摘要：In 2003, at the initiative of Bernard Toulier and Marc Pabois, the French Institut national du patrimoine ( inp ) organized a round table on the theme of “Architecture colonial et patrimoine” within the French context, followed two years later, in 2005, by a round table during which the topic was discussed from a broader, European perspective. Both encounters brought together a wide array of contributors coming from different backgrounds and disciplines and opened the floor to a myriad of opinions, approaches, policies and practices on the topic. As such, the two round tables and the publications that resulted from them testify of a more general, international attention for colonial built heritage, both in circles of architectural historians and in the milieu of architectural preservation, conservation and restoration. 1 In the last decades, colonial architecture indeed has become one of the key areas of research in architectural history, not in the least because of the introduction of postcolonial theory in the writing of the history of 19th and 20th century architecture and urbanism since the early 1990s. 2 This rediscovery of an architectural production that for a long time was ignored, runs parallel with an emerging debate on the conservation of the colonial built legacy, which is also partly triggered by the often radical urban developments that quite a number of former colonial cities are witnessing today and that are threatening their historical edifices and streetscapes.
