Professor Howayda Al-Harithy

Professor and Chair of the Department of Architecture and Design American University of Beirut

Title of presentation :Urban Heritage and the Politics of Identity Construction
 

The presentation focuses on urban heritage and the politics of its identification, conservation and representation. The principal theoretical position recognizes heritage as an intrinsically contested notion. Issues such as collective memory, invented traditions, constructed identities, heritage tourism, cultural consumption and sacredscapes are debated and examined through case studies that include Jerusalem, Beirut, Cairo, Riyadh and Dubai.   The presentation takes an is interdisciplinary approach and aims at an understanding of urban heritage, not only as a historical product, but as a negotiated entity that is reproduced everyday through the dynamics of city life; social, economic and political. The discussion is set against theoretical works t hat include Bourdieu's Field of Cultural Production,  Boyer's Cit y of Collective Memory,  Bart hes' Semiology and the Urban, Lefebvre's Production of Space Hewison's Heritage Industry and Hobsbawm's Invention of Tradition.   The claim is that cultural heritage has occasionally suffered at the hand of both national and global constructs and actors who claim to defend and to preserve it.  The position taken is that restoration or conservation efforts should neither be about the internationalization of heritage which often results in packaged frozen icons to be understood by the world public, nor should it be about nationalization of heritage which results in its translation into the contemporary political construct that is national identity. Heritage should rather remain linked to the cultural context to which it belongs, should be defined as that which is beyond the physical and visible and should be recognized as an open process of production and transformation sustained by its rooted links to the community and its local identity.