City Rehabilitation with Community Participation on Cultural and Social Rejuvenation

Abstract

This paper purposes to archive for translation of how Chiang Mai
communities with in an urban aspect seeking methods to success their
aims on community rehabilitation through heritage conservation. Overall
representation comes from a development project by non-governmental
alliance, named Fuen Baan YaanWieng Project which recruited varied
partners from scholars, youth professionals and governor officers. The
project focuses on promote the unique value of Chiang Mai old city and
the community participation to conserve its heritage.
The methodology of this project applied three steps of rehabilitation
process
1) Identification of community’s unique value 2) a procedure on cultural
and social rejuvenation based on community participation 3) How a center
place or social system assemble a support for the program. The three steps
are manifested as a core value to reveal questions and move forwards to
implement and reach out community and alliance understanding.
The result shows through the pilot projects based on community
participation and community opinion which all excellent represent a good
path way of community and city rehabilitation. Additionally, community
has learned and experienced to rejuvenate their old social and cultural
ecology; which gradually collapsed by urbanization. The communities
have applied cultural and heritage assets as a tool along with collaboration
and empowerment from varied agents who focused on cultural and heritage
conservation as well. The new model of working with participatory
approach has become a core concept which presently widespread over the
old city and gradually started its impact in city level.
Key words: Community Participation, Cultural Heritage, Social
Ecology