Mumbai’s Victorian and Art Deco buildings on Unesco list
MUMBAI: Mumbai’s rich cluster of Victorian and Art Deco buildings in the Fort precinct and Marine Drive has been declared a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) World Heritage Site.
Maharashtra, now, has the maximum number of Unesco sites in the country, a total of five including the Ajanta and Ellora caves in Aurangabad.
Collectively known as the ‘Victorian Gothic and Art Deco Ensemble of Mumbai’, it was added to the global list of heritage sites on Saturday, at the 42nd session of the Unesco World Heritage Committee, currently underway in Manama, Bahrain.
WHAT IT MEANS
A Unesco World Heritage Site tag ensures additional funding from international agencies for upkeep and ensures strict control over changes to structures on the site.
WHAT IT TAKES
To get a World Heritage tag, a site should be of outstanding universal value and meet at least one of 10 selection criteria laid down by Unesco.
These include conditions as wide-ranging as being a masterpiece of human creative genius or containing threatened species.
“These historic buildings are unique because they’re not dead monuments but active public buildings in use as courts, libraries and cinema halls,” says conservation architect Abha Narain Lambah, who put together the three-volume nomination dossier and management plan, with over 1,500 pages of historical narrative, maps, drawings and notes on each of the 94 buildings.