Heritage
Urban heritage is what a society decides to keep of its city because it gives identity: monuments, ensembles, layouts, and increasingly the intangible —the market, the festival, the trade. Preserving is choosing: what is protected, for whom and at what cost is a political decision dressed as a technical one.
The Venice Charter (1964) set the principles of restoration; UNESCO World Heritage listing, since 1972, became a tourist magnet with ambiguous effects. The recent debate distinguishes between protecting the stone and protecting the life: a museum neighbourhood is dead heritage.
Videos on this term (15)
- Urban history
Christine Boyer: How the City Turns Memory into a Tool of Power
M. Christine Boyer shows in The City of Collective Memory that heritage and urban images are selected and…
Christine Boyer 3 min read - Urban psychology
Dolores Hayden: Transform Spaces, Transform Gender
Dolores Hayden shows how homes, suburbs and public memory reproduce gender inequality and how design can undo it.…
Dolores Hayden 3 min read - Housing
Sharon Zukin: How Culture Turns a Neighbourhood into a Product
Sharon Zukin explains how the symbolic economy raises a neighbourhood's value before prices rise: the sequence of…
Sharon Zukin 3 min read - Housing
The Historic Centre as a Deceptive Façade: Tourism Without Neighbours
Historic centres restore their stones and lose their residents to short-term rentals and souvenir shops.
3 min read - Urban history
Aldo Rossi: The Architecture of the City
A summary of Aldo Rossi's The Architecture of the City (1966): the city as a historical artifact, urban…
Aldo Rossi 2 min read - Urban history
Christine Boyer: Collective Memory and Urban Planning
The City of Collective Memory (1994) by Christine Boyer explains how the city stores memory and how regeneration…
Christine Boyer 3 min read - Urban history
London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, the History of London
London: The Biography (2000) by Peter Ackroyd tells two thousand years of London as the life of an organism. From…
Peter Ackroyd 3 min read - Urban history
Cairo According to Nezar AlSayyad: Histories of a Superimposed City
Cairo: Histories of a City by Nezar AlSayyad explains Cairo as superimposed cities, from Fustat and the Fatimids to…
3 min read - Shrinking cities
Deindustrialization and Urban Reuse: Lofts, Rent Gap and Culture
Reusing industrial land turns factories and docks into housing, culture and parks. What Sharon Zukin and Neil Smith…
2 min read - Urban history
Decolonising Urban Heritage: Statues, Streets and Memory
Decolonising urban heritage reviews which colonial monuments and names occupy public space. What Sharon Zukin and…
3 min read - Public space
Gender Inequality in Urban Space: Causes and Responses
Gender inequality in the city is measured in time, fear and opportunity. What Dolores Hayden and Leslie Kern…
3 min read - Urban ecology
Urban biodiversity: Pickett, Cadenasso and Forman
How to integrate nature and city according to Pickett, Cadenasso and Forman: the city as ecosystem, green…
2 min read - Public space
Decolonising Urban Space: What It Means and How It Is Done
Decolonising urban space dismantles the hierarchies colonisation left in cities. What Ananya Roy and Jennifer…
3 min read - Shrinking cities
Reusing Abandoned Spaces: Opportunities and Risks
Reusing abandoned factories, stations and lots preserves heritage and central land, but it can gentrify.
3 min read - Urban economy
Creative Urbanism: From Landry and Florida to Their Critics
Creative urbanism uses culture and art to regenerate cities. What Charles Landry and Richard Florida propose, what…
3 min read
