Introduction

With its celebrated Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972)1 UNESCO steers the global heritage agenda by defining and redefining what constitutes heritage and by offering a high-level forum for heritage professionalism. World Heritage sites, as understood by UNESCO, are places that have “outstanding universal value.” While it is the national governments that nominate sites for inclusion in the World Heritage List, and while it is the intergovernmental World Heritage Committee which makes the final decision on inclusion or non-inclusion, it is the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) for cultural heritage that examines whether the level of outstanding universal value is met. During this process of establishing value, a place that had previously been recognized as locally and nationally significant is given an additional layer of meaning. When the official statement of outstanding universal value has been decided on, it becomes critical as to how this abstract notion of value is interpreted and used locally, and questions regarding World Heritage become particularly critical at any time of dissonance. For instance, World Heritage has produced conflicts in connection with many cities, including the Finnish city of Rauma, where plans to build a large shopping center on the buffer zone of Old Rauma, a World Heritage site since 1991, became openly debated in the mid-2000s.