Historic Centre of Shakhrisyabz

• Management systems/management plan (Lack of a comprehensive conservation and management plan)
• Management activities
• Housing; Commercial development (Major interventions carried out, including demolition and re-building activities)
• Legal framework (Need to reinforce the national legal framework)
• Human resources (inadequate)
• Financial resources (inadequate)

• Large-scale urban development projects carried out without informing the Committee or commissioning the necessary heritage impact assessments
• Demolition and rebuilding of traditional housing areas
• Irreversible changes to the original appearance of a large area within the historic centre
• Significant alteration of the setting of monuments and the overall historical town planning structure and its archaeological layers
• Absence of conservation and Management Plan

Not yet drafted

Not yet identified

Not yet identified

Total amount provided: 2016: USD 30,670 from the UNESCO/Netherlands Funds-in-Trust project for the Application of the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on Historic Urban landscape (2011 UNESCO HUL Recommendation) at the World Heritage properties in Uzbekistan; 2019: USD 43,115 from the UNESCO/Netherlands Funds-in-Trust for building capacity in the conservation and management of World Heritage properties in Uzbekistan.

On 1 February 2022, the State Party submitted a report on the state of conservation of the property and the “Restoration Plan – Proposal for a Regeneration Strategy”, which contained information concerning the State Party’s preferred option for the future actions at this property. The document contains a comprehensive set of data, visual materials concerning the urban morphology and buildings showing the historical evolution from 1928 till present, supported by archival records, drawings and satellite images. It also provides a revised figure concerning the scale of the demolitions and reconstructions conducted within the property from 2014 to 2016, which represent 31 ha of the 240-ha property, of which 17 ha are traditional mahallas, and 23 ha are in the buffer zones. The Restoration Plan argues that restoration works on monuments within the property are reversible, that their settings and spatial organization can be recovered, and that the evolving nature of heritage in urban context should be considered. The State Party also submitted an “Intermediate Report: Diagnosis & Options for a Regeneration Strategy”, which is a more detailed account of the studies and reflection leading to the Restoration Plan.

The state of conservation report is available at https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/885/documents and provides the following information on the actions undertaken by the State Party in response to the previous decisions of the World Heritage Committee and recommendations of Reactive Monitoring missions:

• After a one-year delay due to the global pandemic situation, the State Party commissioned independent experts who have visited the property since 2019 and conducted research on monuments and urban structure and elaborated a Restoration Plan, taking into consideration the two options suggested by the Committee. This was done on the basis of the data analysed through the preparation of the Restoration Plan and by consulting with local and regional stakeholders, including the residents affected by past demolitions;
• The research and survey on urban structure, traditional dwellings and monuments were carried out together with the analysis of the historical evolution, which enabled a comparison of the situation before and after the demolitions;
• The analysis of the architectural typology of traditional domestic architecture allowed to identify urban patterns, which feed into the decisions made regarding the possible Restoration Plan;
• The proposal for the boundary modifications is also under elaboration, in line with the chosen option;
• A national, multidisciplinary team is currently working on the conservation strategy for the Ak-Saray tiles;
• The State Party took into consideration the recommendations of the 2016 and 2019 missions when carrying out the above-mentioned actions;
• The International Advisory Committee (IAC) for Uzbekistan was set up, and its inaugural meeting took place in September 2021. The first technical session, scheduled in 2022, took place in July 2022 to discuss, among others, the advice on the implementation of Committee decisions and previous mission recommendations.

On 28 March 2023, the State Party confirmed that the moratorium on construction has remained effective from 30 March 2019 and no new construction work has been engaged since then in Shakhrisyabz.

The Committee may recall that the property was inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2016 due to large-scale demolition and reconstruction within the property. Two Reactive Monitoring missions took place in 2016, the latter of which concluded that “the key attributes of the Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) have been damaged to such an extent, and for the most part irreversibly, that the property can no longer convey the OUV for which it was inscribed” (Decision 41 COM 7A.57, Paragraph 8) and should be considered for deletion from the World Heritage List in accordance with Paragraph 192 of the Operational Guidelines.

Nonetheless, at its 42nd session in 2018, the Committee decided not to proceed with the deletion at that stage and recommended that “the State Party should further explore options for the potential recovery of attributes and, if needed, consider, in consultation with ICOMOS, whether a significant boundary modification based on some of the monuments and the remaining urban areas might have the potential to justify OUV” (Decision 42 COM 7A.4, Paragraph 12).

A January 2019 high-level mission proposed two possible options for the State Party to consider, which can be briefly summarised in Decision 43 COM 7A.44, Paragraph 11, as follows:

1. Focus on a selection of monuments representing the Temurid period, or
2. Explore key elements of Temurid urbanism within the Historic Centre. 

The mission indicated that it did not have sufficient information to explore either of these two options or to ascertain whether OUV might be justified. In Decision 43 COM 7A.44 (2019), the Committee endorsed the mission’s recommendations and decided ‘to allow the State Party two years to explore possible options for a significant boundary modification or a new nomination, and at the end of this period, to consider once again whether the property should be retained on the World Heritage List for a further period to allow time, if by then a clear direction of travel has been articulated, or to delete the property altogether’. The Decision also made it clear that, in exploring either option, the State Party should undertake further research and develop a restoration plan to allow for a thorough assessment of the potential for any preferred option to justify OUV.

In its 2020 report, the State Party indicated that it would prefer the second option and offered assurances of strong will and commitment at the local level, but no potential way forward for the property was submitted within the timeline set by the Committee, which the State Party attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. In view of these delays with the consideration of options, the Committee extended the deadline by one year and, in Decision 44 COM 7A.31, requested the State Party to submit a report on the feasibility of the preferred option for consideration at its 45th session in 2022.

Given the crucial importance of the assessment work being undertaken and the very difficult questions raised by any form of reconstruction, it was recommended that the State Party seek upstream advice from ICOMOS to identify any potential for a significant boundary modification or a new nomination to justify OUV.

In its 2022 report, the State Party analyses the two options proposed in the Decision 43 COM 7A.44 as well as a third option for a way forward that it considers to be a modified approach to Option 2. This third option, entitled “Restoration Plan of Shakhrisyabz, Proposal for a Regeneration Strategy”, covers both the monuments and aspects of Timurid urbanism and is composed of three parts:

• A detailed analysis of the damage inflicted by demolition, by unsympathetic restoration of monuments, and by inappropriate changes to the setting of monuments,
• An outline of proposed restoration projects for the monuments and their settings,
• Suggested changes to the central area of the property, where major demolitions took place and resulted in the creation of a new park: re-instating lost urban connections, re-building some of the housing fabric within the mahallas that had been demolished and slightly modifying the boundaries of the property.

Overall, the State Party’s conclusion, as presented in this proposed third option, is that if the monuments and their settings are restored, if the central area is re-landscaped to recreate urban spatial links and reflects aspects of Timurid urbanism and garden design, and if the boundaries are refined to include the whole line of the defences, then the OUV for which the property was inscribed may be recovered, including its authenticity and integrity.

The Committee has already acknowledged ((43 COM 7A.44, para 13). Although the report analyses the two options and proposes a third one, what has been presented is neither a significant boundary modification nor a new nomination; instead, it is a proposal to recover attributes of OUV without either.

The World Heritage Centre and the Advisory Bodies agree with the State Party report that a nomination based just on the monuments alone, and excluding the mahallas, would lead to a fragmented boundary and a property that would be difficult to manage. They also consider that detailed evidence on Timurid urbanism is insufficient to allow Shakrisyabz to be seen as exceptional in that regard. Nonetheless, they consider that the idea of combining monuments and urbanism has merit, and that aligning boundaries with the line of the city walls is sensible. While the overall approach of the option can be supported in terms of sustainable development, in the view of the World Heritage Centre and ICOMOS, the proposal, if implemented, will not recover fully the attributes of OUV for which the property was inscribed. The idea of evolving urban areas and the need for cities to maintain their dynamism have been fully taken into account in that conclusion, but the demolitions undertaken went beyond the idea of any evolution or change that could be considered as balancing the evolving socio-cultural structures or socio-economic needs of the city with the protection of the city’s OUV.

The approach presented by the State Party cannot be said to deliver an intact city or intact urban fabric, nor will it return the historic centre to its previous appearance, nor restore key aspects of Timurid planning. The demolitions within the city centre have permanently altered the relationship between the mahallas and between the monuments and the overall city structure. The report recognizes this and does not propose to reconstruct lost historical buildings but rather to re-establish lost urban connections with a view to recovering some of those attributes.

The main decision that the Committee must now take is whether the property should be retained on the World Heritage List for a further period, to allow time to explore an agreed, clear and realistic way forward, or whether the property should be deleted from the World Heritage List. In the view of the World Heritage Centre and ICOMOS, the proposal submitted by the State Party deserves to be explored further. It is thus suggested that the Committee should not delete the property from the World Heritage List at this stage, but instead encourage the State Party to explore the submission of a significant boundary modification, in line with Paragraph 166 of the Operational Guidelines, that sets out a new justification for criteria, based on an OUV that reflects a shift away from the integrity of an overall intact city and towards an ensemble of Timurid monuments with urban areas seen as their essential setting. Such a submission could include the proposed adjustments to the boundaries. Although at this stage, it cannot be said with certainty that such a proposed OUV could be justified, this approach appears worth pursuing.

To that effect, the Committee may wish to recommend that the State Party engage in a specific consultation with the World Heritage Centre and ICOMOS on procedural questions related to any submission.

The detailed and thorough historical research, documentation and analytical work that has underpinned the current proposal should provide a sound basis to define a protection and management framework, as it has allowed a clear and quantifiable understanding of precisely which buildings have been demolished (some 18 ha), an acknowledgement of the detailed and extensive work that needs to be undertaken to reverse damaging conservation of the monuments and to create more sympathetic settings, and a sound basis for designing new houses within the mahallas that reflect local styles.

The Committee may also wish to urge the State Party to take the necessary time to develop substantive proposals for the renovation of the monuments in the context of detailed Conservation and Management Plans integrated with an overall Master Plan for the city, which should encompass urban planning regulations and architectural and urban design guidelines in line with the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) as well as considering the comprehensive analysis of cultural legislations in Uzbekistan, conducted with the support of the UNESCO/Netherlands Funds-in-Trust. The State Party should also be encouraged to submit full details of urgent conservation projects, as well as the strategy for the conservation of the Ak Saray tiles, to the World Heritage Centre for review by the Advisory Bodies before any work commences.

Finally, the Committee may wish to welcome the launch of the International Advisory Committee (IAC) in September 2021 for the World Heritage properties in Uzbekistan and the organisation of its first technical session in July 2022, for which the contribution of the late leading expert Dr Michael Jansen, should be deeply thanked. The Committee may also emphasize that this mechanism should continue advising the national authorities on the conservation of cultural heritage properties and the implementation of Committee decisions and previous mission recommendations, with a reviewed membership.