Heritage and the Right to the City: When Securing the Past Creates Insecurity in the Present

Abstract

The contested concept of heritage has increasingly been used by powerful and privileged actors—the state, the wealthy, corporations, and even universities—to justify their expropriation of inner-city areas. Appealing to an all-too-often ignorant version of “high culture,” they have increasingly excluded the poor, ethnic minorities, and other supposedly marginal groups from the right to inhabit areas designated as “historic.” One response has been the increasingly globalized “Occupy” idiom of social protest; another has been through local traditions of resistance grounded in long years of experience (as in several Asian countries). All such responses produce distinctive readings of the past; these alternative histories also challenge hegemonic discourse, as well as the practices of conservation associated with it, by either re-appropriating or challenging its basic premises. At the same time, they indicate the growing sense of precariousness among disadvantaged populations worldwide, especially among those for whom affordable rental arrangements are increasingly unobtainable. That situation threatens an even larger insecurity, as the prospect of swelling tides of displaced and dispossessed humanity threatens to create physical danger on the streets. It also undermines the very values of humanism on which the “high culture” tradition—itself, ironically, a proudly borne heritage—claims to have been built, and thereby threatens the well-being of that tradition's self-appointed bearers. Deskilling in artisanship and the loss of basic skills in the educational sphere, the commodification of heritage and history, and the brutal application of “audit culture” logic to the management of urban space all converge in a dismaying scenario in which, without sensitive intellectual leadership, wealth will trump the search for critical cultural knowledge and so will also destroy the resource that is the healthy diversity of humanity's past.