide to ethics - just ethical habits in getting accustomed to setting proper ends.