The Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) has won two important awards from UNESCO’s Asia-Pacific regional office for cultural heritage conservation and sustainable development, according to the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN).
The prizes include: the 2020 Award for Special Recognition for Sustainable Development; and the 2020 Award for Excellence.
The awards were established in 2000 to recognize “the efforts of private individuals and organizations that have successfully restored, conserved and transformed structures and buildings of heritage value in the region.”
The UNESCO Master Jury awarded Special Recognition for Sustainable Development on Sunder Nursery for its “transformative impact in turning a barren site into an urban oasis in the heart of New Delhi.”
According to the UNESCO press release, the project “pays equal attention to ecological restoration, thus underscoring the message that heritage conservation is beyond monuments and is only truly sustainable when essential linkages between nature and culture are profoundly understood and nurtured.”
UNESCO introduced the new Special Recognition category in 2020 to acknowledge how cultural heritage can be leveraged to achieve sustainable development.
The 2020 Award for Excellence, the highest level of achievement in the Awards’ conservation category, was also given to Sunder Nursery for its “comprehensive renewal of the Sunder Nursery ensemble that sets a new bar for heritage restoration and serves as a catalytic model for public-private partnerships in India.” It also mentioned that “world-class conservation combining the latest technology with rich building craft traditions reinstated severely dilapidated Mughal tombs, decorative works, and garden features, such as lotus ponds, following an extensive process of study and documentation… The vitality of Sunder Nursery, which is partly included in the World Heritage Site of Humayun’s Tomb, is a testament to the project team’s multi-faceted approach to heritage conservation and establishes a paradigm for connecting physical fabric to ecology and societal well-being”.
Over the last 20 years, AKTC’s conservation work has reportedly won a number of awards, including 15 from UNESCO’s Asia-Pacific office.
