DISPOSITION OF UNESCO Officially, UNESCO is relatively toothless when it comes to protecting and preserving world heritage sites. The organization can place sites on a list of ‘endangered world heritage sites’ or retract the world heritage status altogether. UNESCO’s role, as they describe it on their website, is to advance heritage protection by “advancing cooperation in education, the sciences, culture, communication and information”17. Preserving heritage, then, is a tool towards “equitable and sustainable development.”18 However, there is a recurring pattern of undesired modern fringes developing on the border of many UNESCO heritage sites. This pattern is visible when comparing the UNESCO borders of Krems and Melk at the beginning and end of the Wachau. Both towns have a strong spatial divide, with a historic western side and an eastern side with modern commercial and industrial developments. Beyond the Wachau this pattern is visible in UNESCO sites ranging from the shantytown tourist market on the edge of the Borobudur temple compound in Indonesia to suburbs infringing on de Stelling van Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
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Keller Easterling, architect, writer and professor at Yale University, uses the word ‘disposition’ to describe the undeclared intentions and unstated tendencies of an organization. She argues that these dispositions often reveal themselves in spatial forms19. All aforementioned examples show a disposition of the UNESCO heritage status. A disposition of relocating any development deemed aesthetically unfitting for the world heritage site to a fringe zone. The mechanism behind this disposition works as follows: The measures that protect the Wachau often have nothing to do with the valley specifically. Instead, protection derives from a stricter application of general monument protection laws and restrictions related to the preservation of biodiversity and sustainable water management20. Many of the laws and regulations are just as applicable to Krems-East, however, the lack of UNESCO status means they are applied with less scrutiny during the processing of application for new development. Hence many ventures with a low spatial quality will look for a location in Krems-East. In this way KremsEast has become an overflow for developments not deemed worthy of the Wachau.
