Heritage, Gentrification and Resistance in the Neoliberal City 9781800735736

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HERITAGE, GENTRIFICATION AND RESISTANCE IN THE NEOLIBERAL CITY

Explorations in Heritage Studies Series Editors: Ali Mozaffari, Deakin University David Charles Harvey, Aarhus University Explorations in Heritage Studies responds directly to the rapid growth of heritage scholarship and recognizes the trans-disciplinary nature of research in this area, as reflected in the wide-ranging fields, such as archaeology, geography, anthropology and ethnology, digital heritage, heritage management, conservation theory, physical science, architecture, history, tourism and planning. With a blurring of boundaries between art and science, theory and practice, culture and nature, the volumes in the series balance theoretical and empirical research, and often challenge dominant assumptions in theory and practice. Volume 5 Heritage, Gentrification and Resistance in the Neoliberal City Edited by Feras Hammami, Daniel Jewesbury and Chiara Valli Volume 4 Forging Architectural Tradition National Narratives, Monument Preservation and Architectural Work in the Nineteenth Century Edited by Dragan Damjanović and Aleksander Łupienko Volume 3 Walls and Gateways Contested Heritage in Dubrovnik Celine Motzfeldt Loades Volume 2 Heritage Movements in Asia Cultural Heritage Activism, Politics, and Identity Edited by Ali Mozaffari and Tod Jones Volume 1 Politics of Scale New Directions in Critical Heritage Studies Edited by Tuuli Lähdesmäki, Suzie Thomas and Yujie Zhu

HERITAGE, GENTRIFICATION AND RESISTANCE IN THE NEOLIBERAL CITY

8 Edited by

Feras Hammami, Daniel Jewesbury and Chiara Valli

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2022 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2022 Feras Hammami, Daniel Jewesbury and Chiara Valli All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hammami, Feras, 1978- editor. | Jewesbury, Daniel, editor. | Valli, Chiara, editor. Title: Heritage, gentrification and resistance in the neoliberal city / edited by Feras Hammami, Daniel Jewesbury and Chiara Valli. Description: 1st Edition. | New York : Berghahn Books, 2022. | Series: Explorations in heritage studies; 5 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022004809 (print) | LCCN 2022004810 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800735729 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800735736 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Urban renewal. | City planning--Social aspects. | Cultural property. | Collective memory. Classification: LCC HT170 .H467 2022 (print) | LCC HT170 (ebook) | DDC 307.3/416--dc23/eng/20220421 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022004809 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022004810 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-80073-572-9 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-573-6 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800735729

Contents 8

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgementsx Prefacexi Introduction. Exploring Injustices through Heritage in the Neoliberal City Feras Hammami, Daniel Jewesbury and Chiara Valli

1

Part I. Heritage through Gentrification in the Post-Industrial City Chapter 1.  Theorizing Heritage in the Post-Industrial City Maris Boyd Gillette

27

Chapter 2.  The Value of the Uncool: Reflections on the Demolition of an Old Re-used Industrial Area Helena Holgersson

42

Chapter 3.  ‘Cleaning up’ Heritage in the Post-Industrial City: Making Heritage, Gentrification and Legitimacy in Gamlestaden Feras Hammami and Chiara Valli

63

Part II.  Gentrification through Heritage-Making and Remaking Chapter 4.  Beyond the Good, the Neutral and the Consensual: Heritage between the Police and the Political Višnja Kisić

83

Chapter 5.  Whose Heritage, Whose City? Questions from the Revolting New York Project Don Mitchell

104

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Chapter 6.  ‘Virtuous Marginality’ Revisited and Revised: Distance, Difference and the Selection of Objects of Preservation in an Era of Hyper-Gentrification112 Japonica Brown-Saracino Part III.  Gentrification through Heritage-Led Resistance Chapter 7.  The Dynamic Authenticity of Local Mixed Streets: Street Heritage and Activism in Belfast City Centre Agustina Martire and Anna Skoura Chapter 8.  Gentrification and Public Heritage in Rome: The Potential and Ambiguities of the ‘Right to Buy’ Policy as a Strategy to Stay Put Sandra Annunziata, edited by Loretta Lees

125

151

Chapter 9.  Public Art, Docile Bodies and the ‘Post-Conflict’ City Daniel Jewesbury

166

Epilogue. Reflections on Heritage, Gentrification, Resistance Daniel Jewesbury, Feras Hammami and Chiara Valli

185

Index194

8 Figures 2.1.  The Gustaf Dalén area in 2001. © Helena Holgersson.

45

3.1.  The names of the three authorized periods of history (Industriella tiden, Landritiden, Nya Lödöse) were imprinted on the steps of the stairs, connecting the Säveån Canal to Gamlestaden’s square. © Göteborgs Stad, public database. Rstudio for architecture. 71 3.2.  Visual explanation of the shopping Galleria in SKF’s Kullan. © Göteborgs Stad, public database. Rstudio for architecture.

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3.3a (left).  The ‘fake rusty’ building, symbolically representing the industrial history of the area. © Chiara Valli. 3.3b (right).  The location of Nya Lödöse Church. © Chiara Valli.

72

4.1.  Exhibition ‘History that does not exist’ at the public square in Kotor, 2013. © Martin Kmet. Published with permission. Photo archive by Expeditio.

93

4.2.  Encounter with objects and stories from the collection of the Museum of Homelessness, 2018. © Museum of Homelessness. Published with permission. Photo archive by the Museum of Homelessness.96 7.1.  Shopping centre strategy. Map on Google Map satellite image. © Agustina Martire. 

130

7.2.  Demolition in North Street. Map on Google Map satellite image. © Agustina Martire. 132 7.3.  Royal Exchange. Leaside Investments, 2012. Public domain.

132

7.4.  North Street, 2017. © Joe Laverty for SaveCQ.

133

viii • Figures

7.5.  Donegall Street, 2017. © Joe Laverty for SaveCQ.

134

7.6.  Canada House, 2017. © Joe Laverty for SaveCQ.

135

7.7.  North Street, 2017. © Joe Laverty for SaveCQ.

135

7.8.  Backs of buildings on Royal Avenue seen from North Street, 2017. © Joe Laverty for SaveCQ. 136 7.9.  North Street Arcade, 2017. © Joe Laverty for SaveCQ.

137

7.10.  Tribeca Belfast, 2017. Castlebrooke Developers and Chapman Taylor Architects. Public domain.

138

7.11.  Products of North Street, 2015. © Milda Paceviciute. 

141

7.12.  Thresholds of North Street, 2015. © Stefan Downey.

142

7.13.  People of North Street, 2017. © StreetSpace project, Rebekah McCabe and Anna Skoura.

143

7.14.  North Street Arcade before 2004 fire, 2018. © Aisling Madden. 144 8.1.  A map of Rome from above, showing the location of San Saba neighbourhood. © Google Maps, 2021.

153

8.2.  An example of the building typology of individual villas. © Sandra Annunziata.

154

9.1.  ‘No Topless Bathing’, photographer unknown, no date.

167

9.2.  Paul Seawright, Cage II Belfast, colour photograph, 1997, courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

169

9.3.  The Sunflower pub, Belfast. Photo: Allan Leonard, 2016, Creative Commons licence Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/2.0/.170 9.4.  Stephen Shaw, No Topless Bathing, watercolour, 2009, courtesy of the artist. 

170

9.5.  Ross Wilson, Titanic Yardmen, bronze, 2012. Photo: William Murphy, 2019, Creative Commons licence Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 (CC BY-SA 2.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/. 174

Figures • ix

9.6.  Andy Scott, Thanksgiving Square Beacon, steel and bronze, 2007. Photo: Edwin Klein, no date, via Wikimedia Commons. 175 9.7.  Wolfgang Buttress, Rise, steel, 2011. Photo: Alan Meban, 2011, Creative Commons licence Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 2.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/2.0/.176 9.8.  Jorge Rodriguez Gerada, Wish, earthwork ­installation, 2013. Photo: Gerada Studio via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0.

177

9.9.  Joss Smith, artist’s visualization for The Magic Jug, 2010, courtesy of the Department for Social Development for Northern Ireland.179

8 Acknowledgements Heritage, Gentrification and Resistance in the Neoliberal City came out of an inspiring lecture series that was organized by the editors of this book at the University of Gothenburg. The book and the lecture series wouldn’t have seen the light without the generous grants from the Swedish National Heritage Board, HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design at the University of Gothenburg and the Institute for Urban Research at Malmö University. We, the editors, would like to thank the speakers at the lecture series and the authors of the different book chapters for the inspiring discussions and feedback on the different versions of the book. We are also grateful to the editors of the book series Exploration in Heritage, Ali Mozaffari and David C. Harvey, for their constructive comments and continual support, and to the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions for change.

8 Preface Examining the relations between heritage and processes of gentrification, marginalization and displacement, this collection is a valuable contribution to the Explorations in Heritage Studies book series. Gathering together an exciting mix of established researchers and early career scholars, the volume addresses these pertinent and critical issues in the spirit of open and reflexive dialogue. Interdisciplinarity is central in this endeavour, and is particularly important with respect to generating politically aware and conceptually nuanced work in the broader context of urban planning and development, where many traditional conceptualizations of heritage – as a building to be ‘preserved’, or a boosterist toolkit to be implemented – have been especially influential. Aligned with the ‘critical conversational’ ambition for the Book Series, the volume draws together a series of thoughtful, situated and original contributions. Rather than ‘identikit’ chapters, therefore, this anthology acts as a challenge to many urban development ‘blueprints’ in which a category of ‘heritage’ is often inserted into urban planning scenarios. Thus, the book gets beneath the skin of a series of specific case studies, and maintains the means to connect across cases and particularities through an insistence on the attention to critical theory. This provides spaces for stories that are often airbrushed out of boosterist endeavours: stories of displacement and marginalization. Crucially, however, there is also a clear commitment across the volume to take things further and see ‘heritage’ as central to stories of resistance. Heritage narratives, practices and performances matter. In many ways, through processes and practices of critique and justifiable anger over processes of marginalization, Heritage, Gentrification and Resistance in the Neoliberal City comprises a rallying point for solidarity and a pathway towards social justice in its broadest sense. The authors within the volume do not preach and, as is clear in the introduction, they are fully aware of difficulties and shortcomings. We feel that this sense of humility

xii • Preface

acts as a means through which readers are invited to become part of the ­conversation – perhaps part of the solution – with what might be described as a hopeful message; one that will encourage further dialogue, critical ­reflection and practical action. David C. Harvey and Ali Mozaffari

8 INTRODUCTION Exploring Injustices through Heritage in the Neoliberal City Feras Hammami, Daniel Jewesbury and Chiara Valli

Introduction What happens when particular versions of the past become silenced, suppressed or privileged in processes of urban restructuring? In what ways are the interpretations and performances of ‘the past’ linked to neoliberal urbanism, gentrification, marginalization, displacement and the social responses to them? These and other questions about the entangelment of heritage in urban restructuring stimulated an open lecture series that led to this edited book. ‘Heritage, borders and marginality within urban restructuring’ was the broad theme of the series of three lecture events, to each of which we, the organizers of the lecture series and editors of this book, invited three speakers. Prior to their respective lectures, we asked each speaker to write a short reflection paper, expanding on their own interpretation of the theme and problematizing the complex technologies (spatial-disciplinary, bureaucratic and institutional) that facilitate and legitimize specific trends of urban restructuring. To stimulate reflections, we introduced the speakers to our interpretation of the theme, and invited them to expand on it, ­inspired by their different disciplinary  backgrounds, which include sociology, cultural studies, social and economic geography, critical heritage studies, fine arts, design, architecture, urban studies, policy analysis and planning. Our idea has been to dwell on the speakers’ case to advance the debates around the inherently diverse, contingent, ever-mutating and path-dependent processes of heritage making and urban change in post-industrial cities (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Harvey 2007; Wacquant 2009; Pinson and Morel Journel 2016).

2 • Feras Hammami, Daniel Jewesbury and Chiara Valli

In this book we thus seek to contribute to these debates by advancing the explorations of gentrification through a critical heritage studies (CHS) perspective. Rather than engaging in a static study of material ‘things’ frozen in the past, scholars of CHS explore the ways through which heritage is enmeshed in a range of critical issues that face societies today, including climate change, sustainability, human rights, democracy, the future of the state and of course the protection and preservation of cultural heritage itself  (Winter 2013). This perspective challenges the established relationships between  nature and  culture, material and immaterial, formal and informal,  and global and local aspects of cultural heritage (Smith 2006; Harrison  2015). Instead,  it  suggests viewing heritage in relational terms (Harrison 2013)  and  as a  process through which the past becomes contested, negotiated and  reconstructed in the present, rather than given and unquestioned. What is specific to CHS is a move from explanatory discourses and site-specific contestations towards active research that articulates a theoretical framework capable of unveiling the different hegemonic projects that underlie, maintain and normalize the deeply structured relations of injustices. Inspired by this perspective, this book scrutinizes the relations that connect heritage, the politics of place identity and memory to processes of neoliberal urbanism, and employ heritage analytically to uncover the deeply structured, path-dependent, and complex dynamics that produce, normalize and legitimize gentrification and other urban inequalities. During the lecture series, transdisciplinary discussion of this perspective on the transformation of former-industrial cities brought forth new questions and intellectual analysis of the political struggles over space and territory. It became apparent that most of these struggles were inspired by and / or targeted local histories, traditions and other forms of tangible and intangible heritage, as much as other social, economic and political aspects. Heritage emerged as a broad concept and discourse. It was not possible to keep it restricted to material culture, to old, static aesthetic artifacts, or associated only with shared, universally representative, non-politicized objects and processes. In this context, a critical engagement with gentrification through heritage revealed gentrification as being bigger than any simple outcome of urban economic development. While deeply rooted in capital accumulation processes, gentrification is inextricably entangled in processes of heritage-making, bordering and resistance. We explain each of these concepts in the next section, and follow up with a discussion about this entanglement. Neoliberalism and urban neoliberalization are brought to these discussions, inspired by the empirical and theoretical analyses reported in the different contributions of this book, and by emerging debates in CHS.

Introduction • 3

The Neoliberal City: Processes of Change In this book we depart from the argument that gentrification is entangled in different processes of urban neoliberalization, heritage-making, bordering, and resistance. After we unpack each of these concepts here, we close this section by explaining their intersection.

Urban Neoliberalization In considering contemporary urban restructuring we are particularly aware of the cluster of processes, causes and effects which have come to be known as ‘urban neoliberalization’ (Peck 2010; Pinson and Morel Journel 2016). The city experiencing neoliberalization is one which has already been deindustrialized. This post-industrial city is thus in transition, from some degree of productive, economic security to precariousness and potential unsustainability. What happens during the transition is a highly contested and context-situated process. Many former-industrial cities sought to revitalize their economies by adapting to the needs of the ‘creative class’ (Tochterman 2012; Florida 2005), and / or adopting new forms of development and technological advancement. The transition often occurs rapidly, producing new developments that are both celebrated and contested. ‘Stakeholders’ identify the allegedly ‘undesirable’ spaces, places and spatial elements, and describe them as ‘dirt’ or as ‘matters out of place’ which must be cleared away in order to promote other elements of ‘value’ (Hammami and Uzer 2018; Herzfeld 2006; Douglas 1966). The ‘punishment’ of certain places is often justified and legitimated by publicly labelling them a ‘lawless zone’, ‘outlaw estate’, ‘hellhole’ or outside the ‘common norm’ (Wacquant 2009: 67–69). The operation of the political-economic project of neoliberalization is well explained in pivotal works in urban studies and geography (Harvey 2007; Swyngedouw 2005; Brenner and Theodore  2002). A growing body of literature that borrows from these disciplines, and from other explorations within social movements and resistance studies, scrutinizes notions of justice and rights in the neoliberal city (Hou 2010; Merrifield 2014; Pinson and Morel Journel 2016; Nicholls and Uitermark 2016; Bayat 2017). From the perspective of these debates and their exploration of the dynamics driving the transformation of former-industrial cities, we can suggest that four processes, together, amount to the ‘neoliberalization of the urban’. Firstly, public land and services are extensively privatized, in line with assertions about the greater efficiency of the competitive market in comparison with the State. Secondly, these privatized domains are deregulated, or rather re-regulated: laws relating to ownership, use, access and disposal of

4 • Feras Hammami, Daniel Jewesbury and Chiara Valli

land and other urban assets are largely done away with. However, new regulations governing permitted behaviour, and licensing private authorities with pseudo-police powers, proliferate. Thirdly, the privatized, deregulated city is opened to financialization: speculation on land value, rental income and debt, and the translation of real estate generally into financial commodities, as rapidly tradeable derivatives. City authorities offer substantial incentives, including publicly subsidized infrastructure, to private developers who can remodel redundant industrial sites, thereby raising the market value of assets including formerly public land. Finally, all these processes are globalized: profits generated can be exported to other tax regimes, and development capital can be raised from global markets. These four processes are certainly not divorced from culture and the heritage of places. Political, cultural and economic approaches to the neoliberal city reinforce one another hegemonically. It is argued in this book that these processes and approaches are supported, and revitalized, by processes of heritage-making and re-making. Consequently, this helps to necessitate economic models of urban investment, themselves only possible when areas of political decision-making can be removed from democratic scrutiny. Following these lines of thoughts, urban neoliberalization processes are discussed in this book with a critical reference to heritage, seeking to unpack the characteristics and operationalization of what we call the ­neoliberal city.

Heritage/Heritage-Making Heritage in this book is explored through the critical issues that entangle it in urban restructuring. In a nutshell, the erasure or preservation of particular artifacts in the built environment entails or is driven by particular processes of heritage-making and re-making. These processes however are heavily politicized and should be unpacked to better understand their thorny relations and impact. David C. Harvey (2001) argues that a process of ‘heritagization’ has since the mid-nineteenth century been defining our valuable past and desired future, and also informing the ways in which we engage with them. It is a process of nationalizing the ethnic and constructing a singular representation of modern nation states. This process is conceived in this book as performances of ‘transvaluation of the obsolete’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995: 369) through which the past was ‘re-invented’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) and its role in the present ‘transvalued’. It is thus a process of both uniting and dividing people (McAtackney 2018). It is a politicized and violent process that over time, as Smith (2006: 17, 299) explains, has developed into an ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (AHD). This discourse incorporates the ‘grand narratives of Western national and elite

Introduction • 5

class experiences’ but also governs people and their past accordingly. It not only guides the recurrent question in heritage studies – ‘whose heritage should be preserved’ (Lowenthal 1998) – but also regulates which heritages should be excluded. Heritages that fall outside the narrative of value are challenged, de-signified or destroyed (Pullan and Britt 2013; Hammami 2015), while the people and memories associated with them may accordingly become marginalized (Meskell and Scheermeyer 2008: 155). The politicization of heritage is certainly not confined to any specific local level. It expands across national, ethnic, class and other boundaries of difference. UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention (1972) and the remit given to UN organizations in order to identify and protect so-called outstanding universal values provided AHD with a global reach. Its impact on societies across the globe gave rise to criticism from the Global South of the Eurocentric, restrictive and exclusive nature of the convention and of AHD. This, for example, has paved the way for the emergence of new debates on intangible heritage and context-related processes of heritage valuation and preservation. The Burra Charter (1981), which was originally drafted in 1979 by Australia ICOMOS, came to broaden the scope of heritage so that it includes all types of places of cultural significance, including natural, indigenous and historic places of cultural value. It also shifted attention to ‘place’, instead of monuments and sites (Waterton et al. 2006: 340). Accordingly, new historic places have been recognized as having outstanding universal value, and actors from the private and voluntary sectors have become involved in decision-making. These changes in the production of heritage took on an additional dimension with the growing economic deficit in heritage institutions (e.g. museums, archives, libraries, etc.) as well as the emergence of certain governance models (public-private partnerships) and public interest in heritage. Robert Hewison (1987) characterized these changes in what he called the ‘heritage industry’. Creative industries discourses have brought culture-led regeneration, economic instrumentalization of creative knowledges, and technological solutions for progress to the forefront. Historical sites, buildings, archives and museums are increasingly viewed as resources for economic development. Indeed, the implications of such ‘neo-liberal’ development have been evident in the management of heritage in many Western and non-­Western countries (Negussie 2006; Hammami 2015). Generally, these changes in the heritage sector, including the calls for democratized diversity and the continued critiques of the politicization of the past, and the focus on the ‘tangible’ aspects of heritage, paved the way for UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on ‘Creative Diversity’ (2001) which suggests that ‘all’ sub-­ cultures (ethnic minorities and disadvantaged community groups) have equal rights to represent and identify themselves within global heritage and

6 • Feras Hammami, Daniel Jewesbury and Chiara Valli

to access that heritage. This was followed shortly after by the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003 and the Faro Convention in 2005. Despite the evolution and refinement of the dominant frameworks of AHD, traditional engagements with heritage and heritage management have not been critically challenged. Heritage is still predominantly viewed as something neutral, positive, and monumental, divorced from its wider socio-political context. On the global level, Tim Winter encourages us to explore the politics of heritage that occur within nationalism and internationalism. He specifically explains the role that heritage may play as diplomacy and in diplomacy (Winter 2013). While the ambition is to reconstruct the past in a heritage that expresses ‘positive’ shared histories and identities, colonial histories are increasingly debated by colonial powers as a resource for mutual benefits with former colonies. For example, the Euromed Mutual Heritage Programme has been implemented to protect the material witnesses of the colonial histories of the Mediterranean region. The Dutch government also initiated the Shared Cultural Heritage Project in the early 2000s in response to a request by the Indonesian government to exhibit collections from the Leiden Museum (Oostindi 2008; Scott 2014). While UNESCO (2013) celebrates the ‘mutual benefits’ of these initiatives within the context of global heritage, issues of mutuality in such initiatives have been appropriated for nationalist projects and for diplomatic relations between governments, rather than for people. On a lower level of political influence, traditional and politicized processes of heritage and heritage management are in many cities (indirectly) guiding and informing urban policies and other broader dynamics of urban change. In post-industrial Western cities, which are the focus of this book, a material account of the collective memory of the working class, and the contemporary experiences of ethnic and minority groups, have generally been regarded as less important than the experiences of the dominant upper class. In this book, we see how these policies and practices are increasingly challenged by, among others, notions of dissonance, the pluralizing of the past, heritage activism and cultural diversity (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996; see also Harvey and Perry 2015; Harrison 2015; Mozaffari and Jones 2020). We seek to advance these notions by focusing on the political instrumentality of heritage and its utility as a ‘disciplinary technology’ and a strategy of resistance. As a uniting analytical practice, we also seek to unsettle the political neutrality of heritage, unpack its relations to policy circles and everyday life, and map possible patterns of in/justices that often take shape due to the (unnoticed) involvement of heritage in urban change. Don Mitchell’s exploration of landscape and anti-landscape in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, provides new insight on the making of heritage, through

Introduction • 7

the politicized exploitation of history. Feras Hammami and Chiara Valli also explain how the industrial and contemporary forms of heritage in the Swedish neighbourhood of Gamlestaden have been re-evaluated to increase the real estate value of the area. Dwelling on these and other case studies, this book explores not only how particular heritages become officially institutionalized and publicly accepted as valuable and unchallenged, but also how re-invented heritages enable and legitimate particular dynamics of urban change despite their associated processes of gentrification, displacement, ‘spatial cleansing’, and other forms of marginalization (Herzfeld 2006; Meskell and Scheermeyer 2008). While exploring the critical issues that urban restructuring extends outwards from heritage, this book also explores the transformative power of ‘heritage’ (Harvey and Perry 2015), and its potential to empower the marginalized (Meskell and Scheermeyer 2008) and to arm new forms of non-violent resistance to injustices (Hammami and Uzer 2018). The explorations and findings reported in this book are meant to generate dialogues around these questions: in what ways is heritage entangled in urban restructuring? How does this entanglement enable and legitimate particular urban futures? How does this lead to new challenges and opportunities in cities? And how does the exploration of urban restructuring through a critical heritage studies perspective provide new insights into urban gentrification, marginalization and displacement?

Gentrification Heritage is multiply entangled in the different situations of conflict that engulf the neoliberal city. Gentrification relates to many of these conflicts. Gentrification, intended as a socio-economic shift in a local housing market connected to transformations in the built environment, most often associated with the displacement of poorer residents, is inevitably linked to processes of evaluation and devaluation not only of housing stock, but also of communities, cultures and practices. From the earliest gentrification literature, links between heritagization and gentrification can be found. From Ruth Glass, who coined the term gentrification more than fifty years ago (1964), analysing the rediscovery of dilapidated Victorian housing stock in East London by the middle classes, to Neil Smith (1987), connecting the planned dereliction and stigmatization of inner-city areas with the creation of rent gaps, to Sharon Zukin (1984), who explained how the lifestyle of artistic ‘pioneers’ in post-industrial lofts in Soho was fetishized, marketized and sold to affluent investors, the processes through which derelict built heritage is first devalued, and then revalued for the benefits of investors and city elites are at the core of explanations of gentrification. While many

8 • Feras Hammami, Daniel Jewesbury and Chiara Valli

policy-makers today view gentrification as the establishment of a ‘new culturally sophisticated urban class fraction, less conservative than the “old” middle class’ (Lees 2000: 396), critical scholars of gentrification, like Loretta Lees (2008) explain how past urban renewal policies should be labelled as the work of ‘gentrification battles’ and ‘class war’ instead of urban rebirth and regeneration. As illustrated by Maris Gillette in her contribution to this book, the multiple ways in which old residential or post-industrial built stock is transformed into cultural heritage constitute the cultural and discursive backbone of gentrification processes, used to legitimize profit maximization. At the same time, dilapidated built environments that do not respond to certain aesthetic standards (which are also time- and context-specific) can be discursively marginalized to legitimate complete demolition and reconstruction, as illustrated by Helena Holgersson in her contribution here. In his analysis of public art in Belfast, the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, Daniel Jewesbury (this volume) critiques ideas of public art as a common heritage through which we engage with the ways in which people lived in the past, as well as stories from the present. Viewing it as an important form of heritage, Jewesbury explains how unauthorized forms of public art are usually erased in the neoliberal city through a naturalized or legitimized vision of change that is being enacted through privatization, de- and re-regulation, financialization, and globalization. Crucially, the valuation processes do not concern only built heritage, but also social and cultural expressions connected to it, in selective interpretations of place ‘authenticity’ and belonging. In many cases, gentrification is sustained by what Japonica Brown-Saracino (2010) named social preservationist attitudes, i.e. ‘the culturally motivated choice of certain people, who tend to be highly educated and residentially mobile, to live in the central city or small town in order to live in authentic social space, embodied by the sustained presence of old‐timers’. Even when well-intentioned, as Brown-Saracino reminds us in her contribution in the present book, our preservation choices, and what we identify as valuable or marginal, are always biased, subjective, context-specific, and historically situated. What is to be preserved, in times of super-diversity and hyper-gentrification? Who gets to decide what is worth preserving, and why? Gentrificationinduced displacement cannot be intended merely as physical dislocation, but as formed by discursive, affective, emotional dimensions that revolve around the embodied political economies of worth, value, and belonging (Valli 2020, 2015a). Hence, constructions of self and the Other are central mechanisms of processes of both heritagization and of gentrification.

Introduction • 9

Borders and Bordering Ignoring the entanglements between heritagization and urban restructuring not only enables urban gentrification and marginalization, but also leads to the proliferation of overlapping ‘borders’. In this book, ‘border’ does not refer to a state territorial container, coercive state power strategy, or merely a marker of national identity. Neither are borders lines of separation, nor even necessarily literal ‘spaces’ of interactions. Instead, borders are conceived here as being ideological, bureaucratic, intangible, spatial and instrumental practices, of inclusion and exclusion (Buden 2017). They are driven, formed and intersected by dynamics of class, ethnicity, state politics, colonialism and physicality, as well as other relations and contestations of us-them, here-there, and now-then. The idea of simply crossing – from one discrete space to another – depends on a concretized notion of pre-existing ‘borders’ that might be ‘crossable’ or ‘non-crossable’, but which always exist, and concomitantly, it implies an ever-lasting sense of dualism. Inspired by critical border studies, the ways in which borders are engaged with in this book is intended to challenge their ontology and propose an alternative to ‘seeing like a state’ (Scott 1998). This entails a critical shift from ‘borders’ to notions of ‘bordering practice’, and the ‘performance’ through which bordering practices are produced and reproduced (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012). ‘Practice’ refers to ‘the activities which have the effect … of constituting, sustaining, or modifying borders’, while ‘performance’ suggests a rethinking of borders so that they do not ‘simply “exist” as lines on maps, but are continually performed into being through rituals such as the showing of passports, the confessionary matrix at the airport, and the removal of clothing’ (cited in Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012). In this context, heritagization, the heritage industry as well as urban neoliberalization processes actively involved in bordering practices. Through these processes, the political agency of bordering practices become fluid and active across different spatial scales. As Gielis and van Houtum (2012) explain, ‘The uniform and straight lines in the sand, that borders were once thought to be, are now better understood as a complex choreography of border lines in multiple lived spaces’ (cited in Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012). Yet, bordering practices in the neoliberal city are most commonly conceived in spatial terms, and analysed based on established forms of borders, such as those made by infrastructure, culture, class and ethnicity. The decolonial social movements such as Black Lives Matter that recently erupted worldwide demonstrate the complex nature of borders and the intricated and contested historical roots of present injustice (Knudsen and Andersen 2019; Murray et al. 2007; Witz et al. 2017; Hasian and Paliewicz 2020). The direct targeting of Confederate monuments in the USA,

10 • Feras Hammami, Daniel Jewesbury and Chiara Valli

following the brutal murder of George Floyd by police in May 2020, as well as other similar protests in the UK and South Africa, to mention but a few, was not simply action against the monuments per se but against the way in which the monuments perpetuate a racist history in contemporary society (Mullins 2021). In this book, we attempt to infuse the debates on borders and gentrification with a critical heritage studies perspective. Looking at how borders are dealt with in theory and practice, we suggest that borders have become both a dominant form of ‘heritage’, and a process informed by ­heritage-making. The production and reproduction of barriers, fences, zones and borders are increasingly conceived as a sign of security, privacy and individual right. It is an inherited practice used to separate people from each other, and separate people from things across time and space. Furthermore, selecting, valuing and preserving particular heritages are also inherited practices of bordering. They become prevalent when values (and thus political hegemony) are assigned to one version of the past, and not to others, which co-exist with it in the same space. In other words, careful conservation of certain tangible or intangible aspects of heritage and the normalization of their projection in everyday life can enable exclusive identities to emerge, give shape to the intolerance of particularist possessive claims, shape decisions about who has the right to access and govern heritage, and transform dissonant heritage into a battlefield where it is used as a ‘weapon’ for border-making, circulating the self or separating the self from ‘the Other’. The argument here is that collectives and individuals increasingly embody borders while constructing their identity, whether through urban development projects or even through their ordinary everyday life practices. Through the contributions in this book, it becomes apparent that arming urban development with authorized heritage can lead to new forms of closure enacted by the self and/or the other. For instance, Martire and Skoura in this volume explain how hundreds of buildings and streets in Belfast are continuously transformed into larger blocks or buffer zones, and how this creates new contours of closure and division. Not only are people displaced beyond these contours by gentrification but their social and cultural relations are also evacuated from the inner areas of these borders. Loíc Wacquant (2008: 259) importantly illustrated that vis-à-vis segregation pressures, a local community might ‘isolate itself as a counter-response, pursuing self-reinforcing cycles of social involution and cultural closure’. This also echoes Young’s (1990: 60) articulation of cultural imperialism, which involves ‘the paradox of experiencing oneself as invisible at the same time that one is marked out as different’. This not only hampers possibilities for healthy interactions and encounter with ‘the other’, but also localizes

Introduction • 11

‘cultural imperialism’ and legitimates particular forms of urban gentrification and marginalization. Exploring the critical relations between heritage and borders within urban restructuring can provide new insights on the ways in which heritage, by enabling particular forms of urban restructuring, can engender and perpetuate regimes of (in)justice. This can expand debates on social conflicts in the neoliberal city towards non-territorial forms of borders, and provide a new lens through which to read and investigate urban resistance and other forms of contemporary protests against injustices. How does authorized heritage practice inform and normalize dynamics of urban change and gentrification? What kinds of divisions, barriers, differentiations and distinctions can be conceived from the ways in which cultural claims are used to legitimate urban change? How do people, especially those directly influenced by enforced urban change, respond to the injustices produced, and in what ways do they link their response to notions of the right to heritage? And how do the conditions and relations created by authorized heritage practices and other top-down urban policies discursively contest and resist these practices and policies?

Resistance Resistance is often viewed as people fighting back in defence of freedom and democracy (Pile and Keith 1997), as a counteraction to power (Baaz and Lilja 2017), as intentional and publicly manifested practice (Pile and Keith 1997), and as collective and visible (Mayer et al. 2016; Valli 2015b). In this book, resistance is also conceived as a productive practice that is not necessarily enacted by people, but instead mobilized discursively. Violent changes can lead to new socio-political and spatial conditions and spatial practices that eventually challenge urban policies and authorized heritage discourses. Hammami and Uzer (2018) explain how architectural modernization and its associated processes of ‘social and cultural evacuation of spaces’ (Herzfeld 2006: 132) generate dynamics of resistance to both conservation and modernization (Inglehart and Baker 2000; Hall 2011; Zukin 2012). Their analyses of urban contestations in working-class Gårda in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, show how previous resistance to the spatial cleansing of the city’s industrial history weaponized the protests in Gårda, with lessons from the past providing them with coalitions of support. The rapid transformation of cities, and the distant level of the political decisions that drive urban change, hamper any rational mobilization of local responses. Typically, there are many justifications given for violent urban change: the provision of modern services and ‘smart’ cities, as well as

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prevailing economic, historical, legal and socio-political conditions. With such a level of complexity, the mobilization of unified forms of resistance, in terms of objectives, methods and level of success, is often critical. Local resistance might also become co-opted or diverted. Looking at urban change in different Western cities, local resistance to enforced urban change sometimes led to reversing or refining official development plans, but that does not necessarily favour local communities. For instance, ‘resistance’ to redevelopment, when argued in terms of conservation, can have the effect of saving buildings from being demolished, but ignoring associated processes of gentrification and displacement. Resistance through conservation can thus invent new, or accelerate, processes of heritagization that otherwise might not be possible (Thörn 2013). Similarly, modernizations that provide enhanced amenities or infrastructure to working-class neighbourhoods can be ‘resisted’ in the name of preserving the authentic ‘grain’ of overcrowded districts. The result in both situations is usually a wholesale displacement of entire communities. Resistance to gentrification can even be sparked by groups whose agency in the transformation of the city is ambiguous and not easy to define. The tenants of public housing are often exposed to a violent process of gentrification and are typically seen as ‘victims’ in the process. Still, Sandra Annunziata in this volume explains and problematizes how the tenants of San Saba in Rome, Italy, bought their properties, with much struggle, as a strategy of resistance to a possible gentrification in the near future. The tenants see their collective demands of becoming property owners as the only way ‘to stay put’, preventing displacement and the gentrification that will come, and last but not least, preserving the collective imaginaries and memories of the neighbourhood as they are the only repository of this collective memory. At the same time, the residents do not see that buying their properties could promote a new process of gentrification. Hammami and Valli in this volume also reveal how a coalition of real estate owners in Gothenburg was formed, with claims of democratization and modernization in a former working-class neighbourhood, while at the same time promoting a process of gentrification. In her analysis of resistance to displacement in Provincetown, Japonica Brown-Saracino demonstrates in this volume how the struggles of new inhabitants were concerned with maintaining a sense of authenticity of the areas through the preservation of particular groups of ‘old-timers’, who were identified through biased and partial interpretations of history and legitimate belonging. Brown-Saracino encourages us to think about conservation, gentrification, authenticity and resistance beyond any uncritical subscription to resistance, and to always reflect on questions of ‘resistance for whom? Against whom? What for?’

Introduction • 13

Artists are also among those who have been targeted as the ‘stormtroopers’ of redevelopment (Deutsche 1996); and more recently, ‘hipsters’ have been cited as the enablers of gentrification in cities from Berlin to San Francisco (Hubbard 2016; Huning and Schuster 2015). Groups who congregate in low-rent urban areas in order to carry out cultural work, whose presence subsequently raises property values, eventually pricing out longer term communities, can also become agents of resistance to gentrification (Valli 2015); we maintain however that they are not its cause, but merely symptomatic of larger, more complex, and more globalized neoliberalization processes (Valli 2021). In these processes, the history of the area and the new social and cultural values created by the contemporary community can be used to weaponize the resistance to gentrification. As Martire and Skoura expound in this book, notions such as creative class, adaptive reuse, diversity, memory and experiences are increasingly linked to ‘heritage’, and developed into a new language of resistance.

Intersecting Heritage, Gentrification and Resistance Heritage in this book is linked to resistance, borders, gentrification and other dynamics of urban change and conflict in the neoliberal city. This is done, on the one hand, to explore the role that heritage may play in appropriating, legitimating and informing particular dynamics and technologies of urban change, and investigating the ways in which, and what happens when, potential heritages become cleansed, destroyed and / or neglected. On the other hand, this book navigates through the social responses to urban change to establish how coalitions of resisting groups and individuals, armed by heritage, research alternative proposals for urban organization, generate new debates, scrutinize public bodies, and raise new questions with regard to traditional modes of governance. Non-violent forms of resistance gain insights, strength and energy from the historical narratives of social movements and conflicts, including oral histories, stories of objects, the different affective environments that constitute the physical built environment, the politics of remembering and forgetting at memorial sites, and other forms of local knowledge. Weaponized by these aspects of heritage, resistance in the neoliberal city seems to have been diversified, uncovering unnoticed forms of gentrification and injustice. Through a critical heritage studies perspective, this book re-emphasizes political struggles over space, territory and history, revealing the political exploitation of heritage in urban policies and associated processes of gentrification. The contributions investigate a variety of theoretical and empirical attempts to interrupt and interrogate urban change and associated situations of conflicts. They unsettle the stability of heritage, borders,

14 • Feras Hammami, Daniel Jewesbury and Chiara Valli

resistance, modernization and the urban, and explore the challenges and opportunities that heritage might produce in Chicago, Provincetown, Hoorn, Kotor, Berlin, Belfast, Rome, Gothenburg, Johnstown and New York City. Although  the empirical analyses of these European and American cities informed the contributions of this book, the discussions of the three main topics – heritage, gentrification, resistance – go beyond the geographical boundaries of these cities. The next section presents these contributions in three main sections. Finally, the book ends with an Epilogue in which we critically reflect on the topics by looking at how their meanings, causality and doing (or influence) within the context of neoliberal cities transform when we scale urban change up and down across time and space as well as when we situate patterns of urban change within the multiple layers of networks, flows and relations that constitute the neoliberal city.

Contributions in This Book The contributions of this book are presented and organized here in three thematic sections, following the thematic programme of the lecture series that was the basis for this book.

Heritage through Gentrification in the Post-Industrial City What experiences are protected and or erased in the so-called post-industrial city; how does the time-dominated prefix ‘post’ plays a discursive role in normalizing particular forms of urban change; and what role do heritage discourses play in the dynamics of protection and eradication? Exploring these questions through relations of heritage-gentrifcation has revealed hitherto unnoticed time-related processes of gentrification. Maris Gillette, in her theoretical analysis of the ‘post-industrial’ as discursive practice and actual reality, argues that the language of ‘post’ actively gives shape to, and legitimates, dynamics of (class-inspired) gentrification. She therefore calls for a new language that is more sensitive to the processes that continue to shape the social, cultural and economic lives of people, places and communities long after plants close. She advocates the use of heritage gentrification to uncover the ‘role that heritage plays in material processes of urban regeneration and the displacement of the working class’. As she explains, urban gentrification can be used ‘to characterize the interpretation of former industries as a metaphoric form of gentrification’. Though this term, she challenges the ‘figurative processes of gentrification, through which key aspects of working-class history, environmental

Introduction • 15

contamination, and state policies are displaced from heritage narratives and experiences, which “restructure” the past to appeal to “gentry” such as tourists and new middle-class residents’. From the post-industrial city of Gothenburg, Helena Holgersson shows that the violent urban restructuration of the Gustaf Dalén area has gained legitimacy not only from the officially recognized (listed) values of heritage in the municipal and state registers but also from the popular recognition of the nineteenth century as the ‘cool’ history. The destruction and spatial erasure of anything that falls outside these periods, as well as the silencing of all local protests, though sporadically and individually organized, have been legitimated and normalized. Holgersson shows how local resistance to the spatial cleansing of the former industrial area of Kvillebäcken was restrained by authorized heritage discourses that did not value the history of that area. The locals subscribed to the discursive power of official heritage despite their memories and attachment to the area, hence the individual protests that emerged against evacuation have not developed into any collective protest. Critically, the consistent focus of Holgersson’s research on the ‘uncool history’ of the area can be viewed as a scholarly activism challenging the unproblematized professional heritage and developers’ practices that systematically erase and / or project selective layers of meaning into the city. What happened in the Gustaf Dalén area is still happening in other areas throughout Gothenburg and other cities in Sweden and beyond, as argued by Feras Hammami and Chiara Valli in this volume. Focusing on the eastern suburb of Gamlestaden, they revealed an emerging coalition of authorized practices of heritage making and urban neoliberalization through which ‘unthreatening’ forms of diversity are promoted. A forceful process of aestheticization and modernization is implemented to meet a new community group that can afford the newly promoted market value of properties. The medieval, industrial and nineteenth-century layers that constitute the history of the area, and the international cultural environment of the contemporary society of Gamlestaden, are celebrated to market the future of the area as being rooted in the authorized past and responsive to the expectations and lifestyle of the envisioned local community. All conflicts that might emerge because of gentrification, symbolic diversity, unaffordable development and other practices of social and cultural evacuation of the area are simply erased by the power of the allied agendas of city planning, developers and economic actors. These forms of heritage gentrification and re-inventions of history, landscape, geographies of memories and heroic stories are not only exclusive but also authorized to discursively gentrify selective versions of history, geography and societies. Resistance to these legitimated forms of injustices,

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as showcased in the different contributions of this book, often die down and vanish amongst the incessant events produced by the large-scale urban renewal projects implemented to restore the reputation of former industrial cities in their post-industrial times.

Gentrification through Heritage-Making and Remaking In Chicago and Provincetown, other examples of heritage-led gentrification are scrutinized by Japonica Brown-Saracino. Through the concept ‘virtuous marginality’, Brown-Saracino explores the ways in which a particular social group and their places of memories become a reference for what should be preserved and / or marginalized. Marginalization works here in both directions: protection and preservation; or closure and preservation. In this sense, marginalization, as she puts it, becomes ‘indicative of authenticity’. The presence and memories of ‘old-timers’ are conceived by the new inhabitants as authentic and must be protected in order to feel the authenticity of that place. What is important here is the visibility of old-timers, ignoring the natural evolution of the local community and the productive cultural contestations that might emerge when the new inhabitants meet with the old-timers. A different framing of narratives of value and forms of authenticity can be drawn from the case of Johnstown. Don Mitchell uses David Nye’s concept ‘anti-landscape’ (Nye 2014) to explain an often-ignored process of gentrification in heritage-making that occurs at a remove from the geography of the city. His analysis of the US government’s attempt to revive the former-steel-making city of Johnstown after years of economic decline revealed how experiences of homelessness, gender violence and growing levels of AIDS infection were removed from the narrative of the city in the hope of making the heritage of the town attractive for tourism, investment and economic recovery. Mitchell explains how the dominant conception of heritage as being positive and heroic has led to the gentrification of Johnstown’s ‘anti-landscape’. The latter specifically refers to periods of history that have become disfavoured, and are hence erased by decision-makers in order to frame a positive narrative of the history of a place. In the case of Johnstown, the anti-landscape refers to the long history of ‘labor organizing as well as racist actions, deep exploitation as well as the fights against it’ that ‘shaped and defined the town and the people in it’. His analysis of heritage-making and urban shifts in Johnstown showed that dramatic temporalities and ruptures that are least celebrated might be silenced, ignored, destroyed or erased from the narrative of value, thus categorized as anti-landscape. To confront these different processes of heritage exploitation and heritagization, Višnja Kisić suggests we expose the political nature of

Introduction • 17

heritage. She explores the politics of heritage within the context of three different cases of heritage exploitation. While exposing the established relations of injustices that involve heritage in each case, Kisić explores the opportunities for democratizing heritage by ‘rupturing the normalized, sedimented ways of valuing and practicing heritage, and [making] visible those who are excluded, oppressed and with no part’. Following the works of Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Kisić in this volume explains how the re-politicization of heritage in the three cases could be understood as empowering emancipatory politics that ‘opens the terrain for a variety of negotiations, identifications of social actors and plurality of positions which are necessary for the constitution of public spaces in the societies in which we live’.

Gentrification through Heritage-Led Resistance Sandra Annunziata reveals a two-fold process of heritage-led gentrification in the neighbourhood of San Saba in Rome. Motivated by regional policy reform and the growth of modern tourism, the government prompted the neighbourhood into a process of heritagization through which new architecture and design aspects have been added to the neighbourhood, causing the market value of real estate properties to rise. Facing possible gentrification, to escape skyrocketing rent levels and claim their right to stay put, the inhabitants demanded that the government allow them to buy the properties they had inhabited for many years. While the tenants resisted the official forms of heritage-led gentrification, and associated destruction of social commons and places of memories, Annunziata problematizes the argumentations of such resistance, questioning whether the ‘right to stay put’ mobilized through heritage discourses from below brings broader benefits outside those for the present residents themselves. In addition to the cases of normalized and legitimated situations of gentrification in the name of ‘heritage’, the contributors explore the ­heritage-inspired responses to the injustices produced through top-down processes of urban change. Martire and Skoura explain how rapid urban regeneration in inner-city areas of Belfast often neglects the grain, detail, activities and users of local mixed streets and runs the risk of destroying their authenticity. Focusing on inner-city areas, Martire and Skoura demonstrate how ‘the dynamic authenticity of mixed-use streets relies on the continually changing fabric and activities of the street, balancing the fragile ecosystem they create. By prioritizing an idea of future that is detached from a sense of heritage and history, large developments abruptly disrupt the continuities of the ecosystem of these streets’ which constitute a significant part of their heritage. In their analyses of the social responses

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to these violent urban changes, Martire and Skoura show how local resistance was anchored in the exploration of alternative urban development plans and the explanation of the social and spatial impacts of the proposed development. How ‘heritage discourses are mobilized to naturalize’ socio-economic development in Belfast has been further explored by Daniel Jewesbury in this volume. Areas are named and categorized so that those that fall within the narrative of value are protected and others that are described as dirty, old, former-industrial, or physically dilapidated are erased to make way for new development that meets the vision of the neoliberal city. As Jewesbury explains, ‘What is significant about the widely circulated image of contemporary Belfast as a post-conflict city is not only that it masks the reality of entrenched ethnoreligious segregation becoming accentuated by newly spatialized class division. More crucially, it naturalizes … neoliberal r­ estructuring … with a spurious “morality”’. These three contributions problematize the often taken for granted ideas of resistance to gentrification. In the case of San Saba in Rome, Sandra Annunziata explained how the struggle of San Saba’s community to protect their history and places of memories as well as to claim their right to stay put through the purchase of their housing units can be viewed as a resistance to gentrification but also as an unnoticed process of gentrification from within. Jewesbury critically reflects on art and activism in neoliberal Belfast to reveal the opportunities that dissident aesthetic practices can provide for unlicensed production of meaning and unauthorized modes of being-in-public. These heritage from below forms of activism are further developed by Martire and Skoura when they illustrate the ways in which the social campaigns SaveCQ and StreetSpace could disrupt and / or transform the insensitive economic development in Belfast.

Opening Questions The complementary disciplinary backgrounds of the authors, and their theoretical and empirical analyses of urban change in different contexts, helped to unsettle the stability of the concepts of heritage, gentrification, resistance and borders, and to uncover neglected dynamics and technologies of gentrification and other forms of legitimated injustice. Generally, all contributors subscribed to the argument that modernization, urbanization, migration, urban branding, and other forms of urban neoliberalization are usually associated with changes in urban density, mobility, temporality and diversity. These changes bring a significant impact on people’s social networks, commons, sense of place and memory. Although these changes are often debated as inevitable and vital for modernization, the contributors

Introduction • 19

demonstrated how, in the course of these changes, people may become excluded, alienated or displaced according to their income, ethnicity, state and class. Some also discuss specific cases when people create closure and borders for themselves in favour of protecting their history and identity or of protecting the self at the expense of others. Furthermore, and by using heritage as a lens, the analysis reported in this book revealed the role that heritage may play in producing and legitimating gentrification, but also as a site and tool of resistance. Researching the different resistant practices that interrupted urban change in different contexts provides new insights on the potential that heritage practices may have to provide new possibilities for ­justice-making. In the light of the different debates that have taken place in the course of putting this book together, a number of questions have been put forward for further investigation. We begin exploring some of these questions in the Epilogue of this book, looking at these specific themes: relatedness, detemporalization, deterritorialization, logistical capital and disciplinarity. Feras Hammami is associate professor of conservation at the Department of Conservation, University of Gothenburg. His research concerns the politicization of cultural heritage within urban planning and development, with a specific interest in the purposeful practices of heritage in the conduct of societies and geographies. His current research projects include reconciliatory heritage, urban marginality and resistance, and heritage and peacebuilding in relations to sites located in Palestine and Sweden. Daniel Jewesbury is a senior lecturer in Fine Art at HDK-Valand Academy of Art & Design, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He lived for over ­twenty-five years on the island of Ireland, where he conducted extensive research on the instrumentalizations of professional and community art practices, by both state, public and private actors. He is a practising artist, whose film and video works explore the limits of human agency in the neoliberalizing city. Chiara Valli is a social and economic geographer and assistant senior lecturer at the Department of Urban Studies, Malmö University. Chiara’s research deals with housing, gentrification, housing financialization, socio-­ economic and ethnic urban segregation, displacement, social movements and ­resistance, with empirical research in Sweden, Italy and the US.

20 • Feras Hammami, Daniel Jewesbury and Chiara Valli

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Introduction • 21

Harvey, D.C. and J. Perry. 2015. ‘Heritage and Climate Change: The Future is Not the Past’, in David Harvey and Jim Perry (eds), The Future of Heritage as Climates Change: Loss, Adaptation and Creativity. London: Routledge. Hasian, M. and N. Paliewicz. 2020. Memory and Monument Wars in American Cities New York, Charlottesville and Montgomery. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Herzfeld, M. 2006. ‘Spatial Cleansing: Monumental Vacuity and the Idea of the West’, Journal of Material Culture 11(1–2): 127–49. ______. 2016. Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hewison, R. 1987. The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen London. Hobsbawm, E. and T. Ranger (eds). 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hou, J. 2010. Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities. New York: Routledge. Hubbard, P. 2016. ‘Hipsters on Our High Streets: Consuming the Gentrification Frontier’, Sociological Research Online 21(3): 106–11. https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.3962. Huning, S. and N. Schuster. 2015. ‘“Social Mixing” or “Gentrification”? Contradictory Perspectives on Urban Change in the Berlin District of Neukölln’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12280. Inglehart, R. and E.W. Baker. 2000. ‘Modernisation, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values’, American Sociological Review 65: 19–51. Katarzyna Puzon. 2019. ‘Saving Beirut: Heritage and the City’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 25(9): 914–25. doi: 10.1080/13527258.2017.1413672. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. 1995. ‘Theorizing Heritage’, Ethnomusicology 39(3): 367–80. doi:10.2307/924627. Knudsen, T.B. and C. Andersen.  2019.  ‘Affective Politics and Colonial Heritage, Rhodes Must Fall at UCT and Oxford’,  International Journal of Heritage Studies 25(3): 239–58. doi: 10.1080/13527258.2018.1481134. Lees, L. 2000. ‘A Reappraisal of Gentrification: Towards A “Geography of Gentrification”’, Progress in Human Geography 24(3): 389–408. doi: 10.1191/030913200701540483. ______.  2008. ‘Gentrification and Social Mixing: towards an Inclusive Urban Renaissance?’ Urban Studies 45(12): 2449–470. Lowenthal, D. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mayer, M., C. Thörn and H. Thörn (eds). 2016. Urban Uprisings: Challenging Neoliberal Urbanism in Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McAtackney, L. 2018 ‘The Many Forms and Meanings of (Peace) Walls in Contemporary Northern Ireland’, Review of International American Studies 11(1): 39–61. Retrieved 15 February 2021 from https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/RIAS/article/ view/6383. Merrifield, A. 2014. ‘Whither Urban Studies?’, in  The New Urban Question. London: Pluto Press, pp. 1–10. doi: 10.2307/j.ctt183p210.4. Meskell, L. 2019. ‘Heritage, Gentrification, Participation: Remaking Urban Landscapes in the Name of Culture and Historic Preservation’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 25(9): 996–98. doi: 10.1080/13527258.2018.1542334.

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Meskell, L. and C. Scheermeyer. 2008. ‘Heritage as Therapy: Set Pieces from the New South  Africa’, Journal of Material Culture 13(2): 153–73. doi: 10.1177/1359183508090899. Mozaffari, A. and T. Jones. 2020. Heritage Movements in Asia: Cultural Heritage Activism, Politics, and Identity. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Mullins, P.R. 2021. Revolting Things: An Archaeology of Shameful Histories and Repulsive Realities. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Murray, N., N. Shepherd and M. Hall. 2007. Desire Lines: Space, Memory and Identity in the Post-Apartheid City. London: Routledge. Negussie, E. 2006. ‘Implications of Neo-liberalism for Built Heritage Management: Institutional and Ownership Structures in Ireland and Sweden’.  Urban Studies 43(10): 1803–824. doi:10.1080/00420980600838168. Nicholls, W.J. and J. Uitermark. 2016. Cities and Social Movements: Immigrant Rights Activism in the US, France, and the Netherlands, 1970–2015. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Non Arkaraprasertkul. 2019. ‘Gentrifying Heritage: How Historic Preservation Drives Gentrification in Urban Shanghai’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 25(9): 8 82–96. doi: 10.1080/13527258.2018.1460732. Nye, D. 2014. When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Oostindi, G. (ed.). 2008. Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage: Past and Present. Leiden: KITLV Press. Parker, N., and N. Vaughan-Williams. 2012. ‘Critical Border Studies: Broadening and Deepening the “Lines in the Sand” Agenda’. Geopolitics 17. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2012.706111. Parker, N. and R. Adler-Nissen. 2012. ‘Picking and Choosing the “Sovereign” Border: A Theory of Changing State Bordering Practices’, Geopolitics 17(4): 773–96. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2012.660582. Peck J. 2010. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pile, S. and M. Keith (eds). 1997. Geographies of Resistance. London: Routledge. Pinson, G. and C. Morel Journel.  2016.  ‘The Neoliberal City – Theory, Evidence, Debates’, Territory, Politics, Governance 4(2): 137–53. doi: 10.1080/21622671.201 6.1166982. Pullan, W. and B. Britt. 2013. Locating Urban Conflicts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Scott, C.J. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, C. 2014. ‘Sharing the Divisions of the Colonial Past: An Assessment of the Netherlands-Indonesia Shared Cultural Heritage Project, 2003–2006’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 20(2): 181–95. doi: 10.1080/13527258.201 2.738239. Smith, L. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge. Smith, N. 1987. ‘Gentrification and the Rent Gap’. Association of American Geographers 77(3): 462–65, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8306.1987.tb00171.x. Swyngedouw, E. 2005. ‘Governance Innovation and the Citizen: The Janus Face of Governance-beyond-the-State’, Urban Studies 42(11). Thörn, H. 2013. Stad i rörelse: Stadsomvandlingen och striderna om Haga och Christiania. Stockholm: Atlas.

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Tochterman, B. 2012. ‘Theorizing Neoliberal Urban Development: A Genealogy from Richard Florida to Jane Jacobs’, Radical History Review 112: 65–87. Tunbridge, J. and G. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester: Wiley. UNESCO. 2013. Managing World Cultural Heritage. Paris: UNESCO. Valli, C. 2015a. ‘A Sense of Displacement: Long‐Time Residents’ Feelings of Displacement in Gentrifying Bushwick, New York’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39(6): 1191–208. ______. 2015b. ‘When Cultural Workers Become an Urban Social Movement: Political Subjectification and Alternative Cultural Production in the Macao Movement, Milan’. Environment and Planning A 47(3): 643–59. ______.  2020. ‘Emotional Displacement: Misrecognition, Symbolic Violence, and Loss of Place’, in G. Baeten, C. Listerborn, M. Persdotter and E. Pull (eds), Housing Displacement: Conceptual and Methodological Issues, London: Routledge, pp. 67–81. ______.  2021. ‘Artistic Careers in the Cyclicality of Art Scenes and Gentrification: Symbolic Capital Accumulation through Space in Bushwick, NYC’.  Urban Geography: 1–23. doi: 10.1080/02723638.2021.1902122. Wacquant, L. 2008. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. ______. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Walters, D., D. Laven and P. Davis. 2017. Heritage and Peacebuilding. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Waterton, E., L. Smith and G. Campbell. 2006. ‘The Utility of Discourse Analysis to Heritage Studies: The Burra Charter and Social Inclusion’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 12(4): 339–55. Winter, T. 2013. ‘Clarifying the Critical in Critical Heritage Studies’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 19(6): 532–45. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527 258.2012.720997. Witz, L., G. Minkley and C. Rassool. 2017. Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Retrieved on 28 January 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.9200634. Young, M.I. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zukin, S. 1982. Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ______. 2012. ‘The Social Production of Urban Cultural Heritage: Identity and Ecosystem on an Amsterdam Shopping Street’, City, Culture and Society 3(4): 281–91.

PART I

8 HERITAGE THROUGH GENTRIFICATION IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL CITY

8 CHAPTER 1 Theorizing Heritage in the Post-Industrial City Maris Boyd Gillette

Introduction Heritage regularly plays a role in post-industrial urban ‘regeneration’, as numerous studies of former industrial cities have shown (e.g. Chen et al. 2016; Gillette 2017; Storm 2014; Xie 2015). This empirical evidence has led the editors of this volume to pose the question of how we might productively theorize the relationship between heritage and urban restructuring (see Introduction). Heritage, they propose, is a technology of the neoliberal city that legitimates particular trajectories of development through a practice of ‘bordering’, closure and exclusion. In this chapter I investigate to what extent the scholarly models used to theorize heritage in post-industrial cities have directed our attention to the processes of bordering, closure and exclusion that legitimate urban redevelopment. I argue that the scholarship and empirical evidence of heritage in post-industrial cities suggests that we can, in fact, sharpen our analytic frame by pinpointing an essential feature of the bordering that characterizes post-industrial heritage. The redevelopment trajectories legitimated by heritage in the post-industrial city are fundamentally about class, though they may also involve other forms of exclusion and closure (see relevant chapters in this volume). If we accept that heritage in post-industrial settings always has class implications, as my review of the existing scholarship indicates, we can foreground this characteristic by theorizing post-industrial heritage as a material and ideological process of gentrification that encloses new class constellations in the neoliberal city. More specifically, heritage in

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post-industrial urban redevelopment projects displaces the working class, physically and figuratively, in order to create spaces and narratives for middle- and upper-middle-class denizens. Material structures that once housed the working class or the processes of industrial labour are transformed for the use of the middle and upper-middle class. Industrial production is replaced by neoliberal consumption. Narratives concerning industrial workers are eviscerated, stylized and adapted to suit the tastes of middle- and upper-middle-class patrons. Even ‘nature’ is worked on to create ‘urban green spaces’ that appeal to middle-class sensibilities and leisure patterns, a process that has been called ‘ecological gentrification’ (Sandberg 2014; see also Berger et al. 2017). In short, heritage in the post-industrial city promotes and legitimates urban restructuring that benefits middle- and upper-middle-class ‘gentry’ by enclosing and displacing the working class physically, ideologically and environmentally.

Key Analytic Concepts in the Study of Post-Industrial Heritage Anthropologists, archaeologists, architects, geographers, historians, sociologists, tourism scholars and others have researched heritage in post-industrial contexts. Analytically and empirically, the cases of heritage in the post-industrial city lead inexorably to the conclusion that post-­ industrial heritage creates class borders. Dominating this scholarship are four distinct analytic models: museumification, performance, ruination and scar. Each  of these frames indicates some process of ‘bordering’ at work, but none,  in my view, adequately captures the class elements of post-­industrial heritage. I explore each of these concepts in turn, looking at examples of how scholars have used them to study post-industrial urban restructuring, and highlighting the process of bordering to which each model points.

Museumification One of the first models used to conceptualize post-industrial heritage has been called ‘museumification’ (Debary 2004; see also Cameron 2000). Scholars who employ the museumification frame argue that specific industrial heritage sites ‘display’ some histories while omitting and foreclosing others (e.g. Wallace 1987; Debary 2004; Goodall 1993; Shackel and Palus 2006). Museumification as an analytic strategy focuses on practices of representation and insists that post-industrial representations of industry are as much about forgetting and excluding – bordering, in other words – as

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about remembering and preserving. Numerous studies detail how industrial heritage sites limit, exclude and repackage working-class pasts to create appealing representations – what historian Mike Wallace has called ‘history light’ – for consumption by middle-class tourists and homeowners (Wallace 1987; see also Cameron 2000; Högberg 2011; Oakley 2015; Pashkevich 2017; Shackel and Paulus 2006). Anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and others have applied the museumification concept to urban heritage projects in many contexts; here I discuss examples from post-industrial cities in the US, France and Sweden. Anthropologist Catherine Cameron analysed the museumification of industry in the city of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania after steel-making ceased (2000). She investigated the process through which Bethlehem’s former steel plant was redeveloped, focusing on who was involved and how the industry was interpreted and represented. Federal and state funders, a private non-profit redevelopment agency, and the company Bethlehem Steel, whose former plant was being turned into a heritage site, drove the process, which was explicitly linked to the goal of urban renewal. These actors agreed that the plant-turned-museum would showcase the ‘drama, danger, and scale’ of steel-making (67). ‘Museumifying’ steel-making to ‘display’ this narrative meant focusing on technology and innovation, and ignoring other aspects of the industry’s history, such as the lives of its former workers, or discussion of relations between labour and ­management. How it came to pass that Bethlehem Steel closed its eponymous Bethlehem plant was also excluded. At the time that the company closed the Bethlehem plant, it continued to operate steel mills in Indiana and Maryland, and had plans to purchase plants in other parts of Pennsylvania. Museumifying steel in Bethlehem kept this part of the story out of the heritage representation. Cameron points out that locals were not invited to participate in crafting Bethlehem Steel’s post-industrial heritage. This act of exclusion, she notes, was not necessarily unwelcome, as Bethlehem residents preferred the city’s colonial Moravian history to its industrial past. Anthropologist Octave Debary studied museumification in Le Creusot, France, a small city once dominated by a family-owned ironworks and steelworks (2004). Like Cameron, in his research Debary traces the process by which the city turned parts of the owner’s property, including the family’s residence (a castle), into an ‘ecomuseum’ and then a more conventional museum (127–30). Forgetting, excluding and foreclosing were central to the process of museumification in Le Creusot. Debary argues that the absence of any narratives about the tense relations between owners and labourers was ‘wilful amnesia’ about Le Creusot’s ‘class warfare’. As in Cameron’s case, redeveloping an industrial site into a museum in Le

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Creusot also entailed narrating a usable past. In this case, the past focused on a paternalistic entrepreneur and family capitalism, and consigned labour struggles and the working class to what Debary called the ‘warehouse, a garbage dump for dead objects and stories’ (131). Archaeologist Anders Högberg’s study of heritage-making and redevelopment of the former Scandinavisk Eternit industrial area of Lomma, southern Sweden, is another example of scholarship on post-industrial heritage that uses the ‘museumification’ model (2011). Högberg used the term ‘transformation’ rather than museumification to talk about the process through which this former industrial site became an ‘attractive’ residential area, but like Cameron and Debary he argues that creating industrial heritage is ‘more a process of forgetting than of remembering’ (38). In the case of Scandinavisk Eternit, heritage forgetting not only meant ignoring the loss of jobs and other economic consequences of the company’s closure, but also forgetting and excluding the history of a company which knew that its product – a building material made out of concrete and asbestos – was killing its workers and nevertheless chose to hide this fact and continue producing. Turning Scandinavisk Eternit into heritage for Lomma entailed preserving a single office building, removing the production sites of the toxic product, and constructing a ‘bland’ memorial park, ‘a pleasant environment with green areas and a sculpture’ (38, 40). Histories of labour, illness and mortality, and of a company cover-up, were excluded. The end result was a heritage space populated exclusively by wealthy, elderly purchasers of the new residences. In Högberg’s words, ‘A two-edged, traumatic history of many working lives’ was ‘reduced to a tame narrative’ to facilitate construction of a ‘prosperous future’ (40). According to material culture scholar Peter Oakley, who has studied how former mining sites are turned into heritage to promote regeneration, industrial heritage locations are ‘temples to valorized ancestors’ that are carefully managed to foreground particular representations of industry at the expense of others (2015: 64). As his comments and these three cases suggest, the museumification framework for analysing post-­industrial heritage draws attention to what we can call narrative bordering, the construction of specific representations that include and exclude particular pasts at industrial heritage sites. Common to these cases of narrative bordering is that stories about labour and the working class are simplified, reduced or omitted in favour of stories about technology, innovation, entrepreneurship and scale. In other words, the museumification of former industries gentrifies the past by bordering and excluding the working class and labour in favour of representations that facilitate a class-based form of urban restructuring also known as gentrification.

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Performance In some studies of former industries in regenerating cities, industrial heritage is analysed in terms of performance. The anthropologists, historians and sociolinguists who think about industrial heritage as a performance are also interested in narrative and representation. Yet whereas the museumification model focuses on the contents of representations at post-industrial sites, the specific stories that are included and excluded, scholars who analyse industrial heritage as performance focus on the processes of representing the past. Performance as an analytic frame directs attention to a dialogic and interactive process of making meaning between heritage professionals and heritage site visitors (see, e.g., Coupland and Coupland 2014; Kesküla 2013; Stanton 2006). Here I present two examples of scholars who use performance to study post-industrial heritage. Anthropologist Cathy Stanton’s monograph on the Lowell National Historical Park in the former industrial city of Lowell, Massachusetts, remains to date the most extensive discussion and application of the performance concept to industrial heritage (2006). Stanton draws on Goffman’s dramaturgical model of social interaction, and Turner’s theorization of ritual as a marked domain for engaging with cultural symbols, to develop performance as an analytic tool for the study of industrial heritage (2006: 21–23). She scrutinizes the shared meanings that are dramatically enacted at Lowell’s industrial heritage venues by heritage professionals (including tour guides and curators) and visitors. Importantly, as she observes, staff and visitors at the Lowell National Historical Park are homogenous in terms of their social class: they all belong to the middle and upper-middle class. Unsurprisingly, then, the tours that heritage professionals give to tourists at Lowell’s former mills and textile factories perform industrial work as past, ‘post’, history. These tours provide middle-class tourists with ‘rituals of reconnection’ to their parents’ and ancestors’ working-class identities (135–84), together with messages concerning ethnicity and Americanness. These performances of industrial heritage displace the working class into ‘then’, ‘who we were’, effectively obscuring or bordering the possibility of workers and industrial labour in Lowell’s here and now. In ways similar to museumification, the performance of industrial heritage also gentrifies the past, excluding labour from the present day and legitimating the presence of middle-class tourists at the mills. Like Stanton, the historian Bethan Coupland and sociolinguist Nikolas Coupland study industrial heritage tourism, in this case at former mines in Wales and Cornwall (2014). They also argue that the performance of heritage at the mines creates ‘salient meanings, identities and values’ by ‘staging’ a valued cultural past and making it available for scrutiny and

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reassessment by heritage professionals and tourists alike (514). Coupland and Coupland are particularly interested in how performances at these sites construct authenticity, including by hiring former miners to work as tour guides. The former miners carefully craft narratives that will appeal to the tourists, ‘editing’ the past to remove the unwanted bits, which include workers’ racism and misogyny, while creating pleasure for heritage consumers by producing a sense of reality and direct connection (507). In these performances in Cornwall and Wales we again see narrative gentrification at work, as historical stories about workers and mining are ‘edited’ into narratives that please tourists, but here these performances entail a form of self-gentrification by miners turned into tour guides. Similar performances of self-gentrification can be found in other locations (see Kesküla 2013; Walker 2012). Scholars who study industrial heritage as performance focus on how heritage professionals and audiences collaborate to give meaning to former  industries. These performances are processes of narrative bordering that exclude and repackage working-class experiences and histories for  middle- and upper-middle-class visitors. Working-class labour is  ‘worked on’ to create an ‘authentic’ experience of labour that is sanitized  and restructured as a tourist commodity. Former members of the working class can be complicit in these performances that gentrify history and place.

Ruination Ruination is another analytic frame deployed by archaeologists, urban studies scholars, sociologists and other researchers who seek to understand post-industrial cities. The concept of ruination is closely linked to the work of geographer Tim Edensor, who has been especially interested in the aesthetic and sensory qualities of ruins, and the way in which they offer putatively ‘unregulated’ spaces inside neoliberal capitalist regimes (e.g. Edensor 2005; see also DeSilvey and Edensor 2012). Edensor’s theorization has been critiqued for its class politics, or lack thereof; in particular, Stevan High has argued that the aesthetics of industrial ruins are themselves a class phenomenon, appealing overwhelmingly to white middle-class ‘urban explorers’ who seek sites of adventure and nostalgia in deindustrializing cities (High and Lewis 2007: chapter two). Other scholars, however, have adopted other strands of Edensor’s work. Among these is sociologist Alice Mah, whose recent book-length investigation of heritage and urban redevelopment in three post-industrial cities in North America and Europe has received significant scholarly attention (2012).

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Alice Mah uses the concept of ruination to analyse post-industrial physical environments, human bodies and collective memory in Niagara Falls (US and Canada), Newcastle upon Tyne (England), and Ivanovo (Russia). Following Edensor and Schumpeter, she characterizes ruination as a process of creative destruction. The idea of landscape as an ‘assemblage’ of human and material components, recently popularized within actor-­ network theory, also informs her approach (2012: 11–13). Mah highlights the uneven geography of ruination, which produces spaces of tourism and revival adjacent to spaces of deprivation and exclusion (e.g. 37–68). Those who suffer most from ruination are economically disadvantaged communities comprised of former workers. In Mah’s analysis, ruination is often a lengthy and uneven process. For example, while Newcastle upon Tyne’s ruination was readily seen in its abandoned shipyards, gated industrial sites that blocked access to the riverfront, and decaying worker houses, deindustrialization, and thus the ruination of  industry, proceeded in incremental stages over a  long period (chapter  3). This long slow process induced a sense of inevitability and  naturalness  among  Newcastle’s residents, captured in a phrase  she  heard  frequently: a fatalistic wish to ‘get on with it’. Mah’s work  suggests that we understand  post-industrial urban renewal itself as a  process of ruination. The spaces of tourism and revival produced by regeneration are the continuation of a long process of deindustrialization,  through which industrial sites are ruined for the workers who had once lived and worked there. Archaeologists, landscape architects and others who have applied the concept of ruination to redeveloping urban and urbanizing locations make similar arguments (e.g. Petursdottir 2012; Qviström 2018). As an analytic frame, ruination draws attention to coterminous physical, emotional and ideological processes through which industries are destroyed and new urban formations created. Yet, as Stevan High insists, class is fundamental to the ruining of industry. The aesthetics of the industrial ruin appeal to middle-class sensibilities. The redevelopment of ruins disenfranchises and displaces the working class. In other words, when industry is ‘ruined’ to become heritage in the post-industrial city, it is more ruined and ruinous for the working class. For the middle class, industrial ruination is less about destruction than creation.

Scar The concept of scar is the final major analytic tool found in the scholarly literature on post-industrial heritage. Historian Anna Storm is the scholar who has developed this concept most extensively, applying the concept

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to the study of several post-industrial settings in her book Post-industrial Landscape Scars, which includes but is not limited to urban contexts (2014). Other studies of former industrial areas apply related notions, such as ‘healing’ (e.g. Berger et al. 2017), or use Storm’s work to propose related concepts, such as ‘waste-scapes’ (Weber 2019). Storm proposes that we analyse post-industrial settings as scars in part because of her dissatisfaction with the idea, often seen in the heritage literature, that heritage and the past are palimpsests or layers of ‘text’ (2014: 3–4). The notions of palimpsest and layers suggest an undisturbed access to the past which Storm finds problematic. By contrast, the concept of a scar indicates development and growth. Deindustrialization wounds, but the wounds are not static. A scar grows over the wound, and that growth changes the past fundamentally. Storm categorizes post-industrial landscape scars as reused, ruined and undefined in her book, applying these categories to former nuclear power plants, mining industries and steel manufacture. Given the visceral nature of the metaphors of wound and scar, it is somewhat puzzling that Storm did not develop the potential of these terms for her categories. Scars fester, heal, bleed, reopen and fade. Might we say the same about post-industrial landscapes? Nevertheless, prominent advantages of the scar concept include its insistence on change and process, as well as its evocative link to damage and healing. For example, in the forming mining region of Ruhr, German officials have used nature to conceal unwanted industrial pasts and promote ‘healing’ by making a dirty, undesirable place into an attractive tourist destination (2014: 101–26; see also Berger et al. 2017). As with the other scholarship I have presented, Storm’s post-industrial landscape scars are growths with class implications. Her studies of Ruhr and Avesta detail processes of gentrification through which former industries are turned into sites of consumption for non-workers. In addition to physical gentrification through re-naturalization and art, the industrial heritage cases she explores are also processes of figurative gentrification, in which working-class histories are repackaged, bordered and hidden for redevelopment purposes. The concept of scar, like the concept of ruination, draws our attention to the long-term physical, sensorial and aesthetic processes through which industry becomes post-industry and industrial cities are redeveloped. Yet the organic metaphors of decay and growth, however productive they may be, fail to draw attention to the class implications of post-industrial heritage. To keep class at the centre of our analysis, I argue, we need to analyse industrial heritage as bordering class, or more specifically, gentrification.

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Conceptualizing Heritage in the Post-Industrial City All of the theoretical frameworks that I have described briefly here illuminate important aspects of what happens when heritage becomes part of urban redevelopment. ‘Museumification’ calls attention to processes of forgetting and remembering, the bordering of the past to disseminate desired histories, for example about technological innovation and human resilience, and ‘warehouse’ those that are unwanted, such as why industry left, what relations between workers and entrepreneurs were like, and what the consequences of industrial closure were for various participants. The concept of ‘performance’ foregrounds the imaginative and interactive processes through which heritage professionals and visitors co-create meaning at heritage sites as actors and audiences, particularly as these performances promote a sense of connection between the middle-class tourist and an imagined, yet decisively bordered and delimited, working class. ‘Ruination’  as a process of ‘creative destruction’ calls attention to the material, social and psychic processes of degradation, which include heritage-making itself as both a form of loss and deprivation for workers and an opportunity for consumption for new middle-class residents and visitors. The scar metaphor focuses attention on growth, forcing us to recognize that bordering industry, turning a site of production into a site of the ‘post’, always fundamentally changes it, typically through making labour less accessible. All of these analytical models suggest that industrial heritage creates borders in the post-industrial city, but none adequately spotlights what post-industrial heritage in the city does from the perspective of class. Scholars can, and do, use these terms to explore the class dimensions of industrial heritage, describing how heritage sites present working-class history to middle-class consumers (e.g. Stanton 2006), or exacerbate the sufferings of laid-off workers (e.g. Mah 2012), but the concepts of museumification, performance, ruination and scar do not suggest that industrial heritage inherently deals with class, despite the fact that all case studies of  industrial heritage have class components. Some of these concepts, particularly those that are grounded in organic processes, distract attention from the very human set of decisions that give rise to, and then steer, urban restructuring, intimating a naturalness to a process that is neither natural nor class neutral. The concepts that do point directly at the human dimensions of deindustrialization highlight imaginative processes and connect to pleasurable educational experiences like visiting a museum or watching a play. Such framing distracts attention from the very marginalization of the working class that is the precondition for this middle-class creativity.

36 • Maris Boyd Gillette

Heritage as Gentrification in the Post-Industrial City I argue that ‘gentrification’ best captures the class ‘bordering’, displacement and exclusion seen when industrial heritage is produced during the restructuring and redevelopment of post-industrial cities. As the empirical cases I have discussed indicate, this gentrification has physical-material and i­ deological-narrative components. The physical practice of designating material sites, typically former industrial buildings, as heritage, and transforming them into residences, offices for the ‘creative class’, and shopping areas – sites of consumption – is integral to the neoliberal goals of redevelopment in cities. Members of the working class must be removed from the sites of their disenfranchisement (former industrial areas) in favour of attracting residents, tourists and consumers with higher incomes to revalued post-­industrial zones. This is gentrification as we have understood the process since sociologist Ruth Glass first coined the term (1964). At industrial heritage sites, these material processes are accompanied by ideological and narrative ‘restructuring’, the processes of museumification, the performance of new place-based identities, and the ‘editing’ or ruining of working-class history to make ‘history light’, which can be conceptualized as figurative or mental gentrification. By excluding and recasting ­working-class histories and memories to please middle- and ­upper-middle-class consumers and tourists, ideological and narrative gentrification not only recapitulate but also legitimate the material processes of gentrification. Finally, industrial heritage gentrification typically includes ecological phenomena, wherein nature is ‘gentrified’ to appeal to middleand ­upper-middle-class sensitivities (see Sandberg 2014; Wolch et al. 2014). Sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term ‘gentrification’ to describe a class-based process of change occurring in central London neighbourhoods, where middle-class ‘gentry’ moved into working-class areas, opened businesses and demanded improved infrastructure (1964). Central to the process was displacing the urban poor. Since Glass coined the concept, scholars have studied gentrification in urban and other settings, analysing its causes, characteristics and consequences, and exploring the motives of participants (e.g. Atkinson and Bridge 2010; Brown-Saracino 2009; Smith 2002; van Weesep 1994). This research shows that gentrification may be ­gentry-led or government-initiated, but always entails displacing working-class residents from where they live and work, improving the built environment (which raises rents), and creating new amenities for the middle class (e.g. Hee et al. 2008; Storm 2014: 101–52; Yung et al. 2014). In post-industrial cities, turning former industries into heritage is a prominent component of urban gentrification. Numerous studies from Europe and North America describe how that industrial heritage is a strategy to

Theorizing Heritage in the Post-Industrial City  •  37

renew deindustrialized urban areas through tourism, middle-class consumption and the arrival of new entrepreneurs (e.g. Dicks 2000; Mah 2012; Stanton 2006; Storm 2014; Xie 2015). Similar processes are found in other, more recently deindustrialized parts of the world. For example, studies of the adaptive reuse of former factories in Beijing and Shanghai depict how municipal officials and developers use industrial heritage to bring the ­‘creative class’ and tourists to former industrial areas (e.g. Chen et al. 2016; Hee et al. 2008; Pendlebury et al. 2018; Yung et al. 2014). In recent years, environmental studies scholars have examined the role that urban green spaces play in gentrification (e.g. Sandberg 2014; Wolch et al. 2014). For example, domesticating and cultivating the post-­ industrial environment in the former limestone quarry today celebrated as Malmö’s ‘Grand Canyon’ has contributed to the gentrification of Limhamn (Sandberg 2014). The quarry has become what Sandberg describes as a ‘gated ecology’, ‘an open and orderly vegetation pattern’ that serves as an amenity for and spectacle to attract wealthy residents. The working-class history of the site has been almost totally removed and its industrial history is ignored, as the moniker ‘Malmö’s Grand Canyon’ suggests. No members of the working class live there, as housing costs in today’s Limhamn are too expensive for working-class incomes. Sandberg uses the concept of ‘environmental gentrification’ to draw attention to this process, and the types of flora and fauna that attract the middle class. He and others have argued that ecologists should work against gentrification by creating spaces that are ‘just green enough’ to improve neighbourhoods for existing residents without attracting gentrifiers (ibid.; see also Wolch et al. 2014). Industrial heritage is a part of physical processes of gentrification in the neoliberalizing post-industrial city. Materially, industrial heritage gentrification is about privatizing and selling post-industrial spaces and redesigning the built environment and nature to transform former sites of production into venues for consumption. Together with these material and physical processes come ideological ‘redevelopment’, the bordering and restructuring of history to create representations and interpretations of industry that attract middle- and upper-middle-class visitors, tourists and residents. Many scholars have critiqued industrial heritage sites as ‘sanitizing history’ (Berger et al. 2017: 42–43) and engaging in ‘wilful amnesia’ about class (de Bary 2004; see also High and Lewis 2007; Högberg 2011; Stanton 2006). What their analyses have not adequately demonstrated is how such figurative processes, through which key aspects of working-class history, environmental contamination and state policies are displaced from heritage narratives and experiences, are necessary bolsters to physical and material gentrification. The physical and material gentrification of former industrial areas are legitimated and supported by narrative bordering, ideologically

38 • Maris Boyd Gillette

restructuring the past to displace workers and appeal to ‘gentry’ such as tourists and new middle-class residents.

Concluding Remarks From the perspective of most urban officials and residents, the detritus of defunct former industries must be managed. Many regard turning former industrial sites into tourist attractions or heritage-enhanced nodes of new entrepreneurship as positive processes. Redevelopers clean up, re-outfit and repurpose former factory buildings for new uses, including commercial sales, artistic practices, business and tourism. Heritage professionals clean up, rearticulate and represent the histories of former industries, hoping to appeal to visitors and potential buyers or renters. Industry becomes clean, chic, amusing, a novelty to these new gentry, if it is redeveloped. Absent redevelopment, post-industrial settings are an eyesore, a waste, a symbol of decline and failure to grow. Heritage gentrification as a concept has the advantage of foregrounding the class dimensions of this process, the uneven and unequal consequences  of  urban restructuring for the working class and the middle and upper classes. It shows the relationship between material and ideological processes that undergird the production of industrial heritage. Yet like the other concepts discussed in this chapter, it has its limitations.  Among the potential problems of industrial heritage gentrification as an analytic tool is whether middle-class people recognize or associate themselves with the category ‘gentry’ (see also Brown-Saracino 2009). Another is the sentiment associated with gentrification; to some audiences, even including audiences of former workers, gentrification sounds like a positive development, an improvement of ‘blight’ and promise of a more hopeful future rather than a way to border, exclude and disenfranchise the working class. Heritage, the editors of this volume have suggested, is a technology of redevelopment in the neoliberal city. Bordering is key to urban restructuring, and heritage plays a role in this bordering. Heritage may be a technology  of  neoliberal bordering along many vectors, including race, ethnicity  and gender. When it comes to industrial heritage in the post-­ industrial city, however, class is always part of the material and ideological bordering that transforms dead industry into living heritage. While it may have flaws, gentrification as an analytic frame for understanding industrial heritage in the neoliberal city forces us to recognize these class dynamics at work.

Theorizing Heritage in the Post-Industrial City  •  39

Maris Boyd Gillette is a socio-cultural anthropologist and cultural historian who researches economic practices, social identities and material culture, primarily in modern China, but also the US, UK and Sweden. She participates regularly in collaborative action research with community institutions, including museums, media centres and municipal offices.  Her current research includes a project on mining tourism in China and a project on coastal fisheries in Sweden. She is Professor of Social Anthropology, School of Global Studies, the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

References Atkinson, R. and G. Bridge. 2010 [2004]. ‘Globalisation and the New Urban Colonialism’, in J. Brown-Saracino (ed.), The Gentrification Debates. New York: Routledge, pp. 51–61. Berger, S., C. Wicke and J. Golombek. 2017. ‘Burdens of Eternity? Heritage, Identity and the “Great Transition” in the Ruhr’, The Public Historian 39(4): 21–43. doi: 10.1525/tph.2017.39.4.21. Brown-Saracino, J. 2009. A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cameron, C. 2000. ‘Emergent Industrial Heritage: The Politics of Selection’, Museum Anthropology 23(3): 58–73. doi: 10.1525/mua.2000.23.3.58. Chen J., B. Judd and S. Hawken. 2016. ‘Adaptive Reuse of Industrial Heritage for Cultural Purposes in Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing’, Structural Survey 3 (4/5): 331–50. doi: 10.1108/SS-11-2015-0052. Coupland, B. and N. Coupland. 2014. ‘The Authenticating Discourses of Mining Heritage Tourism in Cornwall and Wales’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 18(4): 495–517. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12081. de Bary, O. 2004 ‘Deindustrialization and Museumification: from Exhibited Memory to Forgotten History’, Annals of the American Academy 595 (September 2004): 122–33. doi: 10.1177/0002716204266630. DeSilvey, C. and T. Edensor. 2012. ‘Reckoning with Ruins’, Progress in Human Geography 37(4): 465–85. doi:10.1177/0309132512462271. Dicks, B. 2000. Heritage, Place and Community. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Edensor, T. 2005. Industrial Ruins: Aesthetics, Materiality and Memory. Oxford: Berg. Gillette, M.B. 2017. ‘Deindustrialisation and Heritage in Three Crockery Capitals’, in Anne Helen Mydland and Neil Brownsword (eds), Topographies of the Obsolete: Ashmolean Papers. Crewe: The Printing House Ltd, pp 20–49. Glass, R. 1964. London: Aspects of Change. London: Centre for Urban Studies. Goffman, E. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre. Goodall, B. 1993. ‘Industrial Heritage and Tourism’, Built Environment 19(2): 92–104. Hee L., T. Schroepfer, N. Su and Z. Li. 2008. ‘From Post-Industrial Landscape to Creative Precincts: Emergent Spaces in Chinese Cities’, International Development Planning Review 30(3): 249–66. doi:10.3828/idpr.30.3.4.

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High, S. and D. Lewis. 2007. Corporate Wastelands: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Högberg, A. 2011. ‘The Process of Transformation of Industrial Heritage: Strengths and Weaknesses’, Museum International 63(1–2): 34–42. doi: 10.1111/j.14680033.2012.01761.x. Kesküla, E. 2013. ‘Reproducing Labor in the Estonian Industrial Heritage Museum’, Journal of Baltic Studies 44(2): 229–48. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2 013.775852. Mah, A. 2012. Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place: Landscapes and Legacies of Urban Decline. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Oakley, P. 2015. ‘A Permanent State of Decay: Contrived Dereliction at Heritage Mining Sites’, in H. Orange (ed.), Reanimating Industrial Spaces: Conducting Memory Work in Post-Industrial Societies. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 49–71. Pashkevich A. 2017. ‘Processes of Reinterpretation of Mining Heritage: The Case of Bergslagen, Sweden’, Almatourism 7 (2017): 107–23. doi: 10.6092/issn.2036-5195/ 6758. Pendlebury, J., Y.-W. Wang and A. Law. 2018. ‘Re-Using “Uncomfortable Heritage”: The Case of the 1933 Building, Shanghai’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 24(3): 211–29. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1362580. Petursdottir, P. 2012. ‘Concrete Matters: Ruins of Modernity and the Things Called Heritage’, Journal of Social Archaeology 13(1): 31–53. doi: https://doi. org/10.1177/1469605312456342. Qviström, M. 2018. ‘Farming Ruins: A Landscape Study of Incremental Urbanization’, Landscape Research 43(5): 575–86. doi: 10.1080/01426397.2017.1353959. Sandberg, L. 2014. ‘Environmental Gentrification in a Post-Industrial Landscape: The Case of the Limhamn Quarry, Malmö, Sweden’, Local Environment 19(10): 1068–85. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2013.843510. Shackel, P. and M. Palus. 2006. ‘Remembering an Industrial Landscape’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10(1): 49–71. doi:10.1007/S10761-006-0004-4. Smith, N. 2002. ‘New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy’, Antipode 34(3): 427–50. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8330.00249. Stanton, C. 2006. The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Post-Industrial City. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Storm, A. 2014. Post-industrial Landscape Scars. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Turner, V. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Van Weesep, J. 1994. ‘Gentrification as a Research Frontier’, Progress in Human Geography 18(1): 74–83. doi: 10.1177/030913259401800107. Walker, D. 2012. ‘Towards a Beneficial World Heritage: Community Involvement in the Blaenavon Industrial Landscape’, Museum International 63(1–2): 25–33. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0033.2012.01760.x. Wallace, M. 1987. ‘Industrial Museums and the History of Deindustrialization’, The Public Historian 9(1): 9–19. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3377102. Weber, Heike. 2019. ‘Twentieth-Century Wastescapes: Cities, Consumers, and Their Dumping Grounds’, in T. Soens et al. (eds), Urbanizing Nature: Actors and Agency (Dis)Connecting Cities and Nature since 1500. London: Routledge, Chapter 12.

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Wolch, J., J. Byrne and J. Newell. 2014. ‘Urban Green Space, Public Health, and Environmental Justice: The Challenge of Making Cities “Just Green Enough”’, Landscape and Urban Planning 125 (2014): 234–44. doi: 10.1016/j.landurbplan. 2014.01.017. Xie, P. 2015. Industrial Heritage Tourism. Bristol: Channel View Publications. Yung, E., E. Chan and Y. Xu. 2014. ‘Sustainable Development and the Rehabilitation of a Historic Urban District: Social Sustainability in the Case of Tianzifang in Shanghai’, Sustainable Development 22: 95–112. doi: 10.1002/sd.534.

8 CHAPTER 2 The Value of the Uncool Reflections on the Demolition of an Old Re-used Industrial Area Helena Holgersson

Introduction ‘We might have to skip the last 30 years’, an employee at one of the construction companies involved in the Kvillebäcken project told me during a walking interview, when I asked him if they were trying to research the history of the old run-down industrial site close to the old harbour, which I will refer to as the Gustaf Dalén area, that was being demolished to make room for the new residential blocks.1 In the marketing blog there had recently been a call for old stories from the area, and since it is a common practice to use historical references in real-estate advertising, I was interested if, and in that case how, this might be done regarding the Gustaf Dalén area. ‘It all depends on if you find … a history that is fun and interesting to tell. But it has been paint factories and … well, the kind of industry that isn’t the fun industry to remember’, the man continued as we made our way through the partly knocked down area. Today Gothenburg is often referred to as a post-industrial city. This does not mean that there are no industries left; Volvo is still producing cars here and the port is the largest in Scandinavia (Furåker 2010). But since the closing down of the shipyards in the 1970s the old central harbour has gradually been redeveloped into exclusive office and residential areas (von Sydow 2004). Many of the buildings along the riverbanks are newly-built, but in between them renovated brick factories and warehouses have been preserved, and together with the old cranes they now constitute important

The Value of the Uncool  •  43

aesthetic elements in the new narrative of Gothenburg as an ‘event and knowledge city’; in the official marketing film ‘Sustainable city open to the world’ (Gothenburg Municipality 2015) the old harbour is used as the main backdrop (Holgersson and Florin Persson 2018). Volvo’s present factory and the modern harbour are located well outside the city centre. In Industrial Cool (2008) ethnologist Robert Willim studied how the aesthetization and historization of industrial landscapes that we have seen in the past decades become part of city branding strategies, in which both municipalities and real-estate companies are involved. But how do ‘uncool’ places like the Gustaf Dalén area fit into the post-industrial city? In her research on small-scale participatory development in similar re-used industrial areas, architectural researcher Lisbeth Birgersson (1996: 58f ) argues that what from a planner’s perspective might appear as disorder, disturbances and congestion can be perceived as diversity, variation and closeness by small businesses. Her interviewees did not want any ‘total solutions’, but rather continuing participatory development. Naturally, literature on gentrification and conservation often focuses on areas where buildings have been officially listed by authorities in order to represent a city’s history and strengthen local identity, or renovated by occupants or property owners to create a sense of authenticity (e.g. Cheong and Fong 2018). But by looking at the negotiation around the transformation of the Gustaf Dalén area, where neither the public-private development consortium, who wanted to build a modern residential area, or the inhabitants, who wanted to keep their affordable venues, used arguments about cultural heritage or conservation, I think there is something to be learned about the limits of our tools to measure the qualities and characteristics of urban spaces. In an increasingly segregated city like Gothenburg there are, I argue, good reasons to protect ‘uncool’ buildings and ‘messy’ urban landscapes in central locations in order to preserve social environments where low-income residents can work, consume, organize and meet. My analysis is based on extensive empirical data including interviews, documents and observations gathered over a period of five years, 2010–2015.2

How the Gustaf Dalén Area Became New Kvillebäcken The old industrial area that is the focus of this chapter was located in close proximity to the now closed-down shipyards on Hisingen, the big island north of the Göta Älv river that runs through Gothenburg. The buildings were constructed in the 1930s and 1940s for small-scale industry, but since the 1950s these companies have been replaced – first by service and retail businesses and then also by migrant associations (Birgersson and Wrigglesworth 1984: 20ff; Olshammar 2002; Forsemalm 2007). A

Figure 2.1. The Gustaf Dalén area in 2001. © Helena Holgersson.

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real-estate inventory made by the Urban Planning Office 2001 presented above, ten years before the south part of the area was demolished, stated that fifty-two small businesses and associations were located there. There were many small property owners, but in the 1980s the two big property developers NCC and Wallenstam started investing and, over time, became the major landowners. Thereafter, they demolished some of their buildings without replacing them, long before the new zoning plan was decided on, which made the area appear abandoned and in decay. Up until the early 2000s, everyday life went on in the Gustaf Dalén area outside the spotlight of the media, but within a few years this had completely changed. During the period 2003–2007 the media continuously reported about minor crimes such as assault, illegal gambling and drug dealing, but also a number of more serious violent crimes. In 2007 the situation escalated, with three brutal murders. Looking more closely at the police reports we found that the three murders were all connected to a club that for a couple of years was located north of the area now being redeveloped, run by a member of the motorcycle club Hells Angels (Vikingsson 2007: 2). During this period the expression ‘The Gaza Strip’ started to appear in the press, and was often claimed by the local media to be what the area was called in popular speech (e.g. Micu 2006). This mostly seems to refer to the lawlessness and physical appearance of the area, but probably to some extent also to the multicultural character of the businesses and associations here. During our fieldwork we found no evidence of the claim that ‘The Gaza Strip’ was a local expression, none of our interviewees used it, nor it is found in any scholarly literature from that time (e.g. Olshammar 2002). However, the image that came with the concept indisputably contributed to the rapid stigmatization process that affected the area (see also Forsemalm 2007). It was in 2005, after decades of discussion, that the municipal executive committee of Gothenburg decided to delegate the undertaking of a complete redevelopment of the Gustav Dalén area to the municipal development company Riverbank Development [Älvstranden utveckling] (Adlers 2011). Negotiations soon began with the many property owners, and six private construction companies were invited to join Riverbank Development and form the ‘Kvillebäcken Consortium’. Later a municipal construction company also joined them. Early on Kvillebäcken was also made part of the plans for a new city district – the River City – that would tie together the mainland and the Hisingen island. The Kvillebäcken project was officially opened in May 2010, and as I write this the new residential area is almost completed. Of the fifty-two businesses and associations listed in the 2001 inventory (Gothenburg Urban Planning Department 2001, see figure 1), only one made it into the new area. Eleven had moved to the north part

The Value of the Uncool  •  47

of the Gustaf Dalén area or nearby areas such as Ringön, eight further out from the city centre, three to another part of the city, and twenty-nine had either closed down (for various reason), or we found no information about them.

Gentrification and Conservation Cultural heritage and conservation were never part of the negotiations around the complete transformation of the industrial area by Gustaf Dalén street. They are, however, often key components in redevelopment of both old residential areas and in former harbour and industrial sites. Already in the writing of London-based sociologist Ruth Glass, who coined the concept of gentrification in her research of the transformation of Barnsbury in Islington in the 1960s, historical preservation is pointed out as an aspect of the process where working-class neighbourhoods – consisting of rundown Victorian villas – were ‘invaded by the middle-classes – upper and lower’, and long-time residents were displaced (Glass 1964). As well as the fairly central location of Barnsbury and the affordable rents, the aesthetics was an important reason why this specific area started to draw the attention of ‘the gentry’, as Glass, with a twinkle in her eye, referred to the newcomers. The first wave of people moving in – often referred to as ‘pioneers’, making the colonial aspects of gentrification visible (e.g. Atkinson and Bridge 2005)  – consisted to a large degree of young architects, teachers, social workers and university lecturers. At this point the careful renovation of the buildings were not initiated by property owners, but performed by individual residents interested in cultural heritage and conservation (Lees et al. 2008: 10f ). The theoretical concept of gentrification was coined in London in the 1960s, but the process Glass describes can be historically identified much earlier and in cities around the world (Clark 2005). Following the oil crisis and the economic decline of the 1970s, many industries in cities of the global North closed down or moved production abroad, leaving cities with post-industrial landscapes of abandoned factories and warehouses. In research on the redevelopment of such areas, the urgent need for a wide definition of gentrification became apparent: Mark Davidson and Loretta Lees (2005) suggests these four criteria: 1) reinvestment of capital; 2) social upgrading of locales by incoming high-income groups; 3) landscape change; and 4) direct or indirect displacement of low-income groups. Besides Glass’ pioneering research, another iconic gentrification study is sociologist Sharon Zukin’s work on the transformation of Lower Manhattan in the 1970s, where young artists were able to rent whole lofts in

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former industrial brownstone buildings and turn them into live-in studios. Gentrification applies, Zukin argues, not just to a taste for Victorian villas, but similarly to manufacturing lofts converted into apartments (1987: 134). In her book Loft Living (1989: XIII) we learn that for a short period the area hosted a mix of tenants, where some of the old manufacturers were still there, but that the area soon ‘tipped’ towards residential use. In this phase conversions went from being occupier-led to being led by investors and ­real-estate developers; old leases were not renewed when expired, and rental apartments were converted into co-ops. In his dissertation Industrial Cool (2008) Robert Willim finds that it is mostly industrial buildings and sites from the nineteenth century or earlier that have been officially classified as industrial heritage; and that, parallelly, it is the same types of buildings that have been converted by property developers into exclusive housing. These grand brick factories have been made part of the post-industrial aesthetics by which cities signal that they are moving into a new economy. In Gothenburg the harbour cranes are left as monuments between new built residential houses and offices (Holgersson and Florin Persson 2018). In the last decades ‘storytelling’ has become very fashionable in the marketing of redeveloped areas. In this way the developers want to make buyers of apartments feel that the history of a place is part of their own life project (Forsell 2013: 120). Nevertheless, the modest buildings of the twentieth century, such as the premises in the Gustaf Dalén area, do not meet the criteria for being listed as worthy of preservation and do not have the potential to invoke feelings of authenticity, and are hence often demolished, even though they are regularly re-used in various ways (e.g. Birgersson 1996; Olshammar 2002). Issues of cultural heritage are part of both Glass’s and Zukin’s theoretical frameworks around gentrification; the aesthetics and authentic emanation of the Victorian villas and the Brownstone factories are central to their arguments. But as conservation researchers Caroline Cheong and Kecia Fong underline in a special issue on gentrification and conservation in the journal Change over Time, the relationship between the two is not casual. In their introduction they emphasize the need for critical analyses of who benefits from ‘urban revitalization’, but also request more nuances in the analyses (2018: 3ff ). One of the scholars that have described how historical preservationism often lead to gentrification is geographer Neil Smith; his very basic but useful concept ‘rent-gap’ became central for us in our analysis of the economical take-over of the Gustaf Dalén area. A rent-gap has emerged when the difference between the present and the potential economic output of a piece of land reaches a certain level (Smith 1996). And in this process the aesthetics, and the perceived authenticity, of the buildings are crucial.

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In his book The Urban Frontier, Smith describes how the run-down area Society Hill had once been ‘the home of Philadelphia’s gentry’; and how preservation literature in the 1960s started to describe it as ‘the most historic square mile in the nation’ (ibid.: 119f ). Soon the area started to attract three types of developers – occupiers, landlords and professionals (ibid.: 126), probably in that order. The transformation of this Philadelphia area is widely acknowledged as a success, but Smith highlights how it resulted  in  thousands of low-income, mostly African-American, residents being displaced (ibid.: 138). In her contribution to the special issue on gentrification and conservation, Francesca Rusello Ammon returns to Society Hill. The role of the progressive new arrivals was, she argues, more complex than Smith acknowledges. They were indeed part of the process of making the area more attractive to the middle class, but they were also important actors in mobilizing for the building of low-rent housing in the areas that, in turn, helped some of the displaced residents to return (2018: 16ff ). In Gothenburg the Haga area is the most obvious example of how cultural heritage arguments can make a difference in the mobilization against total renewal. In her thesis on the historization of Haga, conservation researcher Ingrid Martins Holmberg (2006) shows how crucial the discursive change  – where the notion of ‘old ugly Haga’ gradually changed into ‘old beautiful  Haga’ – was in the cancellation of the demolition plans. As a result of this shift, many of the old wooden buildings became listed as being  of  conservation  value. In her analysis of preconditions that made this discursive change possible, Martins Holmberg emphasizes the importance of the collaboration between the activist group Hagagruppen, where many members were students, researchers or public officials, and local worker’s associations (ibid.: 294ff ). However, the activists did not just want the buildings to be preserved, they also had visions of an independent and participatory conservation process, but this was not achieved. And as the renovations of the old houses began, they faced a difficult dilemma: if the renovations were made carefully and old interiors were left, the costs would be high and the rent increase substantial; but if the apartments were emptied and totally renewed, ‘old beautiful Haga’ would not be preserved after all. In the end, the preservation resulted in a large socio-economic transformation (ibid: 301f ), that other researchers have characterized as gentrification (e.g. Thörn 2013). The Haga case also explicates that what is considered as potential cultural heritage changes with time.

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The Value of a Run-down, Re-used Industrial Site The Municipality – Gradual Devaluation under Pressure With the review of research on gentrification and conservation as a backdrop, I will now look more closely at what the main parties – the municipality, the private developers and the former inhabitants – identified as qualities in the negotiation around the future of the run-down industrial area by Gustaf Dalén street. In the concluding discussion I will return to the question of what place ‘industrial uncool’ areas have in the post-industrial city. During the 1990s there was no municipal consensus on a plan for the Gustaf Dalén area. Architectural researcher Gabriella Olshammar (2002) characterizes the state that it became locked into as a ‘permanent provisory’, and shows how this resulted in very little maintenance being carried out and most leases being temporary. On the one hand, this enabled tenants with small economic means to establish themselves in the area, but on the other hand it prevented them from developing their businesses (Olshammar 2002: 93). During these years the Urban Planning Department published programmes and inventories where they mapped out how the run-down industrial buildings had been re-used and analysed what the municipality considered valuable (e.g. Gothenburg Urban Planning Department 1990, 2001, 2002). Cultural heritage was one parameter. Since the 1960s the municipality has been listing ‘typically Gothenburgian’ buildings and urban environments that need to be protected and attended to since they mirror the development of the city (Gothenburg Urban Planning Department 1999: 8). In the first volume of the preservation programme published in 1999, five years before the decision to completely redevelop the area was taken, no buildings in the Gustaf Dalén area were included, and the 2002 Planning Programme reads: The area has no individual buildings that are assessed to have particular cultural historical value. Many buildings have been demolished and only remainder of older industrial premises in various condition are left. The programme opens up for new buildings to be added to the old buildings. The continuing planning will show if and how older buildings can be used. (Gothenburg Urban Planning Department 2002: 38)

In 2002 the aim was to redevelop the blocks into a mixed-use area with housing and offices. The question raised is if and how older buildings can be used, not how they can be protected. In the 2002 programme many aspects aside from cultural historical values are analysed, such as traffic, greenery, land use, adjacent areas, etc.

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An inventory of the endangered water plant Knölnate and a plan for its protection is suggested (ibid: 11). The social consequences of a redevelopment are discussed, and the municipality do recognize wider social qualities in the area: ‘Several businesses in the area are run by people that might have difficulties to enter the conventional labour market. The area fulfils an important social function and is probably of importance to the growth of new companies. Therefore, the activities are of great importance to society’ (ibid.: 39). It is acknowledged that the precondition for these activities is the low rent, but in the following section the programme states that the proposed renewal could entail some of them having to move from the place. In this programme the tenants in the area are almost exclusively described as small businesses owners, although at this time a significant number of them were ‘migrant associations’ (see the map above). Consequently, the social consequences of their displacement from the place are not addressed by the municipality. And, unlike in Haga forty years before, there was no collective mobilization. I will return to that later. In the end, the Gustaf Dalén area was not developed into a mixed-use area. In the early 2000s the idea of a new city centre – the River City – was introduced, which made a rent-gap open up in the Gustaf Dalén area (Smith 1987), which had up until then not been perceived as central. Already in 2006 there was an unofficial draft of a future area where all existing buildings were demolished, ordered by the Property Management Administration and ‘known and supported’ by the partners in the consortium (Riverbank Development 2006). The zoning plan that was officially approved in 2009 similarly describes a degree of development that postulates that no old structures are kept. A former Urban Planning Department official who had been responsible for the 2002 document explains: ‘And you could say that there was a general interest in doing this … and that this place would develop … and it became clear that there wasn’t going to be any financial benefit in what we had suggested here’. Today private stakeholders often get involved in redevelopment projects in such an early stage that plans – and investments – are made long before there is a new zoning plan (e.g. Hanssen Sandjær 2012). As I write this in 2019 it seems, however, as if the Kvillebäcken project is not considered an unambiguous success by the Gothenburg municipality. When the plans for Ringön – a small-scale industrial area next to New Kvillebäcken where some of the displaced tenants from the Gustaf Dalén area moved – are presented, they describe the continuing importance of the small companies and how the ambition is to develop the area slowly and organically to keep the ‘character’ of the area (Gothenburg Municipality 2019b). Keeping the rents low is emphasized, but it remains to be seen how that can be realized. Ringön has been identified as a place for culture, and

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through different projects creatives and artists have been offered affordable venues and spaces here, which means that unlike in the Gustaf Dalén area, there is now a group of ‘pioneers’ on Ringön (Kjellberg 2019: 37ff; Olshammar 2019). The future will tell how this plays out, but fifty years of gentrification research suggests that this will most likely affect the image of the area and, consequently, the real-estate values. A recent ethnographic study of the negotiations around venues for artists and cultural workers in Gothenburg describes the new municipal tool Cultural Consequence Analysis (KKA) as a result of the growing awareness within the municipal administration of the gentrification effects of redevelopment (Kjellberg 2019). This tool is modelled after the Social Consequence Analysis (SKA) that was also developed after the Kvillebäcken project. The aim is to start out from people’s different life situations and needs when physical change is planned, to gain increased knowledge about the place, and to identify important social aspects that need to be handled in the planning process (Gothenburg Municipality 2019a). However, the civil servants in Ida Kjellberg’s ethnography constantly had to deal with conflicts of goals, and in their experience, it was to a large extent the economic arguments that set the frame (Kjellberg 2019: 67).

The Private Developers – A Rent-Gap without Useable Assets Private developers are not necessarily uninterested in industrial buildings, but they need to be ‘industrial cool’ structures that, when restored and complemented with modern design, can create a sense of authenticity and hence attractivity. The Juvel Mill [ Juvelkvarnen] a few kilometres west of Kvillebäcken, next to the river, is a good example of this. The brick building is part of the municipality’s conservation programme (Gothenburg Urban Planning Department 1999: 374), but was renovated and rebuilt by private builder JM ten years ago. A recent advertisement on Hemnet,  Sweden’s biggest online marketplace for home buyers, for a  condo  here presents it as ‘warehouse living’ and reads ‘Here you live on  historical ground, in a house where the feeling is “in the walls”, right next to Eriksberg’s quayside’ (Hemnet 2019b). At sites like the Juvel Mill the interests of conservators and real-estate companies sometimes intersect, but as Willim discusses, this is not always a smooth collaboration; preservation and development are not necessarily the same thing (Willim 2008: 67ff ). A sense of authenticity can be constructed without the preservation of buildings that a heritage listing entails; a condo in a new building in the Juvel Mill area, with ‘industrial architecture’, is up for sale in a similar ad; the façade is constructed with bricks from the old original building (Hemnet 2019a).

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In around 2010, my interviewees from the private developers in the consortium referred to two parallel images of the Gustaf Dalén area. On the one hand they described the area as a criminal node, and on the other hand as empty. When these two images overlapped, the area appeared as a place where there was nothing but criminality. In that representation most of the inhabitants were made invisible, and hence the Gustaf Dalén area as a social space too. During a walking interview through the partly run-down area, a man from one of the construction companies said: We talk a lot about this with the soul of the place, what is that soul, what should you build on? … and how should you confirm the place. These are important issues. But at the same time, a site like this … it’s very motley and … messy. It didn’t feel as if there was very much of value in the area that you could pick up on.

In the Gustaf Dalén area the builders in the consortium identified neither industrial structures nor an industrial history that could ‘be picked up on’ in the newly built residential area. The old modest paint factory building, that in the early 2000s had hosted a number of flea markets, an art studio and a glazier company (block I in the map above), had been knocked down and the paint production was dismissed as not being a ‘fun industry to remember’. The total demolition of the Gustaf Dalén area has often been legitimatized with reference to the violent crimes just outside the area in 2007 – ‘Something has to be done, we can’t have it like this!’, said the chair of the municipal board in her inauguration speech, and referred to the area as ‘the Gaza Strip’. However, in our analysis of the process we found that the unofficial decision to completely redevelop the area was taken two years before the events in question took place (Thörn and Holgersson 2016: 677f ). In gentrification research stigmatization campaigns are known to precede redevelopment projects (e.g. Wilson and Grammenos 2005; Kallin and Slater 2014). This did, however, create problems in the marketing of the new areas, which explains why the man quoted in the very beginning of this chapter suggested that they had to ‘skip the last 30 years’. Interestingly though, a woman from one of the construction companies recognized ‘storytelling’ as an ‘established concept’ and saw potential in the ‘Gaza Strip’ narrative: No, but I think that … it’s a fun place since it has such a history … many, I think, turn it into a negative story, and of course it … has been a place where a lot has been going on … activities that you don’t want-, or that you don’t accept. But it’s still something to build on … in this storytelling, that it becomes interesting that way.

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It would be too soon to use this story now, the woman stated, but ‘maybe in a hundred years’. In Industrial Cool Willim shows how a precondition for the aesthetization of the manufacturing industry is a distance from its negative characteristics; fewer and fewer in the West have personal experience of this labour. The same might be true of specific types of criminality, but the distance would probably, as the women suggested, need to be even bigger. There are examples where a place’s criminal past becomes almost a cultural heritage. For example, in East End in London there are guided tours in the footsteps of Jack the Ripper (Wilbert and Hansen 2009). To summarize, private developers have an instrumental interest in industrial buildings and history. In the contemporary post-industrial city, ‘warehouse’ living is very attractive, but from the perspective of real estate developers, there was nothing in the Gustaf Dalén area that could have invoked that ‘authentic’ atmosphere.

The Inhabitants – Central, Affordable and Adjustable Premises Our interviewees among the remaining tenants in the area at the time of the inauguration, and in the block just north of it, were both entrepreneurs and  members of associations. Their stories illustrated well what it means to  live in a ‘permanent provisory’ (Olshammar 2002). The main reason  that  they wanted to stay put was that the Gustaf Dalén area offered them affordable venues in a central location close to public transport. One man from the Finnish association for pensioners, with a venue just across the street from the redevelopment site, worried that they would soon also have to move. It would be very difficult to find a similar venue, he figured: Because this is the best place to have activities on, right here. Most people are from around here, that usually comes. And then further out, it’s those who are interested in dance and such that come here. So … it’s the best place. … But … I’ve been self-employed, and I have that experience that … market rents … then I know what happens. If there are any venues at all to rent, in those places … but there probably isn’t.

In the Gustaf Dalén area, the buildings’ exteriors were often poorly maintained, but many of the tenants had been able to renovate their buildings in relation to their specific needs, with some financial support from the landlords. The Finnish pensioners had built a tango floor and a radio studio, and in a closed factory there was now a mosque and a garage. (For a detailed visual ethnography, see Despotovic and Thörn 2016.) Most of the companies and associations in the area had short-term leases, but a few actually

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owned their premises. However, since a new zoning plan for the area was under preparation this was no guarantee that the latter would be able to stay. In gentrification research it is often presumed that industrial structures are primarily attractive to the middle classes, but in my experience this could just as likely be the case with low-income long-time residents. Industrial heritage is, of course, as relevant to the working class (e.g. Lindqvist 1978). But when it comes to renovated brick factory buildings, such as the Juvel Mill, the question is not who would want to live there but rather who can afford to. However, the fact that our interviewees in the Gustaf Dalén area were not there for aesthetic or nostalgic reasons did not mean that they were not attached to the area. The investments that they had made in the venues was as much emotional as economical, even though they had little to do with conservation. One woman from Iran had spent money, time and effort to carefully renovate an old garage into a butchers’ shop: I’ve worked … you know, almost around the clock, physically and mentally, you know … it was really hard! So I made every centimetre myself. Sometimes I drove one of these … trailers five-six times a day, drove stuff and … It was really hard! … And then there was the construction, and then the environment committee, and then the labour inspection, ventilation…

She had hoped that she and her husband could stay there until they retired, and she proudly showed us round when we visited her, but in the end, she was the only tenant who made it into the new area, as the manager of the new indoor market. With regard to the man from Finland, he had definitely invested emotionally in his venue, but during our walking interview he also told me how on his way there he always passed the site where the paint factory where he worked in the 1960s had been located. To the construction companies this was not ‘a fun history to remember’, but to him it evoked memories of his first years in Sweden as a teenager (see Holgersson 2017). As part of our research project of the transformation of the Gustaf Dalén area we often brought colleagues there. On one occasion a visiting German artist suggested that the best strategy for the Finnish association would be to invite students for karaoke nights and dance classes. It would be possible to frame both the venue and the Finnish tango as ‘exotic’ or ‘kitsch’ in a way that would probably have appealed to a young hipster audience, and this might have made a difference in the negotiations around the area. Research suggests that at such times, progressive incomers with the right social and cultural capital have a better chance to mobilize and help formulate alternative narratives than long-time low-income residents. As I already discussed,

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in Haga this was crucial for the cancelation of the demolition plans (Martins Holmberg 2006; see also Russello Ammon 2018 and Brown Saracino in this volume). There are many reasons why there was no mobilization against the redevelopment among the tenants in the Gustaf Dalén area. Most importantly, most of them knew that something was about to happen, but had very limited knowledge of the details of the plans. Also important was the fact that this was a very difficult area in which to feel a sense of belonging. After years of stigmatization most of our interviewees had ambivalent feelings about their neighbours and preferred to talk about their own spaces and community rather than the area as a whole (Holgersson 2014a). That tango dancing hipsters would have been able to mobilize against the consortium and change the plans using arguments about the social values of the area is unlikely. Cultural heritage and conservation still constitute a much stronger argument.

Concluding Discussion In this chapter I didn’t exclusively focus on cultural heritage and conservation; instead, I wanted to discuss the more general value of ‘industrial uncool’ areas like the – now demolished – one by Gustaf Dalén street in an increasingly segregated city like Gothenburg. Summing up, I want to elaborate on three lines of thoughts. Firstly, going through research on conservation and gentrification and the refurbishing of old industrial buildings, it is clear that even though private developers and local authorities alike can share an interest in both industrial history and industrial buildings, their motives for initiating urban development projects clearly differ – at least up until quite recently. Roughly described, private developers tend to look for ‘industrial cool’ buildings, such as nineteenth-century brick factories, and an industrial history that is ‘fun to tell’, as the man quoted in the introduction put it. Since the first gentrification studies in London over fifty years ago, researchers have identified historical buildings of the right kind – Victorian villas in Barnsbury, brownstone buildings in Society Hill, manufacturing lofts in SoHo, and picturesque working-class wooden houses in Haga – as an important factor with regard to why ‘pioneers’ and/or real-estate companies take notice of an area that is, at that point, predominantly populated by low-income residents and small non-chain businesses. ‘Authentic’ buildings can, as I have already discussed above, play an important part in the growth of a rent-gap (Smith 1987). Simply put, private developers know that in post-industrial cities, renovated or refurbished ‘cool’ urban landscapes will attract well-off house buyers.

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In the book that lists buildings of cultural historical value in Gothenburg (Gothenburg Municipality 1999), the motives behind the programme are described as preserving and actualizing cultural heritage, ensuring continuity in the external environment, supporting the local cultural identity and raising awareness about aesthetic values and historical contexts (Gothenburg Municipality 1999: 7). In some cases, such as the Juvel Mill, this administration might be able to collaborate with private developers, but in other cases they might not accept the changes that they propose (e.g. Willim 2008: 66ff ). Returning to the Gustaf Dalén area, where nothing was ever listed, I find it logical that the private developers didn’t find any qualities there. The buildings didn’t have the potential to be refurbished in a way that would imbue the area with the authenticity that would have attracted their target group. And with regard to the municipality, I think they were right in not listing any houses, as they hardly met the criteria for preservation. I do, however, find it remarkable that the social values in the area were gradually downplayed after the River City project was launched, until the plan became total demolition. In times of entrepreneurial urban governance (Harvey 1989; Franzén, Hertting and Thörn 2016), when urban development is almost exclusively organized in public/private partnerships, such as the Kvillebäcken consortium, it seems crucial to elaborate on why the interests of the municipality and the private developers came to overlap to such a large extent. This brings me to my next point. Secondly, it seems as though the Kvillebäcken project has become a point of reference in the municipality of Gothenburg, for instance in the redevelopment of the close-by, partly re-used industrial area Ringön, where they explicitly state that they are trying to do things differently (Kjellberg 2019: 38; Olshammar 2019). Today, there is very interesting critical work on immaterial cultural heritage and heritagization (see for example Smith 2006; Harrison 2013). But in the case of the Gustaf Dalén area, I argue that it wasn’t an area suited for preservation, but rather in need of recognition of its usability. In a city with high ambitions to promote social equality and reduce spatial segregation (Gothenburg Municipality 2017), tools to protect ‘uncool’ places are important. In her research on re-used industrial areas, Lisbeth Birgersson emphasizes the need not to trust one’s own impression when one visits unknown environments of this kind. What might appear to an outsider as disorganized, inefficient and only half finished, might be perceived by its inhabitants as self-organized and open for diversity and collaborations (1996: 73; see also Holgersson 2014b). Today, post-industrial inner cities are at constant risk of over-aestheticization, of becoming a scene for the middle classes, designed according to their preferences of authenticity and consumer tastes (Zukin 2008: 734). The visiting German artist, who

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suggested that in order to be able to stay put the Finnish association needed to organize karaoke nights for hipsters, might have been right, but there is something deeply problematic in the fact that the value of an area cannot be appreciated without the gaze and voice of the middle class. If the Finnish association had invited students, these activities would have replaced, or at least fundamentally changed, their own tango nights. The municipalities’ role ought to be to protect their right to the city. The new social consequence analysis tool seems to be an attempt at that. Thirdly, looking at the literature on conservation and gentrification, it seems important not to simplify the relation between the two. On the one hand, because of their income level and their cultural capital, certain segments of the middle class will become gentrifiers wherever they chose to live in the inner city. Property developers, today both private and public, will of course keep track of where they go, and over time their presence is likely to affect rents and property values in a way that might cause the displacement of former long-time, low-income residents (Zukin 1987). They will probably also offer subsidized spaces to gentrifiers as a means to start closing the rent-gap. On the other hand, there are also studies that suggest that this group have the best preconditions to mobilize against displacement, together with their neighbours with a lower income (e.g. Russello Ammon 2018; Brown Saracino in this volume). In the Gustaf Dalén area there were no ‘pioneers’, and no middle class ‘discovered’ and created a new spatial narrative. As we showed in our analysis of the take-over process, the area rapidly went from being considered distant to being considered central when the municipality launched their grand plans for the River City in the old harbour. Differently put, a rent-gap suddenly opened. The lack of middle-class presence was probably the reason why the area was left alone for such a long time despite its location, stuck in a ‘permanent provisory state’ (Olshammar 2002). In the Kvillebäcken project one important goal was to ‘make people cross the river’. Interestingly enough, a large proportion of our interviewees in the area lived in the satellite suburbs on the mainland. The consortium was obviously not referring to them. At the same time though, if there had been middle-class tenants – or karaoke night-time visitors – it is possible that we would have seen organized resistance of some kind against the plans. A few inhabitants who also owned their properties did appeal individually, but eventually lost or were offered new premises elsewhere. A great motivation in our research about the Kvillebäcken project was to write an ethnography of the uncool, everyday, multicultural life in the Gustaf Dalén area prior to the demolition. It was a socially valuable place long after the factories closed, and that needs to be acknowledged, especially since the marketing of the now completed residential area is likely to continue to ‘skip the last 30 years’.

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Helena Holgersson has a PhD in sociology and works as a senior lecturer at the Department of Cultural Sciences at the University of Gothenburg. In her research she explores the relation between culture and democracy from a cultural studies perspective. Her work on gentrification is based on ethnographic methods such as walk-alongs, and focuses on everyday experiences of urban inequality and displacement. She is currently involved in the research project ‘For whom is the city built? A study of goal conflicts, migration patterns and living conditions in the densified city’, funded by the government research council Formas within the framework of a call for research on housing policy for social sustainability. NOTES 1. The industrial area did not have any commonly accepted name prior to the redevelopment, but in everyday language it seems to have been called things like ‘behind Backaplan’. In my analysis I have to call it something, and following architectural researcher Gabriella Olshammar (2002), who studied the area in the 1990s, I use the term ‘the Gustaf Dalén area’, referring to Gustaf Dalénsgatan, the street that runs through it. 2. The research project was funded by The Swedish Research Council (grant number 2009–1296) and led by Catharina Thörn.

References Adlers, Christina. 2011. ‘Från slum till hållbar stadsdel’, Byggindustrin, 24 June. Retrieved 31 July 2013 from http://www.byggindustrin.com/fran-slum-till-hall​ bar-stadsdel__8898. Atkinson, Rowland and Gary Bridge. 2005. Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism. Milton Park: Routledge. Birgersson, Lisbeth. 1996. Att bygga mening och rum: Om processer för utveckling av verksamhetsmiljöer. PhD thesis. Chalmers Technical University, Department of Industrial Architecture and Planning. Birgersson, Lisbeth and Trad Wrigglesworth. 1984. ‘Industrihistorisk Inventering av Göteborgsområdet’, Report from the Country Administrative Boards of Gothenburg and Bohus County. Cheong, Caroline and Kecia Fong. 2018. ‘Gentrification and Conservation: Examining the Intersection’, Change over Time 8(1): 2–7. Clark, Eric. 2005. ‘The Order and Simplicity of Gentrification: A Political Challenge’, in Rowland Atkinson and Gary Bridge (eds), Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism. Milton Park: Routledge. Davidson, Mark and Loretta Lees. 2005. ‘New-build “Gentrification” and London’s Riverside Renaissance’, Environment and Planning A 37(7): 1165–90. Despotovic, Katarina and Catharina Thörn. 2016. Den urbana fronten: En dokumentation av makten över staden. Stockholm: Arkitektur.

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Forsell, Håkan. 2013. Bebodda platser: Studier av vår urbana samtidshistoria. Stockholm: Arkitektur förlag. Forsemalm, Joakim. 2007. Bodies, Bricks and Black Boxes: Power Practices in City Conversion. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg, Department of Ethnography. Franzén, Mats, Nils Hertting and Catharina Thörn. 2016. Stad till salu: Entreprenörsurbanismens och det offentliga rummets värde. Gothenburg: Daidalos. Furåker, Bengt. 2010. ‘A Post-Industrial City?’, in Helena Holgersson, Catharina Thörn, Håkan Thörn and Mattias Wahlström (eds), (Re)searching Gothenburg: Essays on a Changing City. Gothenburg: Glänta produktion, pp. 51–57. Glass, Ruth. 1964. ‘Introduction: Aspects of Change’, in London: Aspects of Change, edited by Centre for Urban Studies. London: MacKibbon and Kee, pp. xiii–xlii. Gothenburg Municipality. 2015. ‘Sustainable City Open to the World’, marketing film. Retrieved 7 February 2022 rom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAj-F1t​ zee4&feature=youtu.be. Gothenburg Municipality. 2017. ‘Jämlikhetsrapporten 2017: Skillnader i livsvillkor i Göteborg’. Report. Gothenburg Municipality. 2019a. ‘Barnkonsekvensanalys och social konsekvensanalys’. Retrieved 7 February 2022 from https://goteborg.se/. Gothenburg Municipality. 2019b. ‘Stadsutveckling: Ringön’. Retrieved 7 February 2022 from https://stadsutveckling.goteborg.se/projekt/ringon/ Gothenburg Urban Planning Department. 1990. ‘Program för området nordost om Vågmästareplatsen, dnr 2224: 89, 4 September. Gothenburg Urban Planning Department. 1999. Kulturhistoriskt värdefull bebyggelse i Göteborg: Ett program för bevarande, del 1. Gothenburg Urban Planning Department. 2001. ‘Östra Kvillebäcken: Fastighetsinventering’, Distrikt Norr. Gothenburg Urban Planning Department. 2002. ‘Program inför förnyelsen av Östra Kvillebäcken’, dnr 1326/01, 16 December. Hanssen Sandkjær, Gro. 2012. ‘Negotiating Urban Space: The Challenge of Political Steering in Market- and Network-oriented Urban Planning’, Scandinavian Political Studies 35(1): 22–47. Harrison, Rodney. 2013. Heritage: Critical Approaches. Milton Park: Routledge. Harvey, David. 1989. ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography 71(1): 3–17. Hemnet. 2019a. ‘Bratteråsgatan 62, Eriksberg, Göteborg’. Retrieved from www.hemnet. se on 28 August 2019. ______. 2019b. ‘Bratteråsgatan 72, Eriksberg, Göteborg’. Retrieved from www.hemnet. se on 28 August 2019. Holgersson, Helena. 2014a. ‘Post-Political Narratives and Emotions: Dealing with Discursive Displacement in Everyday Life’, in Hannah Jones and Emma Jackson (eds), Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging: Emotion and Location. London: Routledge, pp. 115–26. ______. 2014b. ‘Challenging the Hegemonic Gaze on Foot: Walk-Alongs as a Useful Method in Gentrification Research’, in Timothy Shortell and Everick Brown (eds), Walking in the European City: Quotian Mobility and Urban Geography. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 207–24.

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______. 2017. ‘Keep Walking: Notes on How to Research Urban Pasts and Futures’, in Charlotte Bates and Alex Rhys-Taylor (eds), Walking Through Social Research. London: Routledge, pp. 70–85. Holgersson, Helena and Erik Florin Persson. 2018. ‘A Deceptive Return to Welfare State Rhetoric in the Marketing Initiatives of Gothenburg’, Mediapolis 3(1). Retrieved 7 February 2022 from https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2018/02/​ a-deceptive-return/. Kjellberg, Ida. 2019. ‘Med kulturen som (värdeskapande) hyresgäst: En etnografisk studie om Göteborgs Stads arbete med kultur, lokaler och stadsplanering’. Master’s thesis. University of Gothenburg: Department of Cultural Sciences. Lees, Loretta., Evin Wyly and Tom Slater. 2008. Gentrification. Milton Park: Routledge. Lindqvist, Sven. 1978. Gräv där du star: Hur man utforskar ett jobb. Stockholm: Bonniers. Martins Holmberg, Ingrid. 2006. På stadens yta: Historiseringen av Haga. Gothenburg: Makadam. Micu, Patrik. 2006. ‘I folkmun kallas området “Gazaremsan”’, Göteborgs Tidning, 20 March. Olshammar, Gabriella. 2002. Det Permanentade provisoriet: Ett återanvänt industriområde i väntan på rivning eller erkännande. Gothenburg: Chalmers Technical University. ______. 2019. ‘Maintaining Urban Complexities: Seeking Revitalization without Gentrification of an Industrial Riverfront in Gothenburg, Sweden’, Culture Unbound 11(1): 53–77. Riverbank Development. 2006. ‘Landowners Meeting Minutes’. December 21. Russello Ammon, Francesca. 2018. ‘Resisting Gentrification Amid Historic Preservation: Society Hill, Philadelphia, and the Fight for Low-Income Housing’, Change over Time 8(1): 8–31. Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. New York: Routledge. Smith, Neil. 1987. ‘Gentrification and the Rent Gap’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77(3): 462–65. ______. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge. Thörn, Catharina and Helena Holgersson. 2016. ‘Revisiting the Urban Frontier through the Case of New Kvillebäcken, Gothenburg’, City 20(5): 663–84. Thörn, Håkan. 2013. Stad i rörelse: Stadsomvandlingen och striderna om Haga och Christiania. Stockholm: Atlas Akademi. Vikingsson, Karolina. 2007. ‘Tredje mordet i år på Ångpannegatan’, Aftonbladet, 7 December. von Sydow, Åsa. 2004. Exploring Local Governance in Urban Planning and Development: The Case of Lindholmen. Gothenburg and Stockholm: KTH. Wilbert, Chris and Rikke Hansen. 2009. ‘Walks in Spectral Space: East London Crime Scene Tourism’, in André Jansson and Amanda Lagerkvist (eds), Strange Places: Explorations into Mediated Obscurities. London: Routledge. Willim, Robert. 2008. Industrial Cool: Om postindustriella fabriker. PhD thesis. University of Lund: Faculty of Arts. Wilson, David and Dennis Grammenos. 2005. ‘Gentrification, Discourse, and the Body: Chicago’s Humboldt Park’, Environment and Planning D 23(2): 295–312.

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Zukin, Sharon. 1987. ‘Gentrification: Culture and Capital in the Urban Core’, Annual Review of Sociology 13: 129–47. ______. 1989. Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. ______. 2008. ‘Consuming Authenticity: From Outposts of Difference to Means of Exclusion’, Cultural Studies 22(5): 724–48.

8 CHAPTER 3 ‘Cleaning up’ Heritage in the Post-Industrial City Making Heritage, Gentrification and Legitimacy in Gamlestaden Feras Hammami and Chiara Valli

Up until the 1960s, when Sweden experienced some of its most significant socio-economic and infrastructural transformations due to industrialization, urbanization and modernization, demolition and rebuilding were the most celebrated methods for ‘cleaning up’ troublesome city areas and sparking urban regeneration. Overcrowded, dilapidated inner-city areas became symbols of a poorer, pre-welfare state era, which modern Sweden was keen to leave behind. Clearing neighbourhoods from decaying, sub-standard built environments and replacing them with new and up-to-date neighbourhoods with high standards and services was seen as the primary way to build a modern, prosperous and – crucially – more equal society. Planning and housing provision in Sweden have drastically changed since then (Grundström and Molina 2016), and so have the implications for heritage and history conservation. Like in other countries in the Global North, a growing interest in architectural history and conservation of historic buildings and environments led to overcoming demolition and rebuilding as the main strategy for renewal and brought about new methods for conservation such as restoration, removing alterations and enforcing spatial order. Moreover, the so-called late ­twentieth-century ‘heritage boom’ (Hewison 1987; Lowenthal 1998) revealed the value of former working-class and post-industrial neighbourhoods not only as common cultural goods, but also as untapped potential for economic gains (Thörn and Holgersson 2016). At the heart of this, discourses

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of creative cities proliferated about ideas of culture, creative economy and urban attractiveness. Neighbourhoods with historic significance have been brought into processes of heritagization (Gibson and Pendlebury 2009; Harvey C. 2001) and incorporated in official narratives of value (Hammami and Uzer 2018). Similarly, early twentieth-century industrial buildings have been brought into prominent processes of heritagization, revealing their aesthetics, once ‘cleaned up’ and restored, to mark territories as appealing and trendy (see Gillette and Holgersson in this book). These processes of devaluation and hence re-evaluation, however, are never culturally nor socially ‘neutral’, but rather engender social consequences in the areas where they take place, and often result in urban gentrification and material and symbolic displacement (Valli 2015, 2020; Zukin 2008). In this chapter, we acknowledge the radical change in the underlying ideology for urban renewal, but we also see how a legacy of ideas of cleanliness and order in connection to social issues is still persistent, guiding and legitimating urban transformation strategies. We explored these arguments in relation to the ongoing large-scale urban renewal redevelopments in Gamlestaden, an inner-city area of Gothenburg with clear and intersecting traces of different historical eras. In Gothenburg strategic development plans, the implemented redevelopment is meant to make Gamlestaden into a ‘central city area’ and hence raise its socio-economic and symbolic status in the city ecosystem (Göteborgs-Stad 2009). Interviews with civil servants, real estate owners and residents, on-site observation and analysis of development plans and unofficial documents showed how the redevelopment recalls a third-wave gentrification process (Hackworth and Smith 2001). The multiple layers of history and meaning that constitute the identity of Gamlestaden uncovered an unspoken role for heritage in the implementation and rationalization of the redevelopment plans (Hammami 2021). Situating the ongoing social and spatial transformations within the historical context of Gamlestaden prompted us to explore the ways in which ideas of cleanliness, diversity/homogeneity and order are used to build legitimacy, ‘resolving’ social conflicts and making room to accommodate a desired wealthier population and a plethora of city uses while displacing others. In the remainder of this chapter, we show how public debates have been dominated by a rhetoric of cleanliness and order, discursively associated with notions of safety and security that enable gentrifying policies as well as authorized heritage-making (Smith and Waterton 2012) to be portrayed as rational and progressive development. First, we present a conceptual framework around the central concepts of gentrification, cleanliness, heritagization and legitimacy, and then use this framework to explore and discuss the ongoing redevelopment plans of Gamlestaden, outlining relations between urban redevelopment and heritagization.

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Cleanliness, Gentrification and Legitimation as Heritage-Making Many of the contemporary large urban redevelopment processes in Sweden, including the urban transformation in our case study Gamlestaden, adhere to what geographers Hackworth and Smith (2001) described as ‘state-led’ or ‘third-wave’ gentrification: such processes are led by large developers and actively promoted and sustained by the ‘entrepreneurial local state’ (Harvey 1989). Namely, third-wave gentrification features four characteristics that differentiate it from other pivotal forms of gentrification: first, the process is not confined to the city centre, but expands to inner-city and more peripheral urban areas; second, due to the globalization and expansion of the real estate industry, real estate companies often have a triggering and ‘orchestrating’ role in reinvestments, rather than joining in after the area has been ‘tamed’ for changes; third, the state has become more interventionist and more openly supports gentrification through infrastructural interventions and land-use reforms; fourth, community resistance to ­gentrification has declined, due to the normalized displacement of the working classes from the city centres (Hackworth and Smith 2001). The case study description in the following section will make the first three aspects apparent, while the fourth characteristic, i.e. the creation of consensus around gentrification, will be the focus of our analysis section. In our analysis we show how consensus around city redevelopment and gentrification is built by discursively and materially ‘cleaning up’ conflictual elements from the area under redevelopment and its recent history. The language of urban redevelopment – and of its final consequences of ­gentrification – have since time immemorial been imbued with metaphors of cleanliness, sanitation, hygiene and regeneration. Locking urban development into the dirty/clean binary is, in fact, nothing new. In ancient times in Europe, space cleanliness was conceived as a symbol of purity and integrity. It was also used to enforce visual harmony between buildings and to ensure positive public representation of townships in medieval times. During the Romantic period, the moral value of cleaning was linked to liberation from all earlier alterations and served the reconstruction of ‘authenticity’. Ideas of hegemony, harmony, unity and the nationalization of the ethnic were also the principles that formed the modern nation states and their singular representation of the past (Evans and Boswell 1999). Modern urban planning originated from the very will to improve the health and living conditions of overcrowded, sub-standard, working-class slums of the early industrial period. The same ideas of sanitation and regeneration have guided and lubricated demolition plans, urbanization and city ­modernization across the twentieth century.

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Crucially, the dirty/clean binary entails a normative process of evaluation and selection, which is always contingent to the judgements, and socio-cultural and political values of the present time. The process of ‘making’ heritage, of discerning valuable and non-valuable traces of the past to be brought into the future, i.e. the process of ‘heritagization’ (Harvey C. 2001), is always the result of implicit and explicit political choices. Yet, notions of heritage are under-investigated within urban policy and politics. Rather than dealing with heritage as a static ‘thing’ and frozen in the past, we view heritage as a continuously changing process of contestations, negotiations and representations according to which our spatial realities are constructed. Heritage’s meaning expands towards the politics of identity and societal development. Scholars of critical heritage studies provide rich accounts of how heritage has been exploited to serve, amongst others, the authority and singular narratives of the modern nation states, and how professional heritage practices in different countries have been informed by these narratives. Some also expound the top-down ideologies that favour the experiences of the upper middle class through science and experts’ opinions, often at the expense of lower social classes and ‘local’ knowledge (Harvey C. 2001; Smith 2006; Smith and Waterton 2012). Through processes of evaluation hegemonic culture makes the past – heritage – in the present, and at the same time it shapes the future by selectively preserving and transmitting the valuable ideas of the past. We connect the three central concepts at stake – gentrification, cleanliness and heritage-making –  around the concepts of legitimation and consensus. Working at their intersections of those three, we observed how the process of heritagization (Harvey 2001), which Smith (2006) views as an authorized heritage discourse, often becomes involved in the legitimation of particular patterns of urban change that naturalize gentrification and displacement. As Parker and Madureira (2016: 593) put it: ‘Being perceived as legitimate brings freedom from questioning and room to manoeuvre. Being perceived as a credible actor is pivotal in gaining access to potentially available resources’. Cleanliness, entrenched in heritagization processes, is a discursive tool used to bolster credibility and legitimacy and hence gain consensus, around potentially conflictual redevelopment processes connected to gentrification and other related patterns of displacement. Inspired by these theoretical dialogues, in this chapter we show how selected ideas of cultural heritage and interpretations of the past are evaluated and devaluated in order to provide legitimacy and create consensus around the prevailing and aligned plans of the local State, real estate, property owners and commercial actors. In other words, we illustrate the ways in which notions of heritage and cleanliness are incorporated into urban policy discourses and documents for legitimizing disruptive interventions,

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making room to accommodate a desired middle-class population and city uses, and, to this end, displacing populations and activities that may ­interfere with the gentrification of the area.

Gamlestaden’s Histories Gamlestaden, located in a rather central area in the North-East district of Gothenburg, is inhabited by more than 10,000 residents from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Today, about 30 per cent of the population were born abroad, while over 40 per cent have an international background  – mainly from Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Syria, Finland, Former-Yugoslavia, Poland, Italy and Turkey. Gamlestaden was initially built during the end of the nineteenth century over the ruins of the medieval town Nya Lödöse (1473–1624). The king of Sweden decided in 1621 to demolish Nya Lödöse and instead build the city of Gothenburg near the Älv River, in order to improve the city’s security and proximity to the harbour. In the seventeenth century, some representatives of the city cultural elites built large farms and countryside mansions (locally known as Landerierna) on and near Nya Lödöse, adding a new layer of history to the area. Gamlestaden also homed some of the first industries in the country, with textile and sugar industries since the 1850s, followed by mechanics at the beginning of the 1900s, and the by now globally leading ball bearing manufacturing company (SKF) – which was founded in Gamlestaden in 1907 – and the vehicle manufacturing company Volvo in 1927. The industrial expansion continued until the late 1960s, when through a globalized economic restructuring large parts of the industrial production was relocated abroad, leaving much of the housing stock originally built for factory workers vacant. From the 1970s, the municipality began to allocate a high number of (the Swedish version of ) ‘social housing’ dwellings in the vacant apartments in Gamlestaden, including to a large portion of the newly arrived refugees in the 1990s. In the 1980s–1990s the area had one of the highest concentrations of unemployment, social benefits recipients and first-generation immigrants in the city. This new phase was also characterized by a harsh territorial stigmatization process, which still persists today to some extent. In those years, Gamlestaden became locally known as the ‘most problematic’ and ‘shameful’ area in Gothenburg (Holmberg 2016). In a report endorsed by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, Gamlestaden was described as a ‘mistreated public environment and individual buildings, organized crime in the form of cars burning, explosions and armed fights, high levels of everyday crime, extensive social problems, black

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newspaper headlines and a high level of insecurity’ (Holmberg 2016: 4). Ethnic, social and economic forms of segregation are also clearly pronounced in the detailed development plan (Göteborgs stad 2006a: 38). Around the late 1990s, the neighbourhood gained a ‘disgraced reputation as insecure and wounded’ (Göteborgs stad 2006b: 10). Even the social environment of Gamlestaden, which is increasingly celebrated for its social networks, is viewed in the detailed development plan as problem-ridden (Göteborgs stad 2006a: 38). Yet, the urban renewal plans viewed the social environment as a potential resource for investment. This was evident in the recent report by the City which suggested that Gamlestaden’s cultural and ethnic diversity brought a mixture of cultural associations, second-hand and vintage shops, food markets, and a large range of ‘ethnic’ restaurants to the neighbourhood, and this makes Gamlestaden one of the liveliest and most culturally rich areas in Gothenburg (Göteborg stad 2018). To promote a robust social structure, continued efforts would be put towards encouraging a mix of habitation sizes, forms of tenure, price ranges for dwellings and other facilities (Göteborgs stad 2006a: 22). Making Gamlestaden safe and attractive was the principal goal for the development (ibid.: 12). Drawing on previous area-based policies and on local partnerships for safety constituted in the 1990s to deal with the security challenges (Sahlin 2010), Gamlestaden has seen the origins of the first BID (Business Improvement District) in Sweden (Valli and Hammami 2021; Kusevski, Stalevska, Valli 2022), a partnership of local property owners and businesses with the primary goal of raising real estate values and with the common vision of making Gamlestaden more ‘safe, secure and attractive’  (Holmberg  2016). As we explained in Valli and Hammami (2021), through its connections with public and political actors this partnership has had a noticeable  impact on preparing the area for future transformations via a set of disciplining strategies on tenants and behaviours in public spaces. Since the early 2000s, and this is the focus of the present chapter, the city of Gothenburg and the Västra Götaland Region have worked on capitalizing on the central location of Gamlestaden, both in terms of geography and history, and developing it as part of the so-called West-Swedish agreement (Västsvenska paket), i.e., a series of infrastructure initiatives for public and private transport in Western Sweden. The agreement situates a new strategic node for local and regional traffic in Gamlestaden. Moreover, Gothenburg City has been implementing the ‘dense and mixed Gothenburg’ strategic vision, which was designed to guide the preparations towards the Gothenburg Quadricentennial Jubilee Exposition, to be held in 2021. As part of these preparations, the large-scale urban renewal and transportation

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infrastructure construction projects in Gamlestaden have been branded as the re-creation of ‘Gamlestaden – a dense mixed city close to both downtown and water’. The city planning department developed a detailed masterplan for Gamlestaden as a strategic densification area (Göteborgs stad 2006a) that foresees the construction of a new travel centre, a ‘world literature centre’, a shopping precinct, a hotel, and 3,000 new flats that will double the number of residents in the area.

Heritageizing, Cleaning and ‘Diversifying’ Gamlestaden Gamlestaden Top-down: ‘Third-Wave’ Gentrification and the ‘Gothenburg Preservation Plan’ The latest development plans for Gamlestaden mirror in large part the definition of state-led or third-wave gentrification advanced by Hackworth and Smith (2001). The character of the intervention and the massive investment of public capital into the infrastructural project are strikingly top-down, municipally and regionally led. All follow the official vision of creating ­inner-city, not suburb (Göteborgs stad 2013: 6). Inspired by this vision, the new development plans were formulated following advanced architectural design and standards, including landmark buildings to fit inner-city area aesthetics. From these guiding principles, it becomes clear that the role of the local state authorities has been rather interventionist and openly supporting of the uplifting of the area through infrastructural interventions and land-use reforms. In fact, local state officials, as well as other urban governance actors, explicitly endorsed gentrification in the interviews we conducted during our fieldwork in Gamlestaden. The city planner that led the Gamlestaden project asserted that he was positive towards a moderate level of gentrification in Gamlestaden, which would serve as ‘gasoline for the development of the area’ (interview, 2018). A similar attitude was expressed by the director of the Eastern Gothenburg district, who confirmed that reasonable levels of gentrification would be positive (interview, 2018). Moreover, the association of the local real estate owners (BID Gamlestaden), which has municipal housing companies among its main and leading members, has been actively working to raise property values, making Gamlestaden more ‘attractive’ also by means of displacing most ‘troublesome’ and socially marginalized residents from its properties (Valli and Hammami 2021). As such, we could say that the goal of upgrading the economic status of Gamlestaden is the result of concerted efforts of top-down interventionism and of real estate industry implementing actions. What role do heritage and history play in implementing this gentrification process?

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Heritage management in Sweden dates back to 1630, when the National Heritage Board (SNHB) was founded and published the first conservation charter in 1666. Since then a number of guiding documents and reports have been published by the SNHB to guide the preservation works in Sweden. Among others, the value assessment guidelines document Kulturhistorisk värdering av bebyggelse (Lierud and Unnerbäck 2002) has significantly influenced the entire field of conservation. It came to distinguish between two categories of values: historical/document and experience values; and social and aesthetic values. While the former refers to historical knowledge, the second includes architectural and artistic value. In practice, however, almost all assessment processes are predominantly grounded in ‘classical’ authorized values, with a predetermined focus on materiality ( Jensen 2019). Additionally, the different heritage institutions, especially museums, hold different interpretations of the past and the valuation of ethnicity and history. Within urban development, finding a balance between development and conservation is among the important urban policy goals. With regard to Gamlestaden, this balance and the historic continuity of the area were emphasized in the detailed development plan (Göteborgs stad 2006b:12), while the preservation programme for the city of Gothenburg is used to guide the process of preserving the different spatial elements that represent the uniqueness of the city. The preservation programme is founded on the goal of safe-keeping heritage built environment that to the greatest possible extent reflects important historical stages and living conditions for different groups in society (Lönnroth 1999: 11). This goal is usually translated into urban design programmes. For example, the three time periods of Nya Lödöse, the Landerier, and the ‘industrial period’ are symbolically represented in the new development through a literal integration of their names into the design of the staircase that links the river to Gamlestaden’s square (Figure 3.1). Furthermore, selected names from each period will be carved on the steps. For Nya Lödöse, the names of the founder of Nya Lödöse, Sten Sture the Older, and Gustav II Adolf, who moved the city in 1621, are found. For Landeritiden, the represented names are those of Gert Tommesson and Johan Jacob von Holten, as well as the name of Maria Habicht, the only woman represented, whose name was given to the landeri Marieholm (ibid.). For the industrial period, the names of the founders of SKF, Sven G. Wingqist, Axel C. Carlander and Knut Jason Mark, are inscribed. Here, there is also a step that says ‘you and me’ (ibid.). Although there is no readily available reasoning behind the selection of epochs nor names, they appear to reflect, on the one hand, the traditional uses of multiculturalism since 1970s, and, on the other, Smith’s 2006 AHD logic, mirroring class and gender hierarchies of the times.

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Figure 3.1. The names of the three authorized periods of history (Industriella tiden, Landritiden, Nya Lödöse) were imprinted on the steps of the stairs, connecting the Säveån Canal to Gamlestaden’s square. © Göteborgs Stad, public database. The masterplan also includes hints at the more ancient period of Nya Lödöse, to be preserved and communicated by the installation of new manhole covers, embellished with Nya Lödöse’s seal, marking the area where the old city previously stood. However, from our interviews with the archaeologists that led the excavation works preceding the development constructions, it seems as though the archaeological excavations have been subsumed by the redevelopment plans, and although the excavations showed high levels of preservation of the old city, the permit for development was granted before archaeological excavations had been completed (interview, 2018). The subjection of cultural historical value to economic logic is not surprising. Several publications by the Swedish National Heritage Board view cultural heritage preservation as a resource for economic growth, and for sustainable development/environmental goals (Riksantikvarieämbetet 2016). The plans for Gamlestaden do not constitute an exception in this regard. In the current detailed development plan, the cultural heritage values of Gamlestaden are presented as assets for the coming development. Historic buildings and environments give the city ‘an added value which is difficult to recreate in entirely newly produced areas’ (Göteborgs stad 2006b: 27). More specifically, the post-­industrial built heritage will have a central role in the new built landscape. Nya Kulan and the old factories known as Gamlestads fabriker, are highlighted as having large potential for development and expansion while also being historically important landmarks (Göteborgs stad 2006a: 39). This h ­ istoric anchorage is also used to argue for commercial activity, by pointing out that  historically, Nya Lödöse was a commercial hub (Göteborgs stad 2006a: 31). The industrial buildings of Nya Kulan will be transformed into a shopping centre (Figure

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Figure 3.2. Visual explanation of the shopping Galleria in SKF’s Nya Kulan. © Göteborgs Stad, public database. Rstudio for architecure.

Figure 3.3a (left). The ‘fake rusty’ building, symbolically representing the industrial history of the area. © Chiara Valli. Figure 3.3b (right). The location of Nya Lödöse Church. © Chiara Valli. 3.2) while the new constructed landmark ­buildings of the public transport station and the world literature centre, as well as some residential and office buildings, will hint at the industrial aesthetic through steel and glass and a counterfeit rusty patina (Figure 3.3a–b).

Dirty-Clean Binaries and the Creation of Sameness To implement the plans, some smaller buildings and traffic infrastructures have been demolished, but the construction of ‘the new Gamlestaden’ has

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also been undergoing an all-encompassing cleaning up and re-ordering strategy of its physical spaces as well as of its reputation. It is perhaps difficult to understand the radical process of ‘spatial cleansing’ (Herzfeld 2006) that has been used to remove all ‘spatial fragments’, create sameness, and enhance the authorized values (Hammami 2021). Several small structures (streets, bridges, buildings, landscapes, car parks) and informal ‘ethnic’ businesses and associations – especially those located in the Bellevue industrial area – were removed in the process of being replaced. Bellevue is an area located along the Säveån river, between the SKF landmark buildings (to be redeveloped into a shopping centre) and Kviberg, a residential area. Bellevue is dominated by small-scale businesses such as cars repairers, tyre shops, warehouses, second-hand stores, three mosques, ‘ethnic’ food and furniture shops, religious and cultural associations, and garden allotments. The buildings, mostly small warehouses from the ­1940s–1950s, belong to several owners and present more informal aesthetics than other areas nearby. To date, there are no clear plans for the redevelopment of the area in the near future, besides the goal of eventually converting 20 per cent of the area to housing. The first part (DEL1) of the Gamlestaden development plan described the Bellevue area as having: A number of smaller property owners [who] own the area. Today, the eastern part of the beach towards Säveån is leased to various boat clubs and private small yards. One of them is the Estonian Boat Association, which is a shantytown (kåkstad) built by Estonian SKF workers, most of them were fisherman. As a whole, the area is relatively slumped with debris lying about, and is experienced by nearby residents as unsafe, especially in the evenings. (Göteborgs stad 2006a)

The second part of the development plan proposed the protection of the boatyards, after first cleaning and spatially re-organizing them: Existing boatyards and associations constitute an exciting feature along the river and should be preserved, but coordinated with a new stretch along the river… The boatyard workshops should be preserved, but they should be opened up and organised so that they become tidier than today. They can also help make the shoreline feel alive. Existing allotment gardens should be removed or organised in another form. Several parts are full of rubbish and must be cleaned and [should be] reformed to become part of the green belt. (Göteborgs stad 2006b: 29)

A similar emphasis on cleaning the rubbish from the area can be found in the third part of the development plan (Göteborgs stad 2006c: 35). Although

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the spatial organization and standard upgrading of an area may sound positive, the experience from nearby areas revealed the above proposal to be problematic. For example, to better integrate the Bellevue’s roundabout within the newly developed area, the plan was to spatially cleanse it from any informal structures, which included a falafel kiosk, a tram stop and ‘unnecessary areas of asphalts’. While this reduced the traffic congestion around the roundabout, interviewed locals explained how the proximity of the falafel kiosk to the tram station made the area more lively. One of the interviewed locals, for instance, explained how she had established a social relationship with the owner of the kiosk after frequent phone-calls, placing orders for falafel wraps and picking them up upon arrival at the tram station (personal communication, 2017). While the roundabout formed nodes for social networks, the city found the crowds and activities on such a busy traffic junction to be risky. A process of re-evaluation and at the same time modernization of Gamlestaden’s heritage is not only taking place in Bellevue, but is expanding to all activities in the neighbourhood, especially those bordering the new construction. Gamlestaden is popular because of its small shops, which are considered by the public opinion and confirmed in our interviews to confer ‘authenticity’ and value to the area. Several interviewees, in fact, explained their fear that small businesses would be displaced as a consequence of the upcoming large-scale shopping centres. However, the BID (Business Improvement District) also sees potential in the arrival of new residents from the middle and upper middle classes, on the condition that the businesses will adapt to the new market dynamics. According to the BID manager, demands for new commodities will prompt shopkeepers to adapt to new consumer tastes and aesthetics. These links between lifestyle, class, standards and aesthetics were revealed by the BID manager in this interview: [T]here is a bike shop on Artellerigatan. If you live in the new houses along the river or work in the big high house, you wouldn’t go to that bike shop because you kind of metaphysically get [oriented away from it or otherwise] someone tells you there is a bike shop there. It must look welcoming when you get there otherwise you will go elsewhere. The bike shop must increase its… I suppose I don´t know them, [laughing] … the small businesses probably work 16 hours per day. To increase their sales, live and be sustainable, people who move here must get to know that oh there is a bike shop there, oh how practical, it´s only two hundred meters from where I live or work. (Interview, April 2018)

The processes of formalizing the informal, cleaning up ‘ruptures’, removing ‘unnecessary’ spatial elements and creating sameness might make the area more appealing for newcomers and some of the existing residents and their consumption practices, but might also have culturally displacing

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i­ mplications for some existing communities. This appears even more problematic if considered together with the sustained, concerted efforts of housing companies and property owners in the last twenty years to discipline residents’ behaviours and displace the most ‘troublesome’ residents from their premises (Valli and Hammami 2021). In Gamlestaden, the enforcement of a spatial order and the visual cleanliness was generally meant to rid the neighbourhood of anything associated with its ‘dark history’, and to create new conditions of optimism with the capacity to attract new, preferably upscale, businesses and residences. In this sense, the symbolic engagement with the cultural and historical diversity of Gamlestaden has been used as a resource for economic development, rather than a cultural richness per se reinforcing a sense of belonging for the residents already in place.

Cleaning up History? Diversity for Leisure and Excitement Notions of diversity, as implemented in Gamlestaden’s redevelopment plan, are rooted in the multiculturality discourse of the 1970s in Sweden and the mixed city discourse that dominate urban development in Gothenburg and other big cities (Hammami 2021). Supported by the preservation programme, these discourses were used in Gamlestaden to inspire new urban development ideas that reveal the historic significance of the city, protect its ‘identity and diversity’ (Göteborgs stad 2006b: 12, 21), and realize new urban spaces where different community groups and businesses can encounter the history of the city. As Gamlestaden was built over the ruins of Nya Lödöse, it was natural to re-emphasize that history in the redevelopment plans, with a specific interest in the history of Gamlestaden as the country’s main western port during the Nya Lödöse era and during the industrial era (Göteborgs stad 2006b: 41). However, the conception and management of history has also followed assimilative, exclusive and monumental logics. Gamlestaden, in terms of its built environments and experiences, was reconstructed around the three authorized layers of history – the medieval history of Nya Lödöse (1473–1620), the seventeenth-century history of Landerierna, and the nineteenth-to twentieth-century industrial history. While this has reinforced the historical depth of the city, it has also taken attention away from the contemporary mixture of people, class, ethnicity, culture, languages and lifestyle. Focusing on selected periods of history to frame the narrative of value revealed the history of Gamlestaden as layers separate from each other rather than a process of continuous change and evolution. This highly selective political project of history and space-­ making is mirrored in the institutional practices.

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The management of the archaeological heritage is representative of how history is celebrated in the branding policies to flag the historical and ‘diverse’ character of Gamlestaden, but at the same time it is treated in an assimilative way to create a singular narration which is subordinated to economic reason. Ideally, the medieval history of Nya Lödöse should be managed by archaeology expertise legislations, while the two other layers (Landerier and early industrial) would be managed by heritage and planning documents. However, in the management of ‘the past’ in Gamlestaden, an institutional void emerged. In Sweden, and in many other countries, archaeology, heritage and planning are brought into a dialogue only when the landowners are officially requested to carry out salvage archaeology. There is no strategic communication of vision and plans across these separated fields. In Gamlestaden, a slight difference occurred just before the implementation of the development plans. When the salvage excavations  discovered previously undocumented areas of Nya Lödöse, the local interest in the past became rather evident. Several activities and public events were organized to communicate the archaeological process and the Nya Lödöse history to the wider public, through publications, guided tours, lectures, pop-up archives and participatory school activities. Some elements pertaining to the Nya Lödöse discoveries were also integrated into the design of the new built environment, such as Nya Lödöse-related vegetations, a statue symbolizing a medieval church, as well as pavement marks (Figure 3.3). However, in practice, the archaeological timelines and focus had to be fully subordinated to the development plan’s schedule and budget, even when more time and resources were needed. For instance, the archaeologists found that more resources could have been utilized to investigate the Landerier historical layer, but the city urged them to focus only on the Nya Lödöse ruins (our interview with archaeologist, 2018). This assimilative attitude towards the rich history of Gamlestaden is also practised with reference to the history of industrial workers. The redevelopment plans briefly mention that many ‘guest working immigrants’ came to Gamlestaden and that SKF took responsibility for providing housing for them (Göteborgs stad 2006: 13) without explaining the large scale of ethnicities involved and how that largely migrant working force gave rise to and sustained the industrial boom till the end of the 1970s. This attitude towards class, ethnicity and history speaks to the process of heritagization that views diversity as being ahistorical and strictly monumental. Guided by a conception of monumentality as being permanent, elitist and authentic, the urban renewal projects in Gamlestaden sought to protect and capitalize on the officially recognized heritage objects. The experiences of workers and migrants were therefore conceived as temporal and non-monumental history, and hence could be forgotten. A similar monumental engagement

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in history and society was evident in the visualization of the past in the different official and unofficial development plans and documents. Almost all include images of industrial buildings, machines and other technological inventions without any depiction of social life. The consistent exclusion of people based on class and ethnicity, combined with the focus on monumentality, suggests anything but cultural diversity. By removing the human aspect of history from the industrial past, it becomes possible to entirely neglect the diversity of workers that have spent their lives there, and the contemporary experiences of the present culturally diverse community that gave Gamlestaden life after the industrial decline. Furthermore, history and authenticity were the only conditioning factors for the preservation of diversity mentioned in the plans, while the preservation of socio-economic diversity was largely overlooked. In fact, while the ‘multicultural’ character of the area is mentioned as a richness, the variegated ethnical composition is consistently cited alongside high rates of crime, unemployment and violence, in the description of the area’s negative social environment (Göteborgs stad 2006a: 38). The rich social networks of the area are therefore either criminalized for not living up to the new formality, modernity and lifestyle standards, or emblematically celebrated in the branding policies used to highlight the continental character of Gamlestaden.

Conclusion While the links between social and territorial stigmatization and gentrification have been widely acknowledged in urban studies (Wacquant 2009), we have here attempted to highlight the overlooked role that (broadly understood) heritage and symbolic representation of diversity play in legitimating the conventional forms of ‘fixing’ socially troubling communities. The empirical analysis of the large-scale urban renewal projects in Gamlestaden showed that the heritage and planning discourses embrace an alternance of a language of cleanliness and diversity, often associated with monumentality and hegemony as the main characteristics of history and modernity. The consistent employment of this language seems to have legitimated the emergence of new spaces of homogeneity and sameness that fit the taste of a desired middle class and facilitates a (third-wave) top-down gentrification process. In fact, a pervasive AHD in the planning documents and public discourse, combined with the stigmatization of the recent history of the neighbourhood as being lawless, outdated and troubled, legitimates the displacing of those functions, spaces and groups considered as vulnerable and representative of a ‘dark past’ to be left behind.

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The case of Gamlestaden also highlighted that there is an inherited dilemma of institutional voids and divides, meaning that planning and heritage professional practices embrace parallel visions and only communicate to make space for each other rather than to aim for a strategic change. This should not be reduced to the conventional explanation of top-down practices and different language of professionalism. Instead, such institutional voids are inherited and have never been challenged, a perpetual challenge maintained by the AHD.  Any uncritical engagement in diversity might thus lead to safeguarding the political heritage of hierarchies and exclusion rather than safeguarding the plural expressions of cultural heritage. Feras Hammami is associate professor of conservation at the Department of Conservation, University of Gothenburg. His research concerns the ­politicization of cultural heritage within urban planning and development, with a specific interest in the purposeful practices of heritage in the conduct of ­societies and geographies. His current research projects include reconciliatory heritage, urban marginality and resistance, and heritage and peacebuilding in relations to sites located in Palestine and Sweden. Chiara Valli is a social and economic geographer and associate senior lecturer at the Department of Urban Studies, Malmö University. Chiara’s research deals with housing, gentrification, housing financialization, socio-­ economic and ethnic urban segregation, displacement, social movements and r­ esistance, with empirical research in Sweden, Italy and the US.

References Evans, J. and D. Boswell. 1999. Representing the Nation: a Reader: Histories, Heritage and Museums. London: Routledge. Gibson, L. and J. Pendlebury. 2009. Valuing Historic Environments, Heritage, Culture and Identity. Fanham, UK: Routledge. Grundström, K. and I. Molina. 2016. ‘From Folkhem to Lifestyle Housing in Sweden: Segregation and Urban Form, 1930s–2010s’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 16(3): 316–36. doi: 10.1080/14616718.2015.1122695. Göteborgs stad. 2006a. ‘Fördjupad översiktsplan för delar av GamlestadenBagaregården. Del 1. Förutsättningar’. Antagen i Kommunfullmäktige 2006-09-14. Dnr 675/02. Göteborgs stad. 2006b. ‘Fördjupad översiktsplan för delar av Gamlestaden-Bagaregården. Del 2. Planförslag’. Antagen i Kommunfullmäktige 2006-09-14. Dnr 675/02. Göteborgs stad. 2006c. Fördjupad översiktsplan för delar av Gamlestaden-Bagaregården. Del 3. Samrådslista och Utställningsutlåtande. Gothenburg: City Planning Department.

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Göteborgs stad. 2013. ‘Detaljplan för Gamlestads torg, etapp 1 inom stadsdelarna Gamlestaden och Olskroken i Göteborg’. Utställningsutlåtande. 2013-06-20, rev. 2013-11-26. Dnr 05/0797. Göteborgs stad. 2018. Göteborgsbladet 2018 – områdesfakta. Accessed on 2018-11-15 from https://bit.ly/2SbNJZb. Hackworth, J. and N. Smith. 2001. ‘The Changing State of Gentrification’, Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 92(4): 464–77. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/​ 1467-9663.00172. Hammami, F. 2021. ‘The Scopic Feast of Heritage and the Invention of Unthreatening Diversity in Neoliberal Cities’. Heritage 4, 1660–1680. https://doi.org/10.3390/ heritage4030092. Hammami, F. and E. Uzer. 2018. ‘Heritage and Resistance: Irregularities, Temporalities and Cumulative Impact’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 24(5): 445–64. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1378908. Harvey, C.D. 2001. ‘Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of Heritage Studies’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 7(4): 319– 38. Harvey, D. 1989. ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 71(1): 3–17. doi: https://doi.org/490503. Herzfeld, M. 2006. ‘Spatial Cleansing: Monumental Vacuity and the Idea of the West’, Journal of Material Culture 11(1–2): 127–49. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/​ 13581650120105534. Hewison, R. 1987. The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen Publishing Ltd. Holmberg, H. 2016. Gamlestaden 2016. Från förfall till pånyttfödelse. Dags för BIDs i Sverige? Report for Fastighetsägare i Gamlestaden. Gothenburg. Retrieved from Gothenburg: Jensen, O.W. 2019. Kompetenser med konsekvenser för kulturmiljö-och museisektorn: en förstudie. A report by the Swedish National Heritage Board to build Capacity in Museums. Visby, Stockholm: Riksantikvarieämbetet. Kusevski, D., Stalevska, M. and Valli, C., 2022. ‘The Business of Improving Neighborhoods: A Critical Overview of Neighborhood-Based Business Improvement Districts (NBIDs) in Sweden’.  Urban Affairs Review. https://doi. org/10.1177/10780874211070746. Lierud, P. and A. Unnerbäck. 2002. Kulturhistorisk värdering av bebyggelse. Visby, Stockholm: Riksantikvarieämbetet. Lönnroth, G. 1999. Kulturhistoriskt värdefull bebyggelse i Göteborg: ett program för bevarande. D. 2: Stadsbyggnadskontoret. Gothenburg: Gothenburg Municipality. Lowenthal, D. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Översiktplan för Göteborg. 2009. DEL 1: Utgångspunkter och strategier. Gothenburg: Gothenburg Municipality. Parker, P. and A.M. Madureira. 2016. ‘Housing Context and Legitimacy in the Transformation of a Stigmatized Estate: the Case of Rosengård’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 31(4): 589–604. doi: 10.1007/s10901-015-9480-3.

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Riksantikvarieämbetet. 2016. Vision för kulturmiljöarbetet 2030: redovisning av regeringsuppdrag om ett offensivt och angeläget kulturmiljöarbete. Visby, Stockholm: Riksantikvarieämbetet. Sahlin, I. (ed.) 2010. I Trygghetens namn. Gothenburg: Daidalos AB. Smith, L. 2006. Uses of Heritage. New York: Routledge. Smith, L. and E. Waterton. 2012. ‘Constrained by Commonsense: the Authorized Heritage Discourse in Contemporary Debates’, in R. Skeates, C. McDavid and J. Carman (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Public Archaeology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 153–71. Thörn, C. and H. Holgersson. 2016. ‘Revisiting the Urban Frontier through the Case of New Kvillebäcken, Gothenburg’, City 20(5): 663–84. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080 /13604813.2016.1224479. Valli, C. 2015. ‘A Sense of Displacement: Long‐Time Residents’ Feelings of Displacement in Gentrifying Bushwick, New York’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39(6): 1191–208. doi: 10.1111/1468-2427.12340. ______. 2020. ‘Emotional Displacement: Misrecognition, Symbolic Violence, and Loss of Place’, in G. Baeten, C. Listerborn, M. Persdotter and E. Pull (eds), Housing Displacement: Conceptual and Methodological Issues. London and New York Routledge, pp. 67–81. Valli, C. and F. Hammami. 2021. ‘Introducing Business Improvement Districts (Bids) in Sweden: A Social Justice Appraisal’, European Urban and Regional Studies 28(2): 155–72. doi:10.1177/0969776420925525. Wacquant, L. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zukin, S. 2008. ‘Consuming Authenticity: From Outposts of Difference to Means of Exclusion’, Cultural Studies 22(5): 724–48. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/095023​ 80802245985.

PART II

8 GENTRIFICATION THROUGH HERITAGE-MAKING AND REMAKING

8 CHAPTER 4 Beyond the Good, the Neutral and the Consensual Heritage between the Police and the Political Višnja Kisić

Introduction Heritage is a political process in that it both reflects and constitutes answers to questions with regard to who, in which way and with what roles and rights has a part in the polis – in the making of groups, communities or societies and their relationships to environments. However, in exploring the relationship between heritage and politics in the urban context one is faced with a prevailing doxa of the mainstream heritage practice, policies and thought that claims ‘heritage is apolitical’ – doxa that understands heritage, heritage institutions and heritage professionals as being involved in an apolitical, objective and neutral practice of transmitting the past to contemporary and future generations. This doxa tries to hold on to an imagined clear delineation between culture (of which heritage is a part) and politics, that takes place outside of the culture and heritage field. It forms a nodal point of the ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (Smith 2006), a discourse built and nurtured on the ideas of heritage as a direct material witness of the past and a marker of common identity, whose meanings can be unlocked and deciphered using the neutral, apolitical and objective expertise of heritage professionals. The power of this conceptual framework – which hides the ideological basis of heritage creation, regulation and management – is reflected in the attitudes of both heritage professionals, policy-makers and citizens. As surveys show (Britain Thinks 2013; Schneider 2017), museums are perceived as the most trustworthy institutions (more than media and

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governments), institutions that do not have political agendas and are ‘guardians of factual information’ – notions that support the core heritage and museum ethics of being apolitical, neutral and objective in representing the past. Heritage that is safeguarded, practised and visible in the urban context outside of institutional walls rarely gets even talked about in the context of neutral/biased, objective/subjective and apolitical/political divides. In most urbanscapes, in which active struggles over space, identities and memory are not explicitly visible, the streets we walk through, spaces we use and squares we pass by are seen as a normal, neutral and given scenography for everyday life. Outside of the heated redevelopment resistance movements or the war-torn ‘post-conflict’ urban areas, structures, appearances and layouts, ownership and social dynamics, as well as the naming of streets and squares, get taken for granted. The layers of political struggles and policy-making that have been shaping the city are neither easily accessible nor interpreted for everyday passers-by. However, with just a quick view of the recent active socio-political conflicts, one can see that heritage and diverse visions and claims regarding the understanding of and relationship with the past are mobilized and used in political struggles. The destruction of Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan was an attack on both the universalizing heritage discourse by UNESCO and particular Buddhist religious heritage. The burqa ban in France, as well as the referendum on building minarets in Switzerland, heavily relied on an interpretation of Muslim cultural practices and symbols as fundamentalist, conservative and threatening to the host society and its secular urbanity. Both ‘remain’ and ‘leave’ Brexit campaigns have employed heritage and  diverse visions of the past to inform and justify contemporary  political choices as right and even natural (Bonnachi et al. 2018; Gardner 2017). Not only were the discussions on what the UK was, is and should be in relation to the EU fed by references to heritage from the Iron Age to the Victorian period, but the very attempt to destabilize the EU was compared to the climate of the 1930s and the rise of xenophobic nationalism and rise of Nazism (Whitehead 2017). In Poland, the opening of the ‘Museum of WWII’ in Gdansk has been questioned by political elites, for not being ‘Polish enough’ (Ciobanu 2017), while the squares and public places around Poland have been cleansed of the monuments to USSR anti-­ fascist soldiers in just two years since the ‘Justice and Law’ Party came to power. These struggles have shown that heritage and memory practices are highly conflictual, often oppressive, as well as divisive. However, in mainstream dealing with these challenges, the doxa of heritage as apolitical, civilizing and inclusive field still finds its stronghold. The above-mentioned

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cases of heritage conflicts often get discredited and excluded from the dominant professional understanding of heritage, and tagged as manipulative, violent, politicizing, divisive and revisionist. These acts and struggles are interpreted as being ‘on the other side of heritage’, as ‘heritage gone wrong’, as a ‘perverse misuse of heritage’. As a response to openly political articulations of heritage, UNESCO has steadily been answering violent heritage antagonisms and destructions in the Middle East and Africa by perpetuating the mantra of heritage as good, civilized and universal. In the wake of refugee crises, in 2018, the Italian Ministry of Culture has been addressing threats of terrorism with more funds for culture and heritage. The European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018 has showcased heritage as a cohesive cultural force, in response to the crises of the EU as a political organization and economic union. Through these configurations of exceptions and misuse, heritage gets re-constituted as good, neutral and apolitical, by those holding on to the authorized heritage discourse. Heritage, as part of culture, is seen as being the good, civilized and apolitical field, while politics is where aggressive, divisive and corruptive practices take place. The bad, perverse, political misuse of heritage is thus being fixed by the good, apolitical and rightful approach to it. Throughout these efforts of discrediting conflicts entangled with heritage and insisting on heritage as good, neutral, inclusive and civilized, ‘political’, ‘politics’ and ‘politization’ remain nasty words among heritage professionals, the words representing hot potatoes that should be avoided and handed to another field as soon as they enter the heritage arena.

Heritage Politics – a Troubling Question for Heritage Studies The notion of heritage as a political endeavour, however, is nothing new to critical heritage studies, critical museology and memory studies. The view of heritage as a political endeavour has been challenged for decades by those parts of academia (Hall 1999; Smith 2004; Harrison 2010; Piotrowski 2013) who have criticized the dominant heritage practices as a power-keeping mechanism and pointed out the ideologies and politics behind particular practices of selection, representation and commodification of the past. Heritage is thus defined as the enactment of political choices about what societies choose to remember, forget, conserve or interpret (Harrison 2010), as ‘an active process of power negotiation and mediation of cultural, social and political change in which individuals and groups take positions in relation to the past’ (Smith 2006: 83), as something that ‘can both stimulate and act as a symbol of political struggle’, as something that ‘gives its possessors political power’ (Harrison 2010).

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Despite this recognition of heritage as a political act, the questions on  how  politics and political get defined in relation to heritage remain largely under-theorized. Terms such as ‘politics’ and ‘political’ in relation to h ­eritage feature frequently across the critical heritage studies literature, painting the image of a consensus over political aspects of heritage. Upon a closer reading however, the terms ‘politics’, ‘political’ and ‘politization’ rarely get defined and analysed, with equally rare reliance and reference to specific traditions in political theory and political philosophy.  These terms remain floating signifiers (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Laclau  1996), ­susceptible to multiple, even contradictory readings inscribed by the reader in the absence of a explicit definition and frame of reference provided by the author. The meaning is only partially fixed, in relation to other ­signifiers in the discourse that is created, but it is still fit to absorb a variety of possible specific understandings and imaginations, thus reducing potential differences and possibilities for contestation. Implicitly, however, when analysed through other signifiers they form a part of, the terms ­‘politics’, ‘political’ and ‘politization’ in heritage studies can vary from signifying p ­ artisan struggles and negotiations; current events that are deemed political; the processes of decision-making and power negotiations; openly  antagonistic actions of destruction of heritage in armed conflicts; openly ideological struggles and conflicts over framing and negotiating identities; or the techniques of governance and power relations implied and perpetuated by heritage discourse, just to name the most prominent ones. These implicit articulations of politics and political in heritage trace numerous research trajectories. Literature related to politics of heritage deals with how the national heritage policies (Waterton 2010; Blumenfield and Silverman 2013) and international policy regimes related to heritage (Smith 2006) create particular modes of governance, power and authority. Politics of nationalism and the making of nations through heritage feature prominently in heritage literature, analysing the history of heritage thought and practice as a political endeavour of creating nation states, contestations between dominant national heritage discourses and community understandings (Meskell 1998; Hall 1999; Jones 2005). Hammami and Uzer (2018) analyse practices and policies enacted by different parties and politicians in relation to particular localities and their relationship with the grassroots anti-gentrification movements, while some articles deal with uses of heritage and particular discourses of the past in contemporary events deemed political, events which trigger wide mobilizations and referendums (Bonnachi et al. 2018; Gardner 2017). Moreover, notions of dissonant heritage (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996), contested heritage (Silverman 2011) and difficult heritage (Macdonald

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2009) have been articulated to challenge the idea of heritage as a celebratory, apolitical and consensual practice (Kisić 2018), shedding light on how ideological changes, socio-political conflicts and markets privilege and neglect certain layers of heritage. Openly contested heritage, as well as heritage playing a role in memory wars and memory conflicts, take on the dominant position in research on politics of heritage (Baillie 2013; Kisić 2016; Kisić 2019). A significant body of research addresses politics and heritage in divided cities, in which politics is related to conflicts emerging from these divisions and the role heritage plays in perpetuating and delineating these conflicts (Larkin 2010; Dumper and Larkin 2012; Bakshi 2012; Britt 2013). Furthermore, I have discussed elsewhere the concept of heritage dissonance in relation with issues of latent conflicts, silenced voices and epistemic injustices embedded not only in heritage of wars and conflicts, but in heritage that is deemed ‘normal’ or unproblematic (Kisić 2016; Kisić 2018), as well as strategies used for governing dissonance, creating closures and manufacturing consent (Kisić 2021). Furthermore, literature on heritage politics deals with politics of colonialism in relation to heritage and the ways in which cultural heritage has been used by the imperial powers to control, discipline and subordinate (Harrison and Hughes 2010; May Loo 2014). Analysing Indigenous struggles with the authorized heritage regimes, Smith (2004) has showed how the theory and practice of archaeology and the seemingly apolitical techniques, methods and practices of cultural resource management have been intertwined with identity politics and politics of the past which form hegemonic practices of governing and framing realities. Most recent theoretical considerations have moved beyond identity politics and politics of the past on a discursive level, to encompass ‘politics of affect’ (Waterton 2014: 829) claiming that exclusive heritages not only work on a representational level but govern by ‘privileging of one form of affective response as universal’ (Crang and Tolia-Kelly 2010: 2316). Finally, Harrison (2015) has addressed issues of ‘ontological politics of heritage’, acknowledging that the very ways of understanding and doing heritage by different groups are not just a matter of representation, discourse and affects, but about different ways of worlding – creation of different worlds. In challenging the mainstream doxa that heritage is apolitical, critical heritage studies have built a deeper understanding of the relationship between heritage, conflicts and power, in which the statement ‘heritage is political’ often goes without saying, omitting an explicit explanation of the politics and political. However, in such manoeuvres politics and political become concepts that should be recalled and assumed in relation to heritage, without much need for detailed articulation, thus leaving space for numerous possible readings. The diversity of potential meanings of the

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political and politics as floating signifiers, combined with the lack of explicit definitions of these terms in heritage studies, is problematic because it prevents further theorization, problematization and academic dialogue on the relationship between heritage and politics.

Framing Heritage and Politics: Heritage Police, Heritage Politics and the Political of Heritage Taking the problem of under-theorization, in what follows I aim to articulate a possible framework for conceptualizing the relationship between heritage and politics. In doing so I will be reworking the concept of politics by the French political philosopher Jacques Rancière in a way that puts it in a dialogue with critical heritage studies. I find Rancière’s conception of politics particularly suitable for its grounding in the idea of ontological equality of beings, for the broad conception of the political that cuts through the very ways of living, knowing, feeling and worlding, for its encompassing of both the hegemonic order as well as ways and acts that challenge hegemony, and for the recognition of conflict, dissensus and disagreement as the quality of the constitution of the political. The key common denominator in the work of Jacques Rancière is the idea of radical democracy that is based on ‘equality as a method’ (Rancière 2016) not on the idea of equality as an outcome or desired goal of political emancipation. For democratic politics to exist, every act and every process of becoming has to enact the method of equality, the principle and belief in ontological equality of each and every (human) being. From there comes Rancière’s political theory and tripartite conceptualization of politics, which he sees as the play between the political (le politique), politics (la politique), and the police (la police) (Rancière 1999; Rancière 2010). ‘The police’ – which Rancière derives from Greek polis equalling it with selective accounting for the city – arranges the common life according to a selective, hierarchically privileging accounting of the people. Its hegemony comes from the dominant ‘distribution of the sensible’, through which roles, places, functions, properties and capabilities within a society are defined. The police’s distribution of the sensible pins down particular ways of being, doing, feeling, saying and relating, presenting them as universally valid, proper and commonsensical. In doing so it institutes divisions, privileges certain positions, places and beings, and naturalizes inequality. The police, its logic of inequality and its hegemonic distribution of places, names, senses and roles is haunted by ‘the politics’ (la politique), which Rancière defines as society’s ‘absent ground’ characterized by the

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unconditional ontological equality of ‘each and every one of us as speaking (and hence political) beings’ (2010: 94). If the logic of the police is grounded in inequality and difference exercised through the distribution of the sensible, the politics is grounded in equality as a precondition and method. The politics haunts the police, as a reminder of the impossibility of its desired totalization. It is through the political, as a meeting ground between police and politics, that the politics in its logic of equality becomes visible and confronts the logic of the police. ‘The political consists in re-configuring the space, that is, what is to be done, to be seen and to be named in it’ (Rancière 2010: 37). It is about changing the cartography of the sensible and thinkable (Rancière 2010: 143). This meeting ground takes place through acts of dissensus, defined as the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself. For Rancière, dissensus is that which manifests the gap that makes visible that which had no reason to be seen and makes heard those that are not heard or are heard as noise (Rancière 1999). Dissensus is always practised through new forms of subjectivation, that shake and disturb the fixed identity which the police attributes to subjects. Moments of dissensus shake, displace and unlock the dominant order, ‘hollowing out the “real” and multiplying it in a polemical way’ (Rancière 2010: 149), thus offering glimpses into other imaginable futures and worlds. Dissensus is a type of thinking and activity that produces shocks between worlds, but shocks between worlds in the same world: re-distributions, re-compositions and re-configurations of elements (Rancière 2010: 212). Rancière’s conception of politics is anthropocentric, taking logos and action as the basis for the act of dissensus and political subjectivation (Kisić and Tomka 2020). However, in its grounding on the distribution of the sensible and challenging thereof, it allows for the broadening of the political in encompassing the more-thanhuman world (Kisić and Tomka 2020). Applying this tripartite division on heritage, I define heritage police as heritage practices, relations and materialities which perpetuate hegemony and cement current power structures through seemingly apolitical and neutral set of techniques, sensibilities and beliefs. Heritage police is both constituted by and constitutes cultural hegemony. It contributes to the manufacturing of consent and legitimacy, by presenting the current order and ways of being, feeling and acting in it as natural and commonsensical. The authorized heritage discourse (Smith 2006), as dominant global heritage regime, is hegemonic heritage police, which works not only on a discursive level, but also on the level of politics of affect (Waterton 2014) as well as on the level of ontological politics of heritage (Harrison 2015). Heritage institutions and dominant practices are part of the police, not because of the open partisan agendas they represent, but exactly because they legitimize,

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naturalize and normalize a particular understanding of reality, one’s rights, position, relations and responsibilities as natural, objective and inevitable. However, all heritage regimes that institute inequality by a particular distribution of the sensible act as heritage police. Heritage politics relates to a diversity of practices, materialities, relations and articulations of memory, identity and social imaginations through heritage based on the unconditional value of equality of every being as a political subject who can remember and meaningfully assemble experiences and narratives from the past. However, heritage politics gets repressed through the processes of selection, interpretation and manufacturing of worlds within the heritage police, when a particular distribution of the sensible through heritage is established, while dissonance coming from diverging meanings, conceptions and ways of being is ignored and neutralized. Finally, the ‘political of heritage’ is the moment of meeting and renegotiation between the police and the political, a moment of rupture in which new voices, claims and memories clash with dominant heritage institutions and order, in an attempt to question and restructure the hegemonic through the method of equality. The encounters between heritage police and heritage politics act to rethink, challenge and displace the borders of agency, ways of doing and thinking heritage within the policed distribution of the sensible. They do not necessarily succeed in reframing and instituting a new distribution of the sensible, a new way of policing, but they open the world up to other possible ways of relating and being. The political of heritage, however, stems not only from dissensus between heritage police and heritage politics, but also from the clashes, conflicts and dissensus that may arise between different ways of policing through heritage, such as numerous cases of heritage destruction in armed conflicts, divided cities or national disputes over heritage. In moments of the political, heritage dissonance (Kisić 2016) – ­understood as disagreement, multivocality and lack of consensus among social actors on how the past has been understood, framed, interpreted, represented and managed – triggers dissensus. Heritage dissonance unlocks and disrupts the hegemonic order, the sedimentation of a single discourse and dominant ways of worlding, and makes visible what the dominant order is obscuring and obliterating. It re-politicizes heritage as an agonistic arena in which dissensus, egalitarian emancipation and radical democracy are possible. Heritage politics and the moments of its encounters with heritage police open new polemical space, expanding frontiers of what is visible, speakable, memorable and doable, and acts to constantly create ways of relating pasts, present and futures for moving beyond the delineated institutionalized inequalities.

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Heritage Politics Applied: Cases In illustrating the application of this tripartite concept of heritage police, ­heritage politics and moments of the political, I analyse three cases. The first case is the project ‘History that does not exist’, implemented by  CSO Expeditio, which challenges patriarchy and gender inequality ­instituted through heritage by crowd-collecting, documenting and displaying in public spaces women’s history in the Bay of Kotor, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The second case is a charity and permanent museum organization, Museum of Homelessness, that acts as a support, awareness raising and advocacy actor to safeguard the memory of homelessness, fighting stereotypes associated with homelessness and challenging housing inequalities. The third is the project ‘First Fall of the European Wall’ by the Center for Political Beauty, which, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary  of the fall of Berlin Wall, re-politicized this symbolic heritage by making visible new practices of bordering and victims of the new walls of the EU. All three projects represent political moments of dissensus, moments in which heritage police with its official discourses is being challenged by heritage politics as the idea of everyone having the right to articulate their  voice and stake their claim in memory and heritage. All three cases come from different European contexts, in all of which the authorized heritage discourse has a strong grip. All three rework not only memories related to particular time periods, historic persons, social groups or historical and contemporary phenomena, but do it in a way that re-­politicizes urban spaces and links between memory and place. None of them is an act of urban resistance or political resistance, but a proactive attempt to restructure the political, incorporating heritage and memory in this restructuring.

History That Does Not Exist: Interrupting the Gendered Silence Across the globe, the heritage police has built itself on patriarchal grounds, instituting gender inequality and normalizing the male gaze, memory and speech as the norm. Women’s history and heritage have systemically been limited to the private sphere of family members, ignored and far from public eyes and remembrance. ‘History that does not exist’ grew as a response to the limits of the research work on creating a ‘Women’s map of the Bay of Kotor’, research in which activists from the civil society organization Anima looked at the libraries and archives in the search for women’s history in the Bay of Kotor. In that search, however, it became clear that these public memory institutions hold very little data about women, that even the information available is hard to access and that, when accessed, it

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isn’t systematized. ‘History that does not exist’ was therefore the attempt to make the invisible memories and history of women visible, moving them from the private family domain into public spaces. ‘We thought that it would be precious to make visible (wonderful, scary, warm and heroic) stories about women that remain hidden within personal and private memories of both women and men. And that it would be important to save them from oblivion, and to revalorize this private, intimate sphere, in which silently, from generation to generation, these stories sediment one another to form a long, uninterrupted silence’, explains the project team.1 On 8 March 2014, civil society organizations Expeditio and Anima, together with a designer Tanja Radež, launched a call for crowd-collecting of photographs and personal stories and memories related to women that have left a mark on the lives of citizens in Kotor. The call was open to everyone and within a month more than eighty photographs and sixty stories had been submitted, answering the question: why was this woman special and special to me and my life? A selection of these was turned into an exhibition in one of the main public squares in Kotor (Figure 4.1), attracting numerous positive reactions, email and comments throughout the Western Balkans region. As a way to continue the quest beyond the one-off exhibition, Expedition and Anima set up a website dedicated to the project where all the photographs and stories are archived and where new collecting is taking place. This web archive is composed of personal and emotional narrations through which social history and wider structural struggles could be deciphered. ‘History that does not exist’ acted on the grounds of heritage politics, enacted through a gendered perspective and feminist critique of the heritage police and its patriarchal distribution of the sensible. It presupposed that structurally silenced women, women’s histories and memories deserve visible articulations in public spaces. However, it is not only through the topic and articulations of heritage of one particular marginalized group that this project triggered political encounter with heritage police and hollowed the deeply patriarchal instituting of memory in the Bay of Kotor. It did so also through its choice of methods, as well as the actors that enacted it. Instead of integrating women’s history within the modes, structures and techniques of local memory institutions, it grew from two civil society organizations, one dealing with gender and feminism, the other dealing with public spaces. Its wide public call, and its crowd-collecting and crowd-curating methods, involved numerous citizens in thinking about the issue of gender inequality, recalling the memories of women they have almost forgotten and triggering diverse emotions. The openness in the style and form of

Figure 4.1. Exhibition ‘History that does not exist’ at the public square in Kotor, 2013. © Martin Kmet. Published with permission. Photo archive by Expeditio.

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narrating the memories defied the usual ways of labelling and narrating in museums, bringing in emotions, recollections and family anecdotes. It reached out to people who had not been engaged in the work of Expeditio or Anima before, both men and women. Finally, the choice to hold the exhibition in the open urban space of the public square created moments of dissensus each time a passer-by encountered its presence. The archive of the project is still available, and it is considered to have been reactivated as a part of the Museum of Women of Montenegro that is currently in the making (Nelević 2015). Even though not much has changed structurally as a consequence of this intervention, the project should be seen as a rupture in heritage police, a surprise and a reminder of those who are not counted in the memories, cities and public squares.

Museum of Homelessness: United around Homelessness, Fighting Housing Inequalities In the United Kingdom at the start of 2020 at least one out of every 200 people in England was living without permanent or safe accommodation, and homelessness is on the rise (Shelter 2019). Those with no property, no place and no home in propertied societies become easily treated as disposable. The traces they leave and places they inhabit are deemed irrelevant, not thought about and never recorded. Due to the existential struggles and lost bonds experienced due to the state of homelessness, those who are homeless do not safeguard their memories and stories. The aura of unworthiness, shame and invisibility that society projects haunts them, and they haunt the cities they inhabit. They have no permanent space or neighbourhood, homelessness does not figure among the indicators of spill-over effects and impacts of heritage-led urban regenerations, nor are the destinies and memories of the homeless on the agendas of anti-gentrification campaigners. Those experiencing the state of homelessness experience invisibility as political beings: ‘if there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing him (her) as the bearer of signs of politicity, by not understanding what s/he says, by not hearing what issues from his/her mouth as discourse’ (Rancière 2010: 38). The deeper roots of economic inequalities, commodification of spaces and precariousness of living in neoliberal global capitalism are fully ignored by the heritage police. In the midst of this ignorance, the Museum of Homelessness (MoH) is  a  one-of-a-kind museum organization, a social justice museum which addresses problems of homelessness, housing justice and housing ­ ­precarity,  and acts to solve them. It is a charity founded in 2015, by Jess and  Matt Turtle, developed together with people from all walks of

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life,  including those who are facing homelessness. Jess and Matt both come  from the museum sector, while Jess’s experience of homelessness in her youth and the growing housing crisis in the UK triggered them to start the MoH. Now the MoH acts as a ‘voice that amplifies the problems of homelessness’ and ‘gets invited to places where other grassroot organizations do not have access to’, as Jess and Matt say. They wanted to create a museum, museums are power vehicles, and we wanted to take some of that power, handle it in a different way, playing with that power and re-channelling it to parts of society that haven’t usually had access to that… And the other reason is that museums shape knowledge. They create cultural norms with what they do, so this is a way of rewriting narratives from the perspective of people who are oppressed.2

Being a museum is in this case an act of heritage politics. It is a method of performing equality, recognizing, memorizing and building strength among those whom the heritage police renders invisible. At the same time it is a means of fighting against housing inequality and for the structural changes which would lead to equality. In their collections, stories and actions, homelessness as a structural political problem is dealt with from the perspectives of those who have experienced homelessness, as well as those who work with different charities, public kitchens and public services to fight against housing inequality. Their practices of collecting, exhibiting and using the heritage of homelessness critically assesses and changes the usual ways of labelling objects or authenticating the speaker, transforming how the heritage police operates and labels. The way in which the organization is run by the core group, board and numerous collaborators, the way in which objects and stories are collected and the way in which they deal with researching and commemorating the deaths of homeless people are all characterized by the solidarity, openness and understanding towards different life situations and ways of contributing. The structure, roles and acts of their organization defy classification – it could very well fit what Rancière calls an ‘elusive subject’, one which cannot easily be identified and is constantly changing the established distribution of the sensible, surprising the system in order not to be embraced by it. This is far from a typical museum organization, even though it does collect, archive, exhibit and communicate heritage and memories related to homelessness. Neither is it a typical small grassroots organization providing help to those who face homelessness, even though it does team up with other grassroots organizations to share space, food, showers and support with those who need it. It is not a typical research and remembrance group,

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Figure 4.2. Encounter with objects and stories from the collection of the Museum of Homelessness, 2018. © Museum of Homelessness. Published with permission. Photo archive by the Museum of Homelessness. even though it does conduct research on deaths due to homelessness and organize commemorations. Nor it is a typical lobbying and advocacy group, even though it does work on raising public awareness, pushing for legal changes, organizing protests and pressuring governments and local authorities to solve structural housing problems. Thus, it defies the usual ways of structuring and acting in public, partnering with a wide range of organizations that deal with homelessness and making their voices better heard through museum as a media. In a political landscape in which claims by subaltern groups get on the agenda through performing a common identity, the way in which MoH addresses homelessness challenges the stereotyped way of addressing marginalization by flattening people to the marginalized identity marker labelled ‘homeless person’. The common denominator of the group identity they are building is the fight against housing inequality, simultaneously addressing the personal experiences of what it means to be homeless, the structural inequalities that cause homelessness and requests for systemic changes. Thus, the museum becomes a means for addressing a social condition and problem related to urban life in advanced capitalist societies, requiring change in what is remembered, what is heard and what counts as normal.

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The First Fall of European Wall: Re-politicizing Difficult Heritage In 2014, Berlin was preparing for the commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Wall. This iconic urban heritage that still cuts across Berlin’s streets – whether visible, marked or invisible – acts as a reminder of the atrocities of the Cold War era. Simultaneously, it acts as the symbolic milestone not only in the unification of Germany but in the European Union unifying myth-making, in which sites of difficult heritage are used as evidence of agony, violence, ruptures, conflicts and injustice that end in a positive story of overcoming the evil through the European Union as a peace, diversity and freedom project (Lähdesmäki 2018). For the heritage police, the Berlin Wall is a key actor in the mythic closures of the difficult history of divided Germany. This closure of difficult heritage acts as a depoliticizing manoeuvre (Kisić 2018), which, as Whitehead (2017: 10) argues, obscures connections to contemporary social antagonisms that are truly ‘difficult’ now, thus blurring or cutting away the links between historical and contemporary phenomena. The twenty-fifth anniversary, however, did not fit into the already learned style of ‘never agains’ of policed heritage commemoration rituals. In the midst of official commemoration events, ‘while Berlin’s politicians sent balloons up into the air listening to nostalgic and sedating speeches in an Oktoberfest-like ceremony’,3 a hundred German citizens, in an act of dissensus, travelled on two buses to commemorate this event far from Berlin, to the newly erected wall on the EU’s external border in Bulgaria, called a ‘containment facility’. They went to commemorate the fall of the old wall by tearing down the new one with bolt cutters and electric angle grinders in the act of awakening citizenship and political beauty that accepts no borders and walls. At the same time, white crosses with the names of those who fell victim while attempting to cross the Berlin Wall were stolen from the Spree installations delineating the former Berlin Wall and taken to the refugees and migrants risking their lives to cross new barbed wire borders and walls of the EU. The photos of the white cross commemorating Axel Hammermann, who died in 1962 trying to cross the wall, now held by refugees from Sub-Saharan Africa, are spectral. In these photos, interviews and encounters, the lives, dreams and deaths of refugees start haunting Berlin, even though from far away, inviting the ghosts from the past. According to Shermin Langhoff, Director of Gorki Theater, in which part of the action took place, ‘History is not a quiet place. History must agitate us and weigh us down. After all, commemorating involves thinking. … There was much debate on unacceptable comparisons and declarations that one (history) had nothing to do with the other (the present). It would be a disaster if that were true’.4

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The set of interventions, called ‘First Fall of the European Wall’, was initiated by a Berlin based collective, the Center for Political Beauty, ‘an assault team’ that propagates and engages in ‘aggressive humanism’ through political performance art that ‘must hurt, provoke and rise in revolt’. Their engagement in art is intertwined with the history and heritage of Holocaust, in a way that challenges the heritage police methods of dealing with it, pointing out the de-politicization and hypocrisy through inaction and the rejection of refugees by German society. In a society that builds itself around ‘never again’ morality, where policed heritage embraces the safeguarding and interpretation of ‘difficult heritage’ (Macdonald 2009) and exports the know-how of dealing with the difficult past across the globe, the Center for Political Beauty reminds us that learning from history means taking actions that are informed by history in the very present. ‘We can only fully pay tribute to those who died at the Berlin wall if we also think about the new victims’, says Cesy Leonard, Chief of Planning Staff of the Center for Political Beauty.5 But for these actions to happen, as the Center for Political Beauty shows clearly, one has to value the lives and existences of refugees as one values the lives of German citizens. One has to notice and take into account the uncountable, disposable lives trying to cross the border, practising politics embedded in equality. It is through the mentioned interventions that the Center for Political Beauty has acted through the logic of heritage politics, opening the historic and commemorative space of the heritage police for those who are currently oppressed. This political encounter between heritage politics and the heritage police produced ‘shocks between the worlds in the same world’ (Rancière 2010: 212), and challenged the boundaries of heritage, arts and politics, causing shocks, appraisal, outrage and heated discussions among media, politicians and citizens. Not only it has shed light on those whom active heritage politics embraces despite nationalities and geographies instituted by the police, but it has also opened the polemical space on limits of history and commemorations, political engagement and legitimacy of the intervention under the excuse of the expression of artistic freedom (Landau 2019; MDR Thüringen 2019). At least temporarily, the Berlin Wall has been transformed from a safely closed ‘difficult heritage’ to heritage that causes difficulty by revealing contemporary practices of violent bordering and calling out for the empathy, equality and interconnectedness with contemporary bordering and border-crossing struggles.

Conclusion In this chapter I have argued that in order to reclaim heritage, as an arena for democratization and egalitarian emancipation, critical heritage studies

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and practice need an acknowledgement and understanding of heritage as a political and conflictual practice. My aim was to offer a possible framework for thinking about the relationship between heritage and politics, offering conceptual tools for theoretizing and analysing the political work that heritage is embedded in. This framework and these conceptual tools can offer a fruitful ground for linking political theory with current debates within critical heritage studies. The concepts of heritage police, heritage politics and the political in heritage, inspired by the work of Jacques Rancière, provide a way to think about hegemony as well as conflicts and struggles to reshape hegemonic order on rational, affective, discursive and material levels, by always keeping in mind the principle of equality as a method that is at the core of radical democratic politics. Thus, it offers ways to think about the conflicts between different ways of policing the sensible and instituting inequalities through heritage, as well as for thinking about heritage politics as a project that works to make visible structural, epistemic and ontological injustices, by operating on methods of equality. The three projects I have analysed operate in urban contexts that are not characterized by recent armed conflicts, divided cities and sites of struggles related to active gentrification and urban restructuring, and thus are rarely on the agenda of rethinking the politics of heritage. All three come from formally democratic societies, but work to make visible the institutioning of inequality despite it. All three avoid clear categorization as heritage actors and heritage institutions, but represent new organizational structures that avoid clear-cut definition and cross boundaries of memory institutions, civil society organizations, charities, advocacy groups and activist collectives. All three, to a different extent, use more unusual ways and methods of working with heritage or rework established heritage techniques. All three deal with heritage and memory in urban spaces but do so in a way that retraces the lines between materialities, memories and practices connected to a place, interconnecting particular sites with those who are no longer there or who are far away. In doing that, all three interventions act in a way that ruptures what is considered normal and thus retrace the lines of the political. They shake and challenge the established policed distribution of the sensible and remind us of those beings and ways of being that are left invisible by the hegemonic distribution of the sensible. They have cracked, at least temporarily, the normalized, sedimented ways of valuing and practising heritage, and made visible those who are excluded, oppressed and with no part. What they have been doing is ‘retracing the line that introduces cases of universality and capacities for the formulation of the common, into a universe that was considered private, domestic or social’ (Rancière 2010: 205–206), thus ‘re-qualifying the spaces, and getting them to be seen as

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the places of a community’ (Rancière 2010: 38). More importantly, none of the three dealt with heritage for heritage’s sake, but rather insisted on the potency of the re-politization of heritage in questioning and reordering the current distribution of powers and structural inequalities in contemporary societies. Višnja Kisić, PhD, is  Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Sport and Tourism at Novi Sad, lecturer at UNESCO Chair MA in Cultural Policy and Management, University of Arts Belgrade, and University Hassan II Casablanca, and a visiting professor at the University Lyon II and International Relations University Beijing. In her research, teaching and practice she explores entanglements between heritage, politics, social issues and ecological relations. Besides academic work, she is engaged in heritage practice and activism, and has led projects, training, lectures and research in over twenty countries across Europe, Africa, Asia and South America.

NOTES 1. Quote from the public announcement of the project. The online archive of ‘History that does not exist’ is available at: http://www.istorijakojenema.org/index.php?op​ tion=com_content&view=article&id=190&Itemid=112. Last accessed 10 March 2020. 2. Author’s interview with Jess and Matt Turtle, 14 February 2020. 3. Official web presentation of the intervention, Center for Political Beauty: https:// politicalbeauty.com/wall.html. Last accessed 10 March 2020. 4. Quote from the web presentation of the intervention, Center for Political Beauty: https://politicalbeauty.com/wall.html. Last accessed 10 March 2020. 5. Quote from the web presentation of the intervention, Center for Political Beauty: https://politicalbeauty.com/wall.html. Last accessed 10 March 2.

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Britain Thinks. 2013. Public Perceptions of – and Attitudes to – the Purposes of Museums in Society. Museums Association. Available online: https://www.museumsassocia​ tion.org/download?id=954916. Last accessed 1 February 2020. Ciobanu, C. 2017. ‘Poland’s WWII Museum under Political Bombardment’, 15 May 2017. Available online: https://www.politico.eu/article/polands-wwii-museum-​ under-political-bombardment/. Last accessed 15 January 2020. Crang, M. and D. Tolia-Kelly. 2010. ‘Nation, Race and Affect: Senses and Sensibilities at National Heritage Sites’, Environment and Planning A 42(10): 2315–31. Dumper, M. and C. Larkin. 2012. ‘The Politics of Heritage and the Limitations of International Agency in Contested Cities: A Study of the Role of UNESCO in Jerusalem’s Old City’, Review of International Studies 38: 25–52. Gardner, A. 2017. ‘Brexit, Boundaries and Imperial Identities: A Comparative View’, Journal of Social Archaeology 17(1): 3–26. Hall,  S.  1999. ‘Whose Heritage? Un-Settling “the Heritage”, Re-Imagining the PostNation’, Third Text 13(49): 3–13. Hammami, F. and E. Uzer. 2018. ‘Heritage and Resistance: Irregularities, Temporalities  and Cumulative Impact’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 24(5): 445–64. Harrison, R. 2010. ‘The Politics of Heritage’, in Understanding the Politics of Heritage. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 154–96. ______. 2015. ‘Beyond “Natural” and “Cultural” Heritage: Toward an Ontological  Politics  of Heritage in the Age of Anthropocene’, Heritage & Society 8(1): 24–42. Harrison,  R. and L. Hughes.  2010. ‘Heritage, Colonialism and Postcolonialism’, in R. Harrison (ed.), Understanding the Politics of Heritage. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 234–69. Johnson, L. 2014. ‘Renegotiating Dissonant Heritage: The Statue of J.P. Coen’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 20(6): 583–98. Jones, S. 2005. ‘Making Place, Resisting Displacement: Conflicting National and Local Identities in Scotland’, in J. Littler and R. Naidoo (eds), The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of Race. London: Routledge, pp. 94–114. Kisić, V. 2016. Governing Heritage Dissonance: Promises and Realities of Selected Cultural Policies. Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation. ______. 2018. ‘Beyond Celebrations and Divisions: Re-Politicizing Heritage Dissonance in Europe’, Economia della Cultura 4: 465–79. ______. 2019. ‘Heritage Led Reconciliation in Post-Yugoslav Space: An Apolitical Endeavour’, in S. Labadi (ed.), International Aid and Culture. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 173–91. ______. 2021. ‘Heritage Research in the 21st Century: Departing from the Useful Futures of Sustainable Development’, in L. Veldpaus and E. Stegmeijer (eds), Research Agenda for Heritage in Planning: European Perspectives. Cheltenham, Northampton: Elgar Publishers, pp. 21–39. Kisić, V. and G. Tomka. 2020. ‘Tickling the Sensible: Art, Politics and Worlding at the Global Margin’, in C. Kuoni et al. (eds), The Force of Art: Perspectives from a Changing World. Amsterdam: Hivos, Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, European Cultural Foundation, pp. 49–75.

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Laclau, E. 1996. Emancipation(s). London: Verso. Laclau, E. and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Lähdesmäki, T. 2018. ‘Founding Myths of European Union Europe and the Workings of Power in the European Union Heritage and History Initiatives’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 22(5–6): 1–18. Landau, F. 2019. ‘Exploring the Affective Politics of Political Beauty: An Antagonistic Approach’, Conjunctions 6(1). Available online: https://www.conjunctions-tjcp. com//article/view/117316/165989. Last accessed 1 February 2020. Larkin, C. 2010. ‘Remaking Beirut: Contesting Memory, Space and the Urban Imaginary of Lebanese Youth’, City and Community 9(4): 414–42. Macdonald, S. 2009. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. New York: Routledge. May Loo, T. 2014. Heritage Politics: Shuri Castle and Okinawa’s Incorporation into Modern Japan, 1879–2000. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. MDR Thüringen. 2019. Vorwurf der Bildung einer kriminellen Vereinigung. Ermittlungen gegen ‘Zentrum für politische Schönheit’ eingestellt. Available at: https://www. mdr.de/thueringen/ermittlungsverfahren-zentrum-politische-schoenheit-einges​ tellt-100.html. Last accessed 10 February 2020. Meskell, L. 1998. Archaeology Under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. London and New York: Routledge Nelević, N. 2015. Žene i nasljeđe. Ka osnivanju Muzeja žena Crne Gore. Podgorica: NVO NOVA Centar za feminističku kulturu. Piotrowski, P. 2013. Kritički muzej. Beograd: Evropa Nostra Srbija. Rancière, J. 1999.  Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy.  Trans. J. Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ______. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London and New York: Continuum. ______. 2016. The Method of Equality: Interviews with Laurent Jeanpierre and Dork Zabunyan. Oxford: Polity Press. Schneider, C.D. 2017. ‘People Trust Museums More Than Newspapers. Here Is Why That Matters Right Now’. Available online: https://www.colleendilen.com/2017/04/26/ people-trust-museums-more-than-newspapers-here-is-why-that-matters-rightnow-data/. Last accessed 1 February 2020. Shelter. 2019. ‘280,000 People in England Are Homeless, with Thousands More at Risk’. Available online: https://england.shelter.org.uk/media/press_releases/arti​ cles/280,000_people_in_england_are_homeless,_with_thousands_more_at_risk. Last accessed 1 February 2020. Silverman, H. 2011. Contested  Cultural  Heritage: Religion, Nationalism, Erasure, and Exclusion in a Global World. New York: Springer-Verlag. Smith, L. 2004. Anthropological Theory and the Politics of Cultural Heritage. London and New York: Routledge. ______. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London and New York: Routledge. Tunbridge, J. and G. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester: Wiley. Waterton, E. 2010. Politics, Policy and the Discourses of Heritage. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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______. 2014. ‘A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage? The “Past” and the Politics of Affect’, Geography Compass 8(11): 823–33. Whitehead, C. 2017. ‘Critical Heritages and Serious Play in Museums: Engaging with Difficulty between Europe and the Nation’, Critical Heritages (CoHERE): performing and representing identities in Europe. Available online: http://digitalcultures.ncl. ac.uk/cohere/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/WP1-essay-1.pdf. Last accessed 10 February 2020. Zentrum für Politische Schönheit. 2009a. ‘Portfolio’. Available at: https://issuu.com/ philippruch/docs/portfolio_2009. Last accessed 10.02.2020. ______. 2009b. ‘Aktionen’. Available at: https://www.politicalbeauty.de/reformation. html. Last accessed 10 February 2020.

8 CHAPTER 5 Whose Heritage, Whose City? Questions from the Revolting New York Project Don Mitchell

Whose heritage marks the anti-landscape? Whose history is internalized in it? And how should that heritage or history be marked, memorialized or preserved? Should it even be? The concept of anti-landscape became more and more important to me as I devoted considerable time and energy editing – and writing large portions of – a big collective book called Revolting New York: How 400 Years of Riot, Rebellion, Uprising, and Revolution Shaped a City (University of Georgia Press, 2018). ‘Anti-landscape’ – a concept developed by the historian of technology David Nye – is perhaps not a particularly intuitive concept, but it is, I think, an absolutely vital one for anyone interested in ‘heritage-scapes’, especially in relation to borders and marginality. I first encountered the concept while working on the chapter in Revolting New York (by Miguelina Rodriguez) about the great 1977 blackout in New York City, which many people mark as the Big Apple’s absolute nadir in its postwar economic decline – the low point of the city’s disinvestment – that, perhaps, cleared the ground for the hypergentrification that soon followed, a gentrification that, as we all know, has displaced countless people and destroyed (or was I supposed to write, ‘improved’?) innumerable neighbourhoods and the (often long-established) communities resident in them. ‘Anti-landscape’, David Nye has argued, is precisely what poor New York neighbourhoods had become by the time of the blackout, and what they became even more after it – but what they no longer are. Landscape I know about. But anti-landscape? For my whole career, I have been concerned with the geographical landscape – its production, its built form, its meaning, its exclusions. I have been particularly concerned

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with how working people make landscapes while simultaneously being alienated from them, and have sought to develop a theory of the production of landscape that accounts for the central role landscape plays in the circulation and reproduction of both capital and labour. Sometimes this has led me directly to questions of heritage. As a master’s student in late1980s’ central Pennsylvania (USA), I became obsessed with the small, deindustrialized, former steel-making city of Johnstown, and particularly with what I called its landscapes of homelessness. At the outset of the 1980s Bethlehem Steel and US Steel closed their Johnstown mills, reducing employment  from 12,000 to 2,000 over the course of eighteen months. This destroyed the city. People were quickly made homeless, even as innumerable houses stood empty. Gender violence skyrocketed. AIDS hit hard. And local politicians and development agencies scrambled to respond, seeking any sort of inward investment and eventually pinning their hopes for economic recovery on using the Johnstown landscape to promote its heritage for tourists. 1989 was the hundredth anniversary of the great Johnstown Flood, a deadly event (more than 2000 killed) of national significance that occurred because a dam at a nearby hunting and fishing club frequented by the Pittsburgh capitalist elite failed (it was where the American Red Cross got its start and was a massive, global, media sensation). The built landscape of the city was nearly completely destroyed. Yet, in the wake of the flood, Johnstown quickly rebuilt – a new landscape was produced over the mud-buried carcass of the old – since after all, and for all kinds of reasons, Johnstown was a high-tech and fairly indispensable central place of steel-making in a rapidly industrializing country. The social history of the flood and recovery is complex and fascinating and – though 1980s’ Johnstown officials were loath to emphasize this aspect – shot through with all manner of racist and anti-immigrant sentiments and practices. Such sentiments and practices marked the city – along with significant and militant labour struggles – as it weathered two more deadly floods in the twentieth century, racist attacks on black residents, huge labour organizing campaigns, the Depression, white flight to the suburbs in the postwar years and more. But to Johnstown officials, the coming centenary of the flood was an opportunity to use the landscape – to rebrand it we might now say – such that it could tell a story of a heritage (their word) of perseverance and resilience, of community courage in the face of extreme adversity. The landscape could be made to represent how the closing of the mills was not the end but now a new opportunity, since it was the embodiment of Johnstown’s heritage of, as they called it, ‘community’. City officials developed a new, rather perverse slogan – ‘Come for the History, Stay for the Fun’ – and got to work shaping the representations of

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history in the landscape to better tell the tale of heroism that they thought truly was the heritage of Johnstown. Into this effort, I shot a rhetorical – and entirely unwelcome – bullet. In an article in Pennsylvania History, I argued that under the guise of heritage, Johnstown elites were remaking the landscape to tell a false history, one that elided the significant class and racial antagonisms that had always marked the city, and I sought to show what some of these antagonisms were and how they had shaped – produced – Johnstown’s landscape. I argued that such antagonisms should not be made invisible but rather highlighted in any attempt to put the landscape to use as a vehicle for telling the city’s story. The response was rapid and furious, with a leading local scholar and the head of the local history museum writing a response (which appeared in the same issue of the journal) taking issue with my outsider’s and Marxian account and suggesting that I just did not know what was at stake in Johnstown: the very survival of the city itself. If the positive heritage of community and survival in the face of adversity was not presented as the heritage of the town, then the town would die a rapid death. Heritage – of a certain kind – was simply too important to be subject to my sniping criticism, or to the alternative stories of conflict I thought ought to be at its heart. No one, they argued, would come to see a landscape unless it was an uplifting, ennobling, experience. Heritage in, and as, the landscape had a vital role to play in economic development, and in economic as well as social survival. This exchange or debate taught me a large number of things, but among the most important was that the landscape is unavoidably a space of conflict. It’s very being, even when this is hidden, is shaped by conflict, and conflict persists in its meanings – in the struggle for interpretation – even, or in fact especially, when the landscape actively hides the evidence of such struggle. Landscape, in other words, incorporates struggle. By extension, if landscape also incorporates ‘heritage’, then ‘heritage’ itself is (or at least is shaped by) struggle. If this is so, then the stakes can be quite high, as the Johnstown story suggests. My subsequent work, largely on the historical landscapes of agribusiness in California, has, as I have said, sought to develop theories of the production of landscape. I have made, therefore, a series of interventions and arguments about what the landscape is (as built form and as mode of representation), what the landscape does (ditto), and what the landscape means (ditto again, but also what it means for how political economies operate – or don’t). In all cases, violence or suppressed violence has emerged – so the historical record shows – as the primary structuring force that produces landscape. Landscape’s heritage (as it were) is precisely that it is

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the foundation for, and the resolution of violence, both in its active and structural forms. Occasionally, I have examined ‘heritage’ (more or less) directly, most obviously when examining the meaning of a paupers’ graveyard in the small Imperial Valley town of Holtville, where nearly 250 graves are marked with simple bricks inscribed with only three names, Jane Doe, John Doe and Baby Doe. These are graves holding the bodies of migrants who have died while trying to cross into California from Mexico, but who have never been identified. Hundreds of other graves, also marked with small bricks, carry actual names of migrants killed while crossing the border and desert, but in many ways, they remain just as anonymous. I have argued that what this cemetery marks is the California political economy operating as it has been designed to. These graves are not somehow markers of ‘collateral damage’ or of the unlucky, but are in fact integral to exactly how violence works in California. The bodies here are, if you will permit this, precisely California’s heritage. It is through the work of these migrants, and uncounted millions of others, that California’s hyper-wealthy landscape is produced. The graveyard, horrid as it is, is in fact a quite appropriate marker of the facts of landscape’s production. There are other markers of the facts of landscape’s production. A small historical marker in the northern California town of Wheatland, for example, indicates the site of the absolutely pivotal 1913 Wheatland Hopsfield Riot, which led to the formation of the decisive Progressive agency, the California Commission of Immigration and Housing, which did so much to shape the nature of class struggle in the fields before World War II. Occasionally, one can find historical markers or other heritage signs, marking the sites of Farm Security Administration labour camps – the ‘Gov’ment camps’ that the Joads spend some time in, in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. If you are in the know, you can find old bracero (‘guest worker’) camps and processing stations. And, of course, significant sites for the rise and eventual defeat of Cesar Chavez’s United Farmworker union movement are increasingly well marked. It is, almost, and with a lot of help from books, possible to begin to read at least clues of California agribusiness’s historical development – and the role of labour in it – in the California landscape. A history of production can now, almost, be seen. But all this is about the produced landscape. So what then is David Nye talking about when he invokes the ‘anti-landscape’? Nye defines anti-­ landscape this way: ‘An anti-landscape is a man-modified space that once served as infrastructure for collective existence [that is, a “landscape”] but that has ceased to do so, whether temporarily or long-term. Human beings can inhabit landscapes for generations, even millennia, but they cannot long inhabit anti-landscapes’ (2010: 131). ‘[H]ighly technological societies’, he goes on to argue, ‘can create anti-landscapes quickly, even suddenly’

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(ibid.). Nye’s primary case is the New York blackout, which, he argues, both suddenly and temporarily created an anti-landscape. Yet my own reading of that event suggests something a bit different. There is considerable evidence, for example, that elites in New York started planning for Manhattan’s deindustrialization as early as 1920 (in the wake of a massive bombing on Wall Street in 1919) and that the social, political and economic abandonment of whole neighbourhoods was organized as early as the 1950s. By 1976, the City Administrator, Roger Starr was publicly calling for the ‘planned shrinkage’ of New York by some 2 million people – he had earlier called for barring African Americans and Puerto Ricans from moving into the city – but his plans had already been put into effect in the early 1970s, indirectly at least, when the city started a campaign of closing firehouses in stressed neighbourhoods and just letting those neighbourhoods burn. The apocalyptically abandoned New York anti-landscape of the 1970s was a long time in the making. When the lights went out on 13 July 1977 this did not create the anti-landscape, as Nye avers, but deepened it, confirmed it. As is well known, when the lights went out, the city erupted. Rioting, looting and arson were recorded in every borough, some of it beginning almost instantly. For nearly two days in some parts of the city, people rampaged. Landlords took the opportunity to have their own buildings torched (so as to collect insurance money, something they had been doing for a decade up to that point); ordinary citizens (from across the class and race spectrum) took the opportunity to liberate goods from the stores (in the poor neighbourhoods often going first for necessities – nappies, toothpaste, canned food and the like – recapitulating actions of the three Harlem riots [1935, 1943, 1964], wherein, according to a 1935 mayor’s commission report, looters acted as if they were out ‘to seize what rightfully belonged to them but had been long withheld’); organized, criminal gangs took the chance to grab electronics and cars for sale elsewhere. There were occasional shootings in the streets, and cops (if they showed up – since many refused to heed the order to come to work) were not reluctant to break heads. But it was not all violence. Spontaneous street parties developed around town; near the Stonewall bar – the site eight years earlier of the riotous founding of the gay liberation movement – a giant outdoor orgy reportedly continued all night. In part the blackout rioting and looting, and maybe even the orgies, were direct claims against the anti-landscape in which so many New Yorkers had been forced to live (even as they caused a deepening of that anti-landscape). For, there is a second way in which Nye is not quite right in his arguments. He argues that anti-landscapes are impossible to inhabit. Yet people live in them – inhabit them – anyway and their daily struggle for life under

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such conditions is, frankly, heroic. People also fight back. Across the city, neighbours occupied firehouses to keep them from closing (most famously in Williamsburg in ‘People’s Firehouse #1’). They cleared out abandoned lots and turn them into gardens. They pirated electricity and brought light to abandoned, but now squatted buildings. They went on long journeys by bus just to buy food, and then shared it with their neighbours. They cared for the addicts and homeless in their midst. People found – and always find – ways to get by. And sometimes they explode in rage, or joy, or maybe joyous rage. And, ironically, in learning to live in the anti-landscape, they paved the way for its gentrification – and their expulsion. In this sense the anti-landscape is a heritage of struggle, quite akin to the  way I described the Johnstown landscape as a heritage of struggle. So how should – how could – such a heritage be preserved and marked? Or should it even be? Shouldn’t the whole goal be to banish such abandonment once and for all and produce landscapes that really do nourish and support their residents? Maybe. But then again, the events of the blackout and the three Harlem riots (in which conditions of abandonment were contested), to say nothing of the Great Negro Revolt of 1741 or the Tenderloin Riot of 1900, the rent strikes of the 1930s or the City University Open Admissions struggle of 1969, are far too important to let fade entirely from view. Such issues – such thorny questions – were constantly raised as we ­researched Revolting New York and they are raised in the book itself. But they  are not resolved. Over the course of a nearly 400-year history we show  the dialectical production and interaction of landscapes and ­anti-landscapes, shaped by violence and its suppression. We argue that this history of forceful struggle is, to a significant extent, New York’s h ­ eritage (though we do not put it in exactly these terms), and we find that the concept of anti-landscape – its production and how people struggle to live in it – helps us better understand the shifting grounds of New York’s history. We show how New York’s subaltern classes always make their presence felt, even when they might be violently defeated by the forces of capital and order. In the process we’ve created something of a guidebook to the city’s history, one that allows readers to read the landscape anew, as well as to see where, how and to what effects the anti-landscape has come into being. It’s a guidebook like no other in that it at least partially allows lost or forgotten histories to once again be seen – or at least imagined. We have no suggestions, however, on how to make this history and heritage evident in the landscape. We know we do not want the evident heritage of New York to only be the heritage of the elites (the barons of Wall Street, the heroes of gentrification). But neither do we want anti-landscapes to be perpetuated.

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So we are left again with the question as to whether evidence of the anti-landscape even should even be preserved. What purpose, other than maybe the didactic, would that serve? But about the following I have less of a question: that if, when I had been writing about Johnstown, I had had access to the concept of anti-landscape, I would have had a quite different weapon with which to content the consensual heritage being constructed as a tool of economic redevelopment. For what Bethlehem and US Steel produced was precisely an anti-landscape, and in this case they did indeed do it quickly, and for many hundreds and thousands of people, Johnstown became an impossible place to live in. Yet what city officials wanted to do was erase the facts of the anti-landscape’s production – the near total power of capital, as embodied in the steel companies – to destroy a place and the people in it, for no other reason than that there were more fertile fields for harvesting profits elsewhere. It has always been thus. Capital destroys even as it (or actually the workers enmeshed in it) produces. City officials wanted only to see, and to make serviceable, one side of this inevitable dialectic, and in doing so sought to erase a long history of labour organizing as well as racist actions, deep exploitation and well as the fights against it – all the things that really shaped and defined the town and the people in it. They wanted to create a celebratory museum and in doing so engaged in their own act of destruction: the destruction of peoples’ heritage, even as they sought to celebrate it (focusing on a rich ethnic tapestry, the role of churches, the quite architecturally remarkable buildings constructed in the wake of the first flood, and so forth). And museum is the right word. At the centre of Johnstown’s plans was a project to convert one of the old steel mills into a ‘living museum’ showing off the striking technology of steel-making, the gritty work on the shop floor, and how Johnstown had once been at the heart of it all. This might be a laudable goal, but it is also a misplaced and deceptive one, for it merely restates the question: just how should the heritage of the making of an ­anti-landscape be preserved, or should it even be? In Johnstown the answer was a resounding no – for clearly political (and economic) reasons, relegating significant portions of the city’s history to the dustbin. In New York, in Harlem or Bushwick (ground zero of the blackout rioting and looting) or any of the other places hard hit by decades of disinvestment and destruction, as well as the orgy of violence that was the blackout, not a hint can be seen of what went down, of what used to be there, of how life was lived in an anti-landscape anyway. By ignoring the production of the anti-landscape and its dialectical ­relationship to the landscape, both Johnstown and New York City, in other words, have resoundingly answered the question of ‘whose heritage, whose city’ – and it is not an answer I like one bit. I wish I had a better one.

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Don Mitchell is Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Uppsala University and Distinguished Professor of Geography Emeritus at Syracuse University. His work focuses on historical and contemporary struggles over urban public space, homelessness, the relationship between capital and labour in making the geographical landscape and historical-geographical materialist theories of culture. With the late Neil Smith he was the general editor of Revolting New York: How 400 Years of Riot, Rebellion, Uprising, and Revolution Shaped a City (2018). His most recent book is Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits to Capital (2020).

References Nye, D. 2014. When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smith, N., D. Mitchell, E. Siodmak, J. Roybal, M. Brady and B.P. O’Malley (eds). 2018. Revolting New York: How 400 Years of Riot, Rebellion, Uprising, and Revolution Shaped a City. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Steinbeck, J. 1939. The Grapes of Wrath. London: Penguin Books Ltd.

8 CHAPTER 6 ‘Virtuous Marginality’ Revisited and Revised Distance, Difference and the Selection of Objects of Preservation in an Era of Hyper-Gentrification Japonica Brown-Saracino

Introduction As most of us recognize, we can’t ‘save’ or preserve everything (Smith 2006); this is particularly true in the context of gentrification and when it comes to social preservation efforts – or the work of some gentrifiers to preserve dimensions of the social fabric of the place in which they live (Brown-Saracino 2004, 2009). If we can’t preserve everything, what and whom do we work to save? Which place-based heritages do we recognize and conserve? These questions are increasingly timely as gentrification projects intensify and feelings of vulnerability may deepen and extend across a variety of urban populations, even expanding to include those whom we might once have thought of as solidly occupying the gentrifying class (Glass 1964; Lees 2003). Will this sense of vulnerability call preservationists away from advocating for the poor and working class, toward movements that seek to offer greater protections for the middle class? Alternately, might this shift bring more people on board with advocating for preservation – of one kind or another – in the contemporary city? This chapter wrestles with questions related to how ‘hyper-gentrification’ (Hackworth and Smith 2001; Hackworth 2002) – ‘an accelerated taking over of land which is bigger, faster and much more destructive’ (Lees et al. 2016: 80) than traditional

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gentrification – potentially changes the field of ‘social preservation’ by ­shifting preservationists’ assessment of who is marginal and of what is at risk. This chapter serves, in part, as a call for a revisiting of and renewed self-consciousness about what I call ‘virtuous marginality’: belief in the value or ‘authenticity’ of social marginality and in the virtue of maintaining distance from that marginality to preserve its authenticity (Brown-Saracino 2007). I want to revisit virtuous marginality because I hope that the concept is a reminder of the simple fact that none of us – no matter what it is that we are trying to preserve or save – advocate equally for all, and that all kinds of social inequalities and cultural biases inform our choices. I want to remind us of this now, more than ever, because, as I have long argued, I believe that our preservation choices – our identification of the marginal and valuable and our construction of ‘heritage’ – are context specific and in many places the context that produced the virtuous marginality I first  encountered has changed (ibid.). Specifically, the contemporary context – one of largely unmitigated and escalating gentrification in so many places – may be shaping how one does ‘virtuous marginality’ and, more generally, how one does preservation. Under hyper-gentrification, whom do we seek to preserve? Whose heritage do we value and aim to record (Smith 2006)? To what degree are we increasingly called not to save the ‘other’ but, instead, to save the self? Has virtuous marginality itself taken new form? Specifically, I have worked to trace how cultural valuations of specific social groups shape pragmatic approaches to preservation in the context of gentrification. Against the backdrop of gentrification-induced displacement, which social groups are prioritized for public housing? Which actors are symbolically commemorated in any given neighbourhood or town? Which neighbourhoods, ‘belonging’ to which groups, do municipalities select for heritage branding? My way into these questions has relied heavily on an examination of a class of gentrifiers whom I refer to as ‘social preservationists’. For social preservationists, the central city and small town are attractive because they possess ‘old-timers’ – long-time residents they most admire and whom they believe have a rightful claim to place (Brown-Saracino 2004, 2009). Those who adhere to the preservation ideology – who, like other gentrifiers, tend to be highly educated and residentially mobile – engage in political, symbolic and private practices to maintain place character, primarily by working to prevent displacement. That is, they work to prevent old-­timers’ displacement, despite acknowledging the disruption their in-migration causes. Their concern for old-timers is rooted in empathy, as well as in taste for old-timers’ communities.

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Given their passion, self-awareness and practices, preservationists are poised to be – and on the ground already are – allies in efforts to build affordable housing, support long-time residents’ businesses, and otherwise work to maintain place character (Brown-Saracino 2009). However, I have long offered one crucial note of caution; in the context of intensive and expansive gentrification, this point of caution matters more than ever. Specifically, I have emphasized that social preservationists do not work to preserve all (Brown-Saracino 2007). Rather, in each place I studied they select objects of preservation from a pool of potential candidates. In none of the sites do those they select constitute a numerical majority. And in none of the sites are their objects of preservation African American or Latinx – despite the presence of these population groups in several of the sites. For instance, in Chicago’s Argyle neighbourhood, social preservationists advocated against the commercial, symbolic and residential displacement of Asian American small business owners and their families, placing particular emphasis on Vietnamese residents. In so doing, they prioritized this group, celebrating their heritage and claim to place over and above alternate candidates for preservation, including African American and Jewish long-time residents, SRO residents and Appalachian migrants. Likewise, in the coastal village of Provincetown, Massachusetts, preservationists advocated on behalf of Portuguese fishermen and their descendants, and secondarily artists. They were much less concerned with the plight of working-class LBQTIA+ populations (whom they associated with gentrification), Jamaican labourers and longstanding WASP residents. It is crucial to note this and other limits and problems of the work that social preservationists engage in. A critical examination of social ­preservation – and, truly, of heritage preservation efforts of any kind – calls any and all of us engaged in the work of commemoration and preservation to ask: whose neighbourhood do we wish to ‘save’? Which social character do we value? What do we mean and to whom do we refer when we talk about valuing ‘diversity’ (Berrey 2005; Mayorga-Gallo 2014)? In a 2007 article I elaborated on how a belief in ‘virtuous marginality’ guides social preservationists’ selection of old-timers, and, once selected, establishes interactional norms and boundaries between the preservationists and old-timers. Specifically, at the heart of ‘virtuous marginality’ is a belief in the virtue of maintaining distance from certain ‘authentic’ residents and the notion that old-timers’ political and economic marginality contributes to their (perceived) membership in the ‘real’ community. I wrote: To preserve authentic community, social preservationists … work to limit old-timers’ displacement by gentrification. However, they do not consider all original residents authentic. They work to preserve those they believe embody

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three claims to authentic community: independence, tradition, and a close relationship to place. Underlining their attraction to these characteristics are resistance to the evolution of neighborhoods and towns, and the notion that certain groups have a greater claim to authentic community than others. These beliefs, and, secondarily, local institutions and boosters, influence their preservation of certain groups. While the quest for the authentic is typically viewed as affirming the authenticity of its seekers, social preservationists measure the authenticity of others’ communities against their own [perceived] in- authenticity  … [This suggests that] authenticators do not always seek personal authenticity … [Social preservationists’ advocacy is not, for instance, about capturing and commemorating one’s own family’s history or enshrining the architectural style of one’s brownstone]. By remaining outside old-timers’ networks, preservationists maintain their sense of old-timers’ authenticity and affirm their own moral identities (Kleinman 1996). In other words, they are committed to virtuous marginality, which exists when people associate authenticity with and highly value traits they do not share, and consequently, out of a desire to preserve the authentic, come to regard their distance from it – their marginality – as virtuous. (BrownSaracino 2007: 438–39)

There are two elements of this quest for virtuous marginality that I wish to highlight. First, social preservationists do not seek to preserve all long  time residents; they do not believe that there is a single place ‘heritage’ that encompasses all social groups who reside therein. With this, there are many biases implicit in the choices that they make. Just as historic preservationists might assign greater value to some architectural styles than others, and, in so doing, reveal preferences for styles associated with specific social groups, here, too, social preservationists assign greater value to certain groups (Barthel 1989). Racialized, gendered and classed constructions of social value, and (closely related) complex evaluations of how different social groups do or do not align with a specific landscape (e.g. a fishing village, farming community, or multiethnic Asian marketplace), guide their  choices. Second, their admiration for old-timers rests on preservationists’ social distance from them – on their privilege and the careful distance they keep from old-timers so as to avoid disrupting their communities and way of life (short of not moving into the neighbourhood or village). ‘Old-timers’ are valued, largely, because of the degree to which they do not share  attributes with social preservationists (there are limits to this, though; ‘too much’ difference is consequential, too – hence the exclusion, by the upper middle class, of the very poor, and, by white gentrifiers, of African Americans). And social preservationists, despite their abiding admiration for old-timers, take numerous steps to maintain their distance from them – to preserve their authenticity. Sometimes this means not ­shopping in old-timers’ businesses (or going in quickly to purchase

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something to support the business without occupying, and therefore altering, the space).

Virtuous Marginality Revisited There are two reasons why I want to revisit this material a little more than a decade since I first published it – a decade in which the landscapes of many places have changed dramatically. Certainly, our cultural images of cities, which rely so heavily on certain big cities that have experienced intensive gentrification, like New York, London and Paris, have shifted. In the United States, publishers offer text after text that decry the gentrification of major cities (Florida 2017; Moskowitz 2017; Moss 2017; Stein 2019). Many of our cultural ideas about cities and images of activism emerge from these places; take, for instance, two recent American television series where the drama centres on the potential displacement of family-owned Latinx businesses in gentrifying Los Angeles: Vida and Gentefied. These cultural images are a mechanism that extends awareness of hyper-gentrification well beyond the bounds of cities in which gentrification is most ascendant (Brown-Saracino 2017). In the words of the volume’s theme, the context in which urban ­heritage-scapes unfold has shifted greatly – or, at least, there is an increasingly prolific sense that the context has changed, particularly compared to when I first began writing on these themes. I argue that these changes are relevant for our thinking about virtuous marginality in two ways. First and perhaps most straightforwardly, we ought to revisit the kinds of selection processes associated with virtuous marginality in the context of super-gentrification, which Loretta Lees (2003) defines as ‘intensified regeneration’ produced when elites replace upper middle-class professionals who constituted an earlier wave of gentrification (e.g. when financiers replaced attorneys and doctors), because I suspect that escalating gentrification leads social preservation impulses and discourses to become more prolific. Our awareness and self-consciousness and anxiety about gentrification have expanded rapidly; with this, as housing markets tighten and urban institutions reorient toward new residents, valuation processes become increasingly weighty. We can also expect the rationale social actors use to identify ‘deserving’ and ‘underserving’ residents to shift as the gentrification context itself unfolds. I’ll provide one brief example of how this plays out in the contemporary,  hyper-gentrified city: there is growing advocacy for affordable housing  in the hyper-gentrified context (e.g. the YIMBY movement) (McElroy and Szetzo 2017; Doughtery 2020). With this come myriad choices that, at least implicitly, evoke specific, deserving residents.

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Sometimes these are guidelines that indicate that housing must be reserved for artists  or  students. However, there are also income caps (increasingly ­‘affordable housing’ is geared to the middle class) and number of bedrooms in units – which communicates the value we place on families (sometimes of  a specific size). This is not just city hall policy, but also items that ordinary residents debate at zoning variance hearings and on Facebook and other online platforms (Doughtery 2020). Such debates end up determining how many units and what kinds of units and under what income cap end up getting included in new developments. Here, there is an opportunity to see how perceptions of vulnerability and therefore eligibility for preservation change over time, potentially paralleling changes in ­gentrification itself. As I have alluded to above, perceptions matter more than ever in the context of the neoliberal city, in which development often unfolds on an ad-hoc basis (Smith 1996). This leaves much opportunity for the social attitudes of residents, particularly of relatively privileged residents, such as gentrifiers, to shape the outcomes of specific housing debates and ­development decisions (Doughtery 2020).

Virtuous Marginality Revised I also want to revisit this material because of a new – and distinctive – ­celebration of marginality that I have encountered in the contemporary city. Like social preservationists, the urban actors I recently studied associate ‘authentic’ community with the marginal. However, in contrast to social preservationists, they do not seek to distance themselves from the marginal and even, to a degree, identify with the marginal; they draw careful and intentional parallels between their own marginalization and that of those who came before them. Here, these actors articulate what they believe to be the virtue of aligning one’s self, as a marginalized person, with others who have experienced marginalization in the past. Specifically, I recently conducted an ethnographic study of the commemoration of lost dyke bars in four US cities: Chicago, New ­ Orleans, New York and San Francisco (Brown-Saracino 2020, 2021). These are all cities that have experienced, to varying degrees, intensive gentrification, although the scale and pace of that transformation varies across the  cities. In three out of four of the study cities, the core organizers are thirty-five or younger and describe themselves as having limited contact with the type of bar that they seek to commemorate. In the fourth, organizers are in their late thirties and early forties and have had more contact with dyke bars, but still frame themselves as commemorating a history that

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is not precisely their own (e.g. one went to great lengths to tell me how she had never visited a part of the bar she learned about via oral history interviews). Despite the framing – across all four cities – of their work as commemorating a historical moment that came before them, the activists draw linkages between their subjects’ marginality and their own. They mourn ‘our’ bars, suggesting that ‘we don’t have a place anymore’. They remember the institutions of an earlier generation, but establish a lineage that connects them to that generation – and therefore to claims to their object of preservation: the dyke bar. ‘How can we know where we are going if we don’t know where we came from?’ one troupe asks rhetorically. They fight to remember the past – bars that they believe cultivated vibrant sexual communities – but also to make certain that their cities contain, in the contemporary moment, protective social spaces that commemorators can seek out for themselves. These activists do not casually or lightly establish lineages between their own marginalization and that of earlier generations. Like social preservationists, the relationships they forge around marginality are real and enduring; certainly, they are not limited to the stage. One woman told me that after long thinking of herself as ‘queer’ she has re-embraced the term ‘lesbian’ as a way to describe herself. This change emerged after she befriended a woman in her sixties whom she interviewed about dyke bar histories. Long conversations during weekends spent with the older woman and the woman’s partner led the young activist, who is in her early thirties, to rethink how she understands her sexual identity. And when I arrived to interview an older woman who had served as a key informant for a New Orleans commemorative group, a member of the group was just leaving her house – having delivered groceries to assist her while she recovered from a knee injury. Likewise, members of a parallel activist collective in Chicago told me of the relationship they established with a woman in her sixties who provided access to archival material on Chicago’s lost dyke bars. Hours spent sorting through her collection in her home led her to become, for them, an embodiment of the history they seek to preserve. In short, these activists are not indifferent to the fear, violence and discrimination earlier generations experienced and to how this contrasts, to varying degrees (with activists’ racial, economic and gender identities), with their own experience. However, they are nonetheless unwilling to frame themselves as totally outside of or beyond sexual marginalization. Crucially, they mark themselves as vulnerable to economic, social and cultural shifts that have led to the closure of bars and other institutional sites that they greatly value. In sum, they understand their commemorative work as not just recording others’ past experiences, but as recording the history of one of ‘our’

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important urban institutions, and, potentially, as working toward the preservation of their ability – in the present – to congregate socially with other sexual minorities (Brown-Saracino 2020). One might surmise that this shift – from seeking to preserve the other (social preservationists) to seeking to preserve the other and self ­simultaneously (queer commemorative activists) – is simply a product of the closer relationship between the identities and social position of contemporary LBQTIA+ activists and the identities of those whose ­histories they seek to commemorate. And, indeed, I think this is a crucial part of the  story. However, the commemorative activists I studied understand themselves to be considerably more privileged than those who came  before  them; they do not propose that their lives are synonymous with those of previous generations. In addition, the existence of Swedish  ­gentrifiers  and Portuguese-American gentrifiers who nonetheless  speak of the  object of their preservation as distinct from themselves gives pause here and introduces an empirical question with which I hope some of us  can  begin to wrestle. Specifically, I call on us to ask how the changing conditions of many (although not all) contemporary cities may call out a more universal protectionism, a more universal preservation impulse – one that includes the self. With the exception of those who are truly wealthy, are many urban actors increasingly aware of their vulnerability in the city? If so, how might this sense of increasing vulnerability be harnessed to protect some of what many of us value of the city, and to expand our notions of ‘heritage’? Alternately, how might it cloud our judgment about who needs our protection? How might it change the terms we use to assess the value of those who people a city? Might it turn our attention away from (partially) class-based preservation strategies to strategies predicated, instead, on other social traits, such as sexual, racial or religious identity? How might it, in some instances, misrepresent the degree of our vulnerability relative to that of others? I believe that these are the kinds of questions with which we need to wrestle going forward. I raise this because it is plausible that as gentrification projects intensify, the sense of the preservationist as also marginal may deepen and expand. Will this call social preservationists away from the advocacy work I once documented them engaged in, which focused, largely, on the working class, toward movements that seek to offer greater protections for the middle class? I think this is quite plausible, especially given the direction of recent YIMBY – Yes in my Backyard – movements. Alternately, might this shift bring more people on board with advocating for preservation – of one kind or another – in the contemporary city?

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Conclusion Across these two empirical projects and a changing urban terrain, there are four themes to which I draw our attention. First, the selection of objects of preservation is context-specific. In A Neighborhood That Never Changes (2009) I argued that this is why there are city-specific objects of ­preservation – the farmer in Dresden, Maine; the Vietnamese shopkeeper in Chicago’s Argyle. However, today I want us to think about context a bit differently, to be mindful of historical change and, crucially, of the impact of how dominant images of the city (increasingly as hyper-gentrified) shift our valuation of prospective objects of commemoration and preservation. How might hyper-gentrification orient more and more of us, like those I am currently studying, to work to preserve groups closer to our own identities and experiences? Relative to the increasing concentration of substantial wealth in certain cities, many urban dwellers feel increasingly precarious; this is, after all, the era of Google Bus protests in San Francisco and the storming of a cereal bar in London (Horn 2015). If our understanding of ‘heritage’ and our practices of preservation are context-specific, then we can anticipate that new approaches to heritage and preservation will emerge with accelerating gentrification. Second, both social groups use the work of seeking to preserve the marginal as a method for experiencing ‘community’ – either by being proximate to it (as in social preservationists) or in using the work of commemoration itself to forge new ties (as in the case of LBQT+ commemorative activists) (Brown-Saracino 2020). Thus, we must keep in mind how valuations of heritage and belonging and history relate to this impulse to at least be proximate to ‘community’, as well – and not just to the material concerns of urban residents. Finally, I ask us to consider: does virtuous marginality still work to ­describe what both groups are doing? Or has virtuous marginality itself  – or the project of social preservation – changed? Will it change everywhere  equally? Are some places more likely to generate the form of virtuous marginality I encountered in my earlier research, perhaps those at  earlier stages  of gentrification? Relatedly, are the dyke bar commemorators I highlight above engaging in social preservation, or is their self-advocacy indicative of a movement not only away from ‘virtuous marginality’ but also from ‘social preservation’ itself? After all, can one advocate for the sustained  presence of certain ‘others’ if one experiences one’s own ‘right to the city’ (Harvey 2003) and the institutions on which one depends as tenuous? These are questions that we might explore going forward; by answering them we will have a better sense not only of how hyper-gentrification influences contemporary urban movements and ­

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identities, but also of how ‘social preservation’ is contingent on specific ecological conditions. Japonica Brown-Saracino is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Boston University. She is the author of three books:  A Neighborhood That Never  Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation and the Search for Authenticity (2009); The Gentrification Debates (2010); and How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small U.S. Cities (2018). Her most recent scholarship, on gentrification and dyke bar commemoration, has appeared in the Journal of Lesbian Studies (2020) and the American Journal of Sociology (2021).

References Barthel, D. 1989. ‘Historic Preservation: A Comparative Analyses’, Sociological Forum 4(1): 87–105. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01112618. Berrey, E. 2005. ‘Divided over Diversity: Political Discourse in a Chicago Neighborhood’,  City & Community 4(2): 143–70. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/​ j.1540-6040.2005.00109.x. Brown‐Saracino, J. 2004. ‘Social Preservationists and the Quest for Authentic Community’, City & Community 3(2): 135–56. doi: 10.1111/j.1535-6841.2004.00073.x. ______. 2007. ‘Virtuous Marginality: Social Preservationists and the Selection of the Old-Timer’, Theory and Society 36(5): 437–68. doi: 10.1007/s11186-007-9041-1. ______. 2009. A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ______. 2020. ‘From Situated Space to Social Space: Dyke Bar Commemoration as Reparative Action’, Journal of Lesbian Studies 24(3): 311–25. doi: 10.1080/ 10894160.2019.1684753. ______. 2021. ‘The After-Life of Identity Politics: Gentrification, Critical Nostalgia, and the Commemoration of Lost Dyke Bars’, American Journal of Sociology 126(5): 1017–66. doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/713786. Doughtery, C. 2020. Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America. New York: Penguin Press. Florida, R. 2017.  The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do about It. New York: Basic Books. Glass, R. 1964. London: Aspects of Change. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Hackworth, J. 2002. ‘Postrecession Gentrification in New York City’,  Urban Affairs Review 37(6): 815–43. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/107874037006003. Hackworth, J. and N. Smith. 2001. ‘The Changing State of Gentrification’,  Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie  92(4): 464–77. doi:10.1111/1467-9663. 00172. Harvey, D. 2003. ‘The Right to the City’,  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27(4): 939–41. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0309-1317.2003.00492.x.

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Horn, H. 2015. ‘The $5 Cereal That Provoked a London Mob’, The Atlantic, 30 September 2015. Lees, L. 2003. ‘Super-Gentrification: The Case of Brooklyn Heights, New York City’,  Urban Studies  40(12): 2487–509. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/0042098032 000136174. Lees, L., H.B. Shin and E. López-Morales. 2016. Planetary Gentrification. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mayorga-Gallo, S. 2014. Behind the White Picket Fence: Power and Privilege in a Multiethnic Neighborhood. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press Books. McElroy, E. and A. Szeto. 2017. ‘The Racial Contours of YIMBY/NIMBY Bay Area Gentrification’, Berkeley Planning Journal 29(1). doi: 10.5070/BP329138432. Moskowitz, E. Peter. 2017. How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood. New Rork: Bold Type Books. Moss, J. 2017.  Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul. New York: HarperCollins. Smith, L. 2006. Uses of Heritage. New York: Routledge. Smith, N. 1996.  The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York: Routledge. Stein, S. 2019.  Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. New York: Verso Books.

PART III

8 GENTRIFICATION THROUGH HERITAGE-LED RESISTANCE

8 CHAPTER 7 The Dynamic Authenticity of Local Mixed Streets Street Heritage and Activism in Belfast City Centre Agustina Martire and Anna Skoura

Introduction Local mixed streets are significant elements of the historic urban landscape. Their slow and incremental development has made their buildings and uses adaptable, flexible and authentic. In this context, heritage is encompassed not only in the street’s built environment but also in the activities, uses and people who inhabit them. This process-based understanding of heritage is what we call dynamic authenticity: the ability of a place to slowly change its tangible and intangible qualities through time, adapting to conditions, without losing its character. By demolishing and rebuilding complete streets, commercial redevelopment increasingly threatens their complex heritage. Certain streets in Belfast city centre reflect the gradual and incremental transformation of the built environment, their uses through time, and the people that inhabit them. However, they are in danger of losing their dynamic authenticity if current development plans were to be carried out. In this chapter, we will discuss North Street, a local mixed street in Belfast that is at risk of demolition and redevelopment. We will present the role that the SaveCQ campaign and the StreetSpace project have in disrupting and transforming this process of placeless retail redevelopment.

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Dynamic Authenticity and the Heritage of Local Mixed Streets Authenticity has been defined as ‘the unspoiled, pristine, genuine, untouched and traditional’ (Handler 1986: 2). Heritage scholarship considers structure, material fabric and composition as definers of authenticity (Pye 2001: 65). More broadly, authenticity is considered ‘exceptional and valuable’ (Trilling 1972: 93). This interpretation of heritage therefore regards the authentic as something untouched, material and exceptional. We, on the other hand, are interested in the concept of authenticity as Silverman defines it: ‘dynamic, performative, culturally and historically contingent, relative – a quality/tool that can be strategically configured and deployed according to the task at hand, be that social, cultural, economic, political, religious and so on’ (Silverman 2015: 69). The appreciation of built heritage was for centuries based on the material and symbolic values reflected on individual buildings and monuments. The relatively recent concept of urban heritage, introduced in the 1960s and 1970s, still favours aesthetic and formal qualities rather than uses and other intangible characteristics. The approach to urban heritage was later enhanced by UNESCO’s Historic Urban Landscape (HUL), granting value to urban areas beyond their aesthetic and formal aspects. The HUL approach recognized that cultural heritage can be embodied in many ways within a local mixed-use street, allowing them to be valued in a wider context: ‘Urban heritage, including its tangible and intangible components, constitutes a key resource in enhancing the liveability of urban areas, and fosters economic development and social cohesion in a changing global environment’ (UNESCO 2011). Activity is now recognized as an important element of cultural heritage in urban areas (Bandarin and Van Oers 2012; Silverman 2015). Considering local mixed streets as adaptable and flexible historic urban landscapes, they can foster the manifestation of cultural heritage in all its forms. They are places defined by their activities and users, as much as by their built fabric. Streets understood as places therefore have materiality, meaning and practice (Cresswell 2004; Relph 1976; Norberg Schultz 1980; Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson 1962). Local mixed streets are a useful example to understand the authenticity of the historic urban landscape. Mixed streets were defined by Jones et al. (2007) as a ‘local urban high street outside a main city centre’ (p xi). Zukin et al. (2015) defined them as local shopping streets, focusing their significance on retail and service activities. Carmona and Wunderlich (2013) included change as a contentious but important variable to consider when addressing mixed streets. For us, local mixed streets can be in city centres or peripheries; they hold retail, services, production and housing. More

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importantly, local mixed streets are dynamic places, whose physical fabric and activity always had the ability to gradually adapt to change. They can be seen as a fragile ecosystem that is culture- and place-specific, embodying the social, cultural, economic and political layers of the city. Under this lens, local mixed streets are not only valuable for their built heritage but for the variety of activities present in the buildings that line them, as well as their ability to change over time. Traditionally, urban designers ( Jacobs 1995; Dover and Massengale 2013; Moughtin and Mertens 2006) have defined good streets in a variety of ways, including values such as places for people to walk, physical comfort, complementarity, transparency, qualities that engage the eyes, maintenance, diversity (of buildings), details, beginnings and endings, density, accessibility and harmony, among other attributes. Most of these values refer to the built and physical fabric of streets, neglecting social, economic, political and most importantly cultural aspects of streets. Allan B. Jacobs assured that ‘Streets are more than public utilities, more than the equivalent of water lines and sewers and electrical cables; more than linear physical spaces that permit people and goods to get from here to there’ ( Jacobs 1995: 4). Despite this, his approach is largely about the physical environment. Recent studies in urban design and urban geography have acknowledged local mixed streets as spaces of continuity and change, asserting their significance as dynamic socio-spatial places (Carmona 2015; Jones et al. 2007; Gehl and Svarre 2013; Tonkiss 2013; Törmä et al. 2017; Zukin et al. 2015; Magagnin et al. 2014; Vaughan 2015; Hubbard 2017). Further to the wider understanding of the heritage of mixed streets as dynamic and bound to everyday practices, we want to explore the social significance of their embedded heritage. This was already outlined by Appleyard in 1987, stating that ‘Streets have always been scenes of conflict. The most powerful or well-established groups win but they do not by any means represent the public interest’ (Appleyard in Vernez Moudon 1987 5). Moreover, mixed streets, which have been the epitome of public space, can also be privatized, as explained by Kostof: ‘The public good requires that the street space be kept open, accessible to all, and equipped for its functions. By explicitly defining an outdoor space for general use, the community makes a commitment to this principle. Private urge is to appropriate this space for one’s own purposes – therefore the street space is eliminated by building over it’ (Kostof 1992: 192). While academia has highlighted the value and significance of local mixed streets, in the practice of urban planning and urban design the authenticity of many of these streets is rarely acknowledged and is continuously threatened by large-scale demolition and development. Through the case of North Street in Belfast, we will explore how the ideas of heritage, authenticity

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and change are intrinsically connected in the landscape of local mixed streets. Furthermore, we will investigate how an activist campaign reinterprets the concept of heritage to communicate the value and ­character of that street.

Belfast Belfast’s urban heritage receives very little recognition from local and regional authorities, which has routinely favoured renewal over reuse of large areas of the city in the past few decades. Belfast’s urban fabric was affected and transformed by the Blitz in the 1940s; the transport plans and ‘the Troubles’ in the 1970s; suburbanization in the 1980s; and large retail redevelopment since the 1990s. After the spatial plans of 1947 and 1954, the first comprehensive postwar regional plan for Belfast was published in 1963 (Matthew 1963) and was followed by a series of more detailed planning documents throughout the following decade. The Matthew plan transformed the structure, fabric, mobility and social, cultural and spatial reality of the city. This process of urban transformation happened in the context of the political turmoil in Northern Ireland known as ‘the Troubles’. Scholarship (Douglas and Boal 1982; Bollens 2000; Ellis and McKay 2000; Murtagh 1999) has covered in depth the politics and policies of ‘the Troubles’ and the post-conflict period, where issues of ethnic, political and territorial segregation were instrumental in the transformation of the city. In this climate, hundreds of buildings were demolished and streets were transformed into larger blocks or buffer zones to divide the city centre and its peripheral areas (McClelland 2016). Few academics and activists have highlighted the multifaceted implications of urban transformation (FAB 2009; Sterrett, Hackett and Hill 2012; Gaffikin 2015; Murtagh 1999) but very little research has focused on the explicit effects of this on local mixed streets and their tangible and intangible heritage. Despite the policy protection afforded to the built fabric of designated buildings and urban areas in Northern Ireland, the implementation of these policies has been very difficult. This case is magnified in Belfast City Centre, where the pressure from private developers has been stronger. Many reasons contribute to this problematic situation, mostly connected to the lack of importance placed on heritage and the rigid way in which government offices operate. Specifically, the lack of importance placed on heritage by the government translates to lack of infrastructure and resources (Pollard 2001), the rigid system of listing and management of private and public buildings, the very low fines allocated to the demolition of buildings in Belfast and the

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rest of Northern Ireland (McClelland 2014), which, when coupled with the excessive compartmentalization of the governmental offices in charge of the protection of heritage, further hinder the implementation of statutory heritage protection (Gaffikin et al. 2010).

North Street, Dynamic Authenticity and the Struggle with Redevelopment Beyond the problems at an official level, Belfast city centre is particularly vulnerable to demolition of the built fabric for a number of other reasons. Among them is the rapid commercialization of the city centre since the 1980s, the lack of community ‘ownership’ of the city centre due to ‘the Troubles’ and the difficulty of getting developers to see the value of the existing fabric of streets. North Street is a very relevant example of this situation, as it reflects the gradual and incremental transformation of the built environment and its uses through time, while being under serious threat of demolition and redevelopment. North Street lies in the centre of Belfast, just off the main franchised shopping streets. It still holds a good number of very high-quality n ­ ineteenth- and early twentieth-century listed and unlisted architecture, but has lost most of the community of traders and visitors it had in the past. North Street transformed gradually and incrementally throughout the last couple of centuries, and while it now lies within two conservation areas, current plans (Royal Exchange/Tribeca 2012/2017) propose the demolition of many of the remaining buildings and businesses that sustain its diverse, authentic and vibrant atmosphere. The effects of ‘the Troubles’ in the transformation of the urban fabric cannot be ignored, but the damage was not due to the bombing as only a couple of buildings in North Street were bombed. Instead, the largest transformation of the urban fabric in Belfast during that period was due to planning decisions of transport, housing and redevelopment. During the 1970s and 1980s, as a result of the mentioned spatial plans, large transport and housing redevelopment took place in and around Belfast. This process created an exodus of population from the city centre and the inner city to the outskirts and periphery, allowing the redesign and reconfiguration of the transportation network of the city. The working-class neighbourhoods of the Shankill in West Belfast were particularly affected by these schemes, as a great part of its population was relocated in the outskirts west and north of the city. For two centuries North Street served as a connecting thoroughfare between the Shankill and the city centre and was thus greatly impacted (Sterrett, Hackett and Hill 2012) as its activity and density of use

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was significantly reduced. The transport planning projects of the 1980s and 1990s contributed to this fragmentation even further.

North Street Development and Resistance The dereliction and lack of investment of the northern area of Belfast City Centre at the end of the 1990s led to two types of urban regeneration in the 2000s, both of which had a great impact on the Cathedral Quarter, where North Street is located: on the one hand, large-scale commercial developments in the form of two built shopping centres, CastleCourt and Victoria Square, and one still in planning (Royal Exchange/Tribeca); and on the other, a piecemeal redevelopment of the Cathedral Quarter. The vacancy and dereliction during ‘the Troubles’, expedited by the lack of community ownership, allowed the commercial zoning of the area to thrive without public resistance. North Street was affected at different

Figure 7.1. Shopping centre strategy. Map on Google Map satellite image. © Agustina Martire.

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levels by these developments. CastleCourt Shopping centre, while not directly affecting the built fabric of North Street in its inception, contributed to the decline of the small businesses on North Street Upper. This led to vacancy and dereliction in the 1990s and 2000s and large-scale demolitions on the southern block of North Street Upper between 2004 and 2007 and the north side of North Street Upper between 2015 and 2020. The lax enforcement of conservation policies, and the lack of political will to sustain the existing built fabric in favour of large investment and redevelopment of land in the City Centre, contributed to the situation. Despite the efforts of charities like the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society, the ‘Let’s Get It Right’ Campaign, SaveCQ Campaign and other not-for-profit organizations, the demolition went ahead with little outrage from local government or the media. On the other hand, the small-scale disjointed but positive development of the Cathedral Quarter, concentrated around Hill Street and Donegall Street, has been led since the 1990s by members of the arts and culture scenes in the city. By the mid-2000s, small local developers, such as Bill Wolsey and Willie Jack, invested in a series of cafes, concert halls, bars, hotels and restaurants that have boosted the vibrancy of its streets night and day. This has happened in a piecemeal manner of development building by building, with a gradual reuse of the existing fabric of the area. Despite the economic success of the Cathedral Quarter, criticism has been levelled at the promotion of night-time economy in the area, rather than uses that support that of the culture and arts, as was originally hoped for (McManus and Carruthers 2014). North Street is currently part of four development plans for the area: Royal Exchange/Tribeca (Castlebrooke), Northside (Northside Regeneration Limited), NorthEast Quarter (public) and Inner North West Master Plan (Belfast City Council 2018). A large tract of city centre land bound between Royal Avenue, Donegall Street and Rosemary Street has been bought and sold by investment companies and developers since 1999. While North Street has a reputation for being run-down, derelict and in need of redevelopment, this has been blamed on the developers ‘managed blight’ (Bridge 2010; Stewart 2014; BBC News 2015). In 1999 the Ewart Properties and John Laing/MEPC proposed a development of the area for commercial purposes called the ‘Gateway Project’. The project proposed joining the land owned by both developers in the Cathedral Quarter and behind CastleCourt Shopping Centre. The ‘Gateway Project’ was voted down by the Department for Social Development (DSD), in favour of another shopping centre development, Victoria Square, closer to City Hall, and of the planned pedestrianization of the city Centre (Streets Ahead) (Tweed and Sutherland 2007). Once the building

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Figure 7.2. Demolition in North Street. Map on Google Map satellite image. © Agustina Martire. Figure 7.3. Royal Exchange. Leaside Investments, 2012. Public domain.

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of Victoria Square was underway, and with the forecast of a profitable and positive retail future, the DSD decided to support retail-led regeneration of the North East Quarter of Belfast City Centre in March 2006 (futurebelfast. com).

Tribeca (Ex-Royal Exchange) Proposal by Castlebrooke, 2012–2017 Even though North Street Lower lies between two conservation areas and has a series of very significant historic buildings, it has not seen any development yet and its listed buildings lie vacant. These include the former Waring Street Assembly Rooms (1769), the lower Garfield Street building (1898), Bradells’ (1880) and the North Street Arcade(1930s). The fabric, grain and atmosphere created by the ensemble of nineteenth- and twentieth-century buildings make the street unique and identifiable, tapping into the histories and memories of place of many traders and users. Despite the vacant buildings and parking lots, the buildings that are occupied cater for a variety of

Figure 7.4. North Street, 2017. © Joe Laverty for SaveCQ.

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publics. Cafes, restaurants and galleries, bookstores, tattoo shops, barbers and hairdressers still survived in 2015 in a very vibrant context. However, these very lively fronts of the community cohabit with a large series of highly valuable yet abandoned heritage buildings.

Figure 7.5. Donegall Street, 2017. © Joe Laverty for SaveCQ.

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Figure 7.6. Canada House, 2017. © Joe Laverty for SaveCQ.

Figure 7.7. North Street, 2017. © Joe Laverty for SaveCQ.

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Figure 7.8. Backs of buildings on Royal Avenue seen from North Street, 2017. © Joe Laverty for SaveCQ. The scheme proposed by Castlebrooke in 2017 for the blocks bounded by Royal Avenue, Donegall Street, Garfield Street and Rosemary Street followed up on the previously proposed ‘Royal Exchange’ scheme of 2010 by Leaside Investments, with some significant changes to the original proposal, including more retail, more offices, less residential areas and significantly a new twenty-seven-storey tower at the corner of Rosemary Street and North Street. In short, the scheme proposed the demolition of about 90 per cent of the built fabric of two blocks in the Cathedral Quarter. Among these, ­twenty-three buildings would be demolished with only the three listed buildings restored and reused. With slight differences between the pre-planning consultation and the outline planning proposal of July 2017, Castlebrooke proposed a retail-led development consisting of a large shopping centre, as well as spaces for large franchised retail shops and offices. The only housing provided would be in the twenty-seven-storey tower mentioned above, located across the Assembly buildings, one of the oldest buildings in Belfast. Between 2015 and 2018, as the buildings of North Street were slowly acquired by Castlebrooke Developers, the remaining historic fabric, as well as the complex ecosystem of local traders of the area, was further threatened. Businesses have either disappeared or have to deal with very short leases. As of 2022 only five businesses remain on North Street: Tivoli Barber Shop,

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Figure 7.9. North Street Arcade, 2017. © Joe Laverty for SaveCQ.

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Figure 7.10. Tribeca Belfast, 2017. Castlebrooke Developers and Chapman Taylor Architects. Public domain.

No31 café, Fendereski Gallery, Brennans fish and chips shop, and Keats and Chapman second-hand book shop. These few businesses are struggling to survive in buildings that are derelict and receive no maintenance from their landlords. This is a threat to the dynamic authenticity of North Street, which disrupts the gradual change of activities and buildings, destroying the processes that make it an authentic place.

SaveCQ – a Critique of the Development The SaveCQ campaign was founded in Belfast in February 2017 as a reaction to the planning proposal by developer Castlebrooke to redevelop part of the Cathedral Quarter. A series of people from different backgrounds, including academics, members of the arts community and local traders, organized a group and an online platform to challenge the ‘Royal Exchange’ proposal. The campaign aims to raise awareness of good urban development, to advocate for practices that are appropriate, sensitive, just and sustainable, and to enable the public to exercise their right to participate in the planning process. The campaign opposes the scheme on a number of fronts, with heritage as one of its principal bastions in protecting the ­atmosphere and character of an urban area from redevelopment.

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The SaveCQ campaign studied the proposal for the area and identified five key themes around which the problems of the proposed scheme could be revisited and questioned. These themes were: Heritage, Housing, City Economy, Public Space, Urban Design and Arts and Culture, supported by existing draft policy included in the Local Development Plan and Belfast Agenda. Although not yet established as policy, these were considered important in the redevelopment of Belfast City Centre, through the Local Development Plan and the Belfast Agenda. The SaveCQ campaign published online a series of documents organizing its key objections to the scheme around the aforementioned themes in October 2017 (SaveCQ, 2017, Facebook),1 aiming to inform the public of details within the outline proposal. In terms of housing the campaign highlighted the lack of diversity of housing units, with no mention of affordable housing, family housing or social housing, and no attempt to create balanced and sustainable housing models such as ‘Lifetime Homes’ or mixed-tenure approach. All of these observations point out the potential of a different approach to housing, which capitalizes on the local communities that could use housing in the area. The campaign highlighted the City Economy side of the proposal, questioning how valid it was to propose a new shopping centre or anchor store when there was already a 17 per cent retail vacancy in the city centre. Public space is also a topic open for discussion in the campaign; the reduction of Writer’s Square to a fraction of its size is challenged by SaveCQ, who value not only the necessary amount of open space but also the ownership, insisting that it is questionable to privatize existing public streets. The topic of arts and culture is also identified as contentious, especially as there is no stipulation of arts and culture provision by the developers. The campaign also highlights that good urban design is supposed to be collaborative, visionary, contextual, enduring, hospitable, crafted, responsible, viable and accessible, and suggests that the developers are not really considering these principles in their proposal. Viewing North Street as an historic urban landscape, the SaveCQ campaign argued that the complex character, atmosphere and culture of the area cannot be sustained if the majority of its built fabric is replaced. Fully enforcing the statutory protection of the listed buildings and conservation areas in the area would help. But, beyond the material fabric of the buildings, the street’s past, memories and experiences would be erased, and even more difficult to replace. The campaign suggested that North Street should be seen as part of the Cathedral Quarter, and as such treated in a similar manner in terms of its development. The slow, bottom-up, piecemeal development allowed the Cathedral Quarter to thrive, making it a place where people from different ethnicities, cultures, nationalities and ideologies

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share their ideas, art and culture. A slow-paced, plot-based change of the built environment and street landscape has the capacity to allow for the street’s complex ecosystem to change and adapt, in a way that allows the local population and newcomers to share spaces and experiences. The campaign speaks about the importance of the ICOMOS coined Historic Urban Landscapes and how preserving only five buildings and four facades in a twelve-acre stretch of land falls far short of supporting the local complex character, atmosphere and culture. Mainly, the campaign points out that the Royal Exchange proposal sits within two conservation areas that were established to protect the built and cultural heritage of the city, and that once buildings are demolished, they are gone forever. We argue that this goes beyond the buildings, meaning that by demolishing a building, one is erasing its past, memories and experiences, which would be very difficult to replace. The campaign also highlights the capacity of plot-based urbanism to adapt to change, and how large purpose-built blocks are much more difficult to adapt to new uses than smaller buildings. The online campaign, focused on a Facebook page, got thousands of reactions during its first two and a half years. In April 2017, in the p ­ re-planning stage of the proposal, more than 2500 letters of objection were filed, pushing the developers to modify their proposal once it went into the planning committee. The new proposal, submitted in August 2017, was only slightly changed, offering to retain a series of facades, but keeping the controversial twenty-seven-storey tower and the large anchor store. But this would eventually change in 2019. We will discuss these changes in the following pages.

SaveCQ and StreetSpace Over the following year, North Street became part of the StreetSpace2 MArch Studio, in the School of Architecture at Queen’s University Belfast. The StreetSpace project experiments with different methods of analysis beyond those established within the built environment disciplines. It aims to understand the complexity and significance of mixed-use streets by studying them through the lenses of different disciplines, through mapping and drawing. Different approaches include: taxonomies of products sold in the street’s shops; uses of spaces, circulation and retail; the grit and life beyond the selfie; and the blurred boundaries of private and public. All of these methods of analysis are informed by an understanding of heritage that is both broad and diverse. The students were asked to study the area using these methods and gain a thorough understanding of North Street as a complex ecosystem where traders, dwellers and visitors have a deep connection to the site.

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Figure 7.11. Products of North Street, 2015. © Milda Paceviciute. As a response to the analysis, the students proposed a series of buildings that would cater for the existing and potential communities of the area. Between 2018 and 2019 projects have included the reuse and adaptation of the North Street arcade into live-work units, an alternative cinema, a community arts centre, a large co-housing building with services for the homeless, a writers’ centre, a kindergarten, a cookery school, a microbrewery and many other proposals that are plausible, adaptable to the site and considerate of the scale, use and built heritage of the city. In June 2018, the SaveCQ campaign presented these series of possible alternatives to the large-scale redevelopment, based on infill, small-scale interventions that aimed to improve the area for those invested in it and those who could potentially make these spaces their home.

Figure 7.12. Thresholds of North Street, 2015. © Stefan Downey.

Figure 7.13. People of North Street, 2017. © StreetSpace project, Rebekah McCabe and Anna Skoura.

Figure 7.14. North Street Arcade before 2004 fire, 2018. © Aisling Madden.

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Tribeca, the Name Is Not the Problem The rebranding of the Royal Exchange scheme to ‘Tribeca Belfast’ in November 2018 was met with public outrage (Belfast Telegraph, 8 January 2019). The use of the name of the New York neighbourhood wreaked havoc in social media with thousands of people opposed to the branding exercise. Even the Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Belfast, Grainne Long and Emmett McDonough Brown, posted their disappointment in social media, at the ill-advised use of the name. The extent of the opposition was such that the subject was brought to discussion in Belfast City Council’s first meeting of 2019, where Conor Shields, member of the SaveCQ Campaign, read a poem that received a standing ovation and Agustina Martire read a statement from the campaign. The statement reiterated the problems of the proposal, beyond its name. She explained that the problem is the 21 historic buildings that will be completely or partially demolished, and the 2 listed buildings that will be only partially retained. … The displacement of at least 8 unique arts venues, organizations and businesses, … the 47% reduction in the size of Writer’s Square, … the total absence of ANY provision for social or affordable housing, and no provision of green space, … the focus on retail at a time when Belfast has a vacancy rate of 17% across the city centre. (Save CQ, 2019)

Further, the campaign asked the developer to: Deliver on the vision for Belfast City Centre; Reduce the amount of unnecessary retail; Respect the existing unique heritage and character of Cathedral Quarter; Provide a range of affordable housing for a balanced City Centre; Ensure that all public spaces in the area are retained; Prioritize walking and cycling as opposed to the emphasis on car, and enable the people of Cathedral Quarter to be involved in decisions around the proposed redevelopment in their area.

This deputation was widely published in the media and seems to have had an impact on the content of the subsequent changes to the proposal.

Changes in 2019 – Impact of SaveCQ Surprisingly, the developer has recently responded to many of the concerns of the campaigners and supporting public. A new consultation was launched in July 2019, presenting a scheme significantly altering the original proposal. The new Tribeca scheme shifted from a retail- and office-led development around a central anchor store to a mixed-use development including residential units. The anchor store, as well as the twenty-seven-storey tower,

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were removed from the proposal, replaced by five- and ten-storey buildings with retail units on the ground floor and offices and housing on the upper floors. Attention has been paid to the permeability of the new blocks and a new arcade to replace the burnt down and derelict one. While the removal of the anchor store and retail-based character of the project might be related to risk factors unrelated to the campaign and public dissatisfaction, it is clear that a number of points picked out from the SaveCQ proposals were considered. While this latest proposed scheme is an improvement compared to the last iteration, there are still problems. The new proposal aims to retain only the facades of non-listed buildings, extending the new building behind up to four storeys higher. While the developers argued that the retention of the buildings’ facade will maintain the streetscape, this exercise in facadism will create a disproportionate streetscape, evidence of a disconnection between the interior and exterior of buildings in the scheme. The introduction of the new arcade, with purposely designed small units, would physically cater for the small local businesses that used to inhabit the street and old arcade, but the level of rates and rents in the new development will really be decisive in the potential of those spaces to be filled by local business.

Conclusions The dynamic authenticity of mixed-use streets relies on the continually changing fabric and activities of the street, balancing the fragile ecosystem they create. Change is therefore a welcomed process within the Historic Urban Landscape, but the way in which change is managed is instrumental in maintaining the cultural heritage and authenticity of local mixed streets. Urban regeneration through large developments often neglects the grain, detail, activities and users of local mixed streets and runs the risk of destroying their authenticity. By prioritizing an idea of future that is detached from a sense of heritage and history, large developments abruptly disrupt the continuities of the ecosystem of these streets, which is a significant part of their heritage. North Street sustained not only a series of significant buildings but also a vibrant and lively community of traders and arts organizations throughout at least one century, before the businesses began to collapse under the urban transformations of the 1970s and 1980s. These activities and spaces were coming back to life in the beginning of the 2000s, including the uses of the revived North Street Arcade. A similar situation could be seen in North Street Upper, where thriving businesses were still trading in 2015. Since the demolition of that section of the street recommenced in 2015 and since

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Castlebrooke took over the area of Cathedral Quarter in 2016, the vibrancy and the heritage of buildings and activities on North Street have suffered a managed blight. This increases the possibility of a complete break with the slowly changing authenticity of the street, leaving complete uncertainty about its future. Between the SaveCQ campaign and the StreetSpace project we aim to at least question, if not challenge, these large-scale developments and hope that a more considered, empathetic and fair way of developing the city might come in the near future. Agustina Martire is a senior lecturer in architecture at Queen’s University Belfast. She studies and teaches urban history and theory and architectural design. She leads the StreetSpace project, an international and interdisciplinary project that studies local mixed streets, shedding light on the way in which streets are used, experienced and represented. She works with a series of NGOs and government departments, advocating for equitable and just mobility and housing in Belfast. Anna Skoura is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture in Queen’s University Belfast. She studied civil engineering in Greece and conservation of architectural and urban heritage in Belgium. Her current research explores ways of understanding and mapping the heritage of everyday city streets.

NOTES 1. Agustina Martire is currently the vice chair of the campaign and has been responsible for writing some of these documents. However, a large number of people have been involved in researching and writing documents for the campaign. 2. The StreetSpace project is led by Dr Agustina Martire and has a large series of collaborators and funders, such as the Department for Communities, Belfast City Council, Great Place North Belfast, Seedhead Arts, Community Arts Partnership, Clifton House, Household and many others (www.streetspaceresearch.com).

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8 CHAPTER 8 Gentrification and Public Heritage in Rome The Potential and Ambiguities of the ‘Right to Buy’ Policy as a Strategy to Stay Put Sandra Annunziata, edited by Loretta Lees

Dr Sandra Annunziata was invited by the editors of this book to deliver a presentation on 23 November 2018 as part of a lecture series, and later transform the presentation into a chapter for this collective book. Tragically, on 4 January 2019, Sandra passed away leaving a baby daughter Elena and partner Francesco.  As a tribute to her memory, her intellectual contribution, as well as to the warmth, engagement and enthusiasm that she brought to the lecture series in Gothenburg, we transcribed her wonderful lecture while her friend and colleague Professor Loretta Lees edited it.

Hi everybody. My name is Sandra Annunziata, and I’m very pleased to be here, to be invited. Let me say very briefly who I am. I am an urbanist, a critical urbanist, and I have worked over the last years on gentrification resistance, in particular on practices that attempt to mitigate and stop gentrification processes. I have done fieldwork on the topic in different cities in Europe and in America. I was working in Madrid, in Rome… when all of a sudden, I jumped into a grassroots organization in my city (Rome) that wanted to stop gentrification in their neighbourhood, and they wanted to do so by becoming property owners. They are tenants of a public housing estate in Rome. At the time, I really seriously asked myself if a practice, the desire of becoming a property owner, if tenure conversion in this case, could be seen as a practice of gentrification resistance. So, I’m here to share with you my

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thoughts, my reflections. I’ve no straightforward answer, and my reflection will be on the tenants’ collective demands of becoming property owners in a historical public housing estate in Rome. They justify their demands as the only way ‘to stay put’, preventing displacement and the gentrification that will come, and last but not least, preserving the collective imaginaries and memories of the neighbourhood as they are the only repository of this collective memory. Before we enter into the case, let me frame very briefly what is my theoretical stance, the way in which I looked at gentrification resistance, one of the many ways which we can explore gentrification resistance. As you probably know better than I do, gentrification resistance studies really focus on the ‘right to stay put’ in one place and this is described by Chester Hartman (1974, 1984; also Hartman et al. 1982) who worked in San Francisco, a progressive planner from San Francisco back in the 1980s, who wrote about durable tenancies. Protecting public housing, keeping public housing as public and as a long, durable tenancy has been a core struggle in many gentrification struggles. I’m not here to be naïve and say, ‘Okay, we can sell and we can privatize public housing. This is the solution’. I’m aware of the issues around ownership as a solution. However, recently, some studies from North America have also claimed that tenure conversions, the conversion from tenant to homeownership, in some cases may be a strategy to stay put. This is precisely what Carolyn Gallaher (2016) says in Washington, DC, where she has explored these practices, saying that we can look at it as a practice of radical incrementalism under a very acute and severe neoliberal regime. The fact that individual homeownership or a large diffusion of ­homeownership could be seen as a practice of gentrification resistance – or perhaps phrased in a better way as an endogenous barrier to gentrification – is ­particularly true in southern European cities in which, as you probably know better than I do, homeownership is very diffuse. Up to 80 per cent of rent and public housing is very residual, about 4 per cent of the total stock. To access property, to access homeownership has been, historically speaking, a strategy for the majority of the southern Mediterranean region, in a sense. The question here is what if tenure conversion can mitigate gentrification? Of course, in historical housing this is considered part of the material and immaterial heritage of the city. Here we have Rome (see Figure 8.1). Rome as you know is a very, very large municipality. The public housing I am discussing today is located not far from the Tiber River, south of the city centre. This is San Saba, one of the few remaining public housing estates located near the city centre within the Aurelian wall, in the historical city of Rome. San Saba is perfectly preserved and conserved, you can’t damage

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Figure 8.1. A map of Rome from above, showing the location of San Saba neighbourhood. © Google Maps, 2021. anything, you cannot even change a façade for it is physically completely conserved. What is happening there is that the tenants who have lived there for generations are asking to become property owners, as I already said. I want to say a few words more about the location of San Saba. It’s not only located in the city centre but it’s also surrounded by a very wealthy neighbourhood called Aventino. It is one of the most wealthy, I would say the wealthiest area, in terms of real estate values in the city. While nearby, on the other side of the street, is the Testaccio neighbourhood, the neighbourhood where I live, that is mixed in terms of population… it was public but has already gone through the right to buy process. San Saba I believe is an interesting case for exploring the right to buy policy and related conflicts. The right to buy policy in fact intertwines with architectural heritage and with the complexity of tenures and different social groups that today live in public housing. Again, I’m developing the question that I already mentioned: if and under which criteria the request of the tenants for the implementation of the right to buy policy in historical public housing can be seen as a strategy to stay put for the lower strata in the world of the gentrified city centre of Rome. On the other side of the Tiber, you probably know that there is Trastevere, which is a very touristic site. The tenants of San Saba are afraid that touristification will move towards their neighbourhood. But what conflicts have arisen? And what if those conflicts are silent? Because they are at the moment.

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Let me say very briefly that San Saba was built at the beginning of the 1900s, and it was the result of the implementation of a housing policy developed by the so-called ICP, which is the Instituto Casa Populari, housing public authority. It was developed under the so-called reformist liberal era. It was the Giolitti  government, the first government after the unification that actually pushed forward housing rights and liberal rights. In Rome, this was the first housing project, developed in 1910; others like Garbatella (see Annunziata 2019) followed later. Something important happened in the development of San Saba as it combined different housing topologies. It was built between 1906 and 1921, and it combines individual villas or detached houses with linear row houses and larger block courts of three and four floors. The result is a quite interesting built form, vibrant in terms of the aesthetics of the buildings. It was finally completed with streets and open gardens and a public school in 1924. At the moment it is completely preserved by the so-called city general plan. The city general plan, according to a national law that was passed in 1942, protects the entire fabric that is within the Aurelian wall, what has been called the historical city. Roughly speaking, it protects all the buildings built until World War II. This is what an individual small villa looks like (see Figure 8.2), and I want to stress the value of these villas in a huge metropolis. You can imagine the market value of a building like this, sitting in the city centre of Rome with a private garden. However, this estate, these houses are decommodified at the moment. They are not on the market, and people living there are tenants paying a social rent. What this means in Italy … I need to give you some information, otherwise we won’t understand the complexity of this process. In Italy,

Figure 8.2. An example of the building typology of individual villas. © Sandra Annunziata.

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to be a tenant of public housing means that you can live in public housing forever as long as you remain within the income threshold, and this housing can be passed through the generations. A son and even a son and daughter and nephews of the original tenants are today living in public housing. This results in very low housing mobility. Basically, the same generation, several generations, continue to stay in the same public housing for generations. This results in a housing stock that is very valuable, but at the end of the day does not perform the needs of public housing because public housing allocation, new public housing allocation, is almost impossible in these cases. Moreover, during the Fascist regime and after World War II, ­state-sponsored homeownership was quite an important part of the political economy of housing in Italy. This result is the perception of an implicit homeownership amongst the public housing tenants: ‘One day I will be the homeowner of my house, no matter what is going to happen’. Homeownership is something that is perceived; tenants in public housing talk about their house as if it was theirs: ‘My property’. But the situation in the city centre of Rome is complicated when it comes to the public real estate properties where the majority is used for bureaucratic, administrative cultural headquarters, while only few are used for public housing. What I am arguing here is that this public housing is an important gentrification barrier. Preserving these estates is crucial as a general strategy that prevents gentrification in the city. They are also an example of social mixing. Due to the tenure situation in which generations pass on public housing, low-income and low-middle-class people live side by side. They are an example of an existent social mixing within the city centre at a time when the discourse worldwide is about how to instil social mixing (see Bridge et al. 2011), how to plan social mixing – but here we actually have it. But we are not doing enough apparently to preserve it. The right to buy public housing was introduced in 1992 in line with the neoliberal era, like elsewhere, for instance in Great Britain in 1980. However, the regional government and the city government applied the right to buy intermittently, speeding up or slowing down the process according to political interests, consensus building, and different political areas. Left or Right in this issue made little difference in Italy. During the 1990s, between the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, the set price, the price that you have to pay to transfer your title from tenancy to homeownership, was very low. The reason it was very low was due to the fact that the majority of the tenants had to be allowed to access the right to buy policy. So you could access the right to buy policy, but you could not, say, resell your property for five years. However, this produced a massive rent gap between the accessed price and the real value on the open market. Something that was valued in the

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right to buy process at 40,000 or 50,000 euros, e.g. a detached house, had a  value in the market of 100 times more. A property that was converted from public rent to home ownership for 50,000 euros could be easily resold for 500,000 euros, even more. This huge rent gap, which can be seen as an ­individual perforation of the symbolic and material value of residential public heritage, became a sort of scandal. Personally, I see it as a state-induced production of a rent gap, and am very critical of it. However, the situation got worse in 2015 when a national law introduced the possibility of implementing the right to buy at market rate with a market-oriented approach. The city decided that the detached houses, the little villas, were to be sold at the market rate, and if the tenants could not afford this, the houses would go into a public auction. This was a serious threat for those living there. However, the regional government amended the law, with some changes. It granted the right to stay put to tenants that could not buy. However, it also introduced the notion of a prestigious area to set the transaction cost. What is a prestigious area? A prestigious area is defined as public housing sitting within the historical precinct that has a prestigious or symbolic value, which can be directly converted into a market value. There is this kind of rationale, an economic rationale that does not necessarily make sense with respect to a public good that until today has been used for a social function. As a consequence of this situation, tenants started to perceive themselves as at risk of displacement, even if nothing had happened yet. In San Saba the right to buy has not (at the time of talking) been implemented, no building has been demolished, everybody’s there, nobody has received any letter. Everything about the risk of displacement is in their heads. Nevertheless, in order to protect the most vulnerable tenants they set up a network called the Network of the Tenants of San Saba, and developed an explicit discourse that confronts both the new legislative framework and the housing authority that is in charge of implementing it. The core request is a fair sale of the homes at affordable prices accessible for the majority of the tenants, and the right to stay put at a social rent for those who cannot buy. Apparently on paper everything is fair. In order to underline their request, they developed a very sophisticated narrative, a repertoire of practices strongly based on counternarrative. First of all, they acted on the legal level in a dialogue with the housing authority asking for a normative change, in particular, a change in the determination of the cost of the transaction from tenancy to homeownership. In fact, with the new criteria, the transfer will cost between 800 euros per metre square in the apartments to 5,800 euros per metre square in the villas, which is quite a lot in the real estate market in Rome. These prices rendered it almost

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impossible for the low-income tenants living in the detached houses to become homeowners. The network provides recommendations to the regional government, describing the housing stock as old, decayed and in need of repairs. Trying to countervail the notion of a prestigious area, of a prestigious building – a condition of oldness and being decayed – does not justify the prices that are set at the moment. They also request a discount that considers the cost of maintenance and ordinary refurbishment that the tenants must undertake in the absence of the housing authority. The housing authority is pretty absent in this kind of situation. Moreover, they also enact a housing narrative and a holistic interpretation of the neighbourhood that is based precisely on the presence of lower income tenants, working-class tenants or the popular class as we prefer to call it in Rome. They say they will mobilize a collective local identity and territorial roots, describing the tenants as ‘native’ even though we know that they are the daughters and sons and nephews of the original tenants, mobilizing a collective memory of solidarity, resistance, antifascism, for which many neighbourhoods in Rome are well-known. There is no popular neighbourhood in Rome that does not say: ‘We are antifascist, we were here during the resistance’, and so on and so on. This is the glue that binds San Saba. The position of this network is clear – if we as the natives of this neighbourhood are not able to remain, the memories, the collective memory will go, will disappear. Of all their strategies, there is a specific one that is particularly interesting that I call a mobilization of speculative imaginaries. The neighbourhood is not gentrified yet, but they describe themselves as Trastevere, as the nearby, gentrified Trastevere, mobilizing the idea of what they will be in 2030. They say: ‘We will be lost as the tenants of ‘Trastevere’. There is a sort of mobilizing of temporality here, now and in the future, in order to describe themselves as at risk. Obviously, a silent conflict is going on in San Saba. The negotiation to become a property owner is open, but some conflict is already there. In the summer of 2018, the regional government recognized some of the requests of the tenants, for instance that the cost be spread over thirty years. You can repay the cost of the house thirty years from now. Some discounts that take into account the maintenance and costs have also been taken into consideration. However, the regional government did not change the notion of a prestigious area, which is what inflated the prices in the first place. The costs remain high, even when the public auction of residential property has been undertaken by tenant unions due to forceful strikes in other estates. In the meantime, the neighbourhood is under the radar of real estate  agents, and practices of speculation, subletting, and bed and

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breakfasting have been documented by journalists. This is discussed as a scandal because it is obviously an abuse of public housing, and also by residents. A silent conflict is palpable between the low-middle classes that live there who are very much voicing their right to become a property owner, and the lower classes. Elderly people and households with a single income pay the lowest rate of social rent, and they timidly wish to remain in this situation. (In Italy the lower rate of social rent for an elderly person living off their pension is about 7–10 euros: somewhat ridiculous and out of place with respect to the current situation, but the lowest rate can be very low. There is absolutely no intention that you need to become a property owner if you pay 10 euros a month for your rent.) They probably also wish that the public authority did not recognize that they pay 10 euros a month. In fact, even if the discount was 50 per cent, the lower income groups would not be able to buy. The objective of the network is to abate 50 per cent of reduce the cost established by the transaction cost as established by the regional government. The presence of lower income tenants in the neighbourhood is thus used to justify the request for a fair conversion that in turn will facilitate the desire to become a homeowner for those tenants who have the highest income. Because the lower class are there, the network asks for a discount on the prices. However, only the richer residents will be able to buy. At the end of the day, the lower class will be outside of this process. This silent conflict is typical in Rome, I have to say, because public housing has been historically used as a tool to stabilize the middle class instead of responding properly to the need of the lower classes. It is also worth mentioning, in order to understand if this is a genuine practice that can be described as a practice to stay put, that the lower middle classes living in San Saba in some cases already reached the income threshold for remaining in public housing but are allowed to stay, due to an amendment of the regional law, as they are paying a relatively market price rent. They are paying a rent that is just below the market price, but that is definitely higher than any sort of mortgage repayment in the Italian financial system. In other words, taking out a mortgage would be much less expensive than remaining in public housing. In fact, to quote them, they say: ‘If we pay as much as rent, why not pay a mortgage?’ Going back to my original question, I am moving towards a conclusion. I really think that there are limits to the right to buy in historical public housing and that the case of San Saba has challenged deeply our understanding of gentrification and heritage in many, many ways. First of all, how do we establish the market value of a public house or apartment with architectural heritage that has been used for social purposes until today? In other

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words, can the architectural value of San Saba be separated from its social original use? This is obviously a rhetorical question. The regional authority used the tool of designating a prestigious area, the fact that San Saba has an historical residential heritage, to justify the application of a market principle in the right to buy process. Even if the tenure conversion costs to home ownership today are high, and even if the transaction costs are aligned with market prices, the discount will again produce a rent gap. The right to buy will be implemented at a discount of 50 per cent, and this will obviously represent the production of a rent gap and will facilitate the resale and individual appropriation of symbolic value of this historical neighbourhood. The gentrification literature and stories of resistance about gentrification are clear in this sense – preserving public housing is the most important strategy in existing rent gaps, protecting pre-existing decommodified houses. However, in a situation of limited political expectations, under the offensive apparatus of an acute neoliberal regime, the fact that you can be displaced because someone wants to sell a property at market price to someone else, a request for a fair sale, and the research done for a just transaction price to become a homeowner of a public residential estate, may be considered a terrain of resistance. However, there is an important ­condition – San Saba is quite tenacious in nature and cares for all the tenants there. The request for a fair sale through which tenants who cannot buy will stay put in social rented property is a good proposition. However, it may not be enough to avoid displacement in the future. For instance, when only a fraction of the tenants remains in public tenureship, there is much less critical mass to resist right to buy processes in the future. This conflict between tenants of different social strata is a silent one. I believe it is silent because the boundary between being able to buy, not being able to buy, desiring to become a property owner or not, are deeply cultural issues in Italy, and are very fluid and independent; they are also very personal, intimate decisions. It’s a desire that you cannot completely detach from yourself even if you are living in public housing and paying 10 euros per month. I believe that a struggle of this nature can be seen as radical resistance in line with the anti-gentrification strategies that we can see globally, only if it firmly states that either all tenants will be able, that is placed in a condition to buy, or nobody can: to put it another way, only if the process of becoming a property owner does not benefit the fraction of the lower middle-class tenants that would have otherwise been asked to move. This type of request would prove the spirit of solidarity upon which the network is building its identity – San Saba as the repository of resistance, antifascist, pride of our popular working-class neighbourhood. Building solidarity with the lower

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classes will prove that this discourse is not a rhetorical discourse or an ambiguous construct that allows a fraction of the tenants to become property owners. Finally, I think that this case has the potential to be explored further. It forces us to think about how to preserve the social mix that already exists because as we have already discussed, the discourses about social mixing are all about producing it – celebrating and then reproducing social mixing with policy that in some cases has been described as pro-gentrification. But when we have social mixing in place, in neighbourhoods, within gentrified areas, what can we do? Also, it can reverse the way in which social mixing discourse is produced, e.g. the fact that only poor neighbourhoods are the target of social mixing. Why should wealthy areas not be the target of social mixing and solidarity between different social groups at a time when we are unsure about the discourses around these issues. What is social mixing? Should we implement it, or should we do it? As I already said at the beginning, I don’t have the answer about this process. The process is ongoing, so the negotiation is open. But I’m pretty sure that there are ambiguities and contradictions in the way in which tenants are asking to become property owners. Thank you very much for listening.

Discussion Sandra’s lecture was followed with a short discussion to which the audience was invited to raise short questions and or comments. More intensive questions were postponed to the end of the conference. Moderator:  Thank you. Are there any burning questions? There’s one here. Audience 2:  Super interesting and very clear, but I have only  one clarification to ask you. What is the alternative to the sell-out of the public housing? Is it decided that this public housing stock is going to be sold, or is this a spontaneous request from the tenants? Sandra Annunziata: Thanks for the question. We have a right to buy law that was written in 2015 but it does not say that the regional authority that owns public housing must sell. For instance, other cities such as Turin that have a more reformist government or other cities decided not to implement this type of policy.

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The reason why the housing authority in Rome is implementing the right to buy piecemeal and speeding it up or slowing it down, or it’s one apartment in one block and then another apartment in another block, is because it breaks down solidarity between tenants living in the same block. If you sell all in one place, it’s easier for the citizens to get organized, asking for alternatives, and so on. It’s not compulsory for them to say, so the alternative would be easily not to say.   However, the regional authority has a big budget deficit, so they are running out of money, and they need money. They think that selling these houses will help them to redo the budget. However, another important detail is that because public housing has very low rent in Italy, those who are actually paying and contributing to the budget of the regional authority are precisely the middle class paying outrageous rents living, for instance, in San Saba. In selling the property to them, they will kind of be diminishing the rent influx that they can get from these social strata. Audience 3: Thank you for the presentation. I have a question about the situation where the government will allow the purchase, will let people buy, is there a time frame for the people to ownership, or will they be able to sell it straight away to someone else? Sandra Annunziata: A quick resale is forbidden in Italy. You have to wait five years. Audience 3: That’s still a very short time frame. Sandra Annunziata: Yeah, still a very [crosstalk 00:38:42]. They say, the network of San Saba say that they are pleased to wait for twenty years because they genuinely wanted to keep the house for themselves, not to resell. But I don’t know to which extent they really represent the majority of the tenants there. However, although five years is very limited, there are ways to navigate around the laws. For instance, in other cases, in one room they were signing the contract of homeownership, but behind the scenes they were already selling to someone. Quick resale

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is definitely the process in which gentrification is insinuated.   The very big risk that I think is not completely understood either by the housing authority nor by the citizen nor by lawful representatives in Rome is that big real estate already knows very well where the rent got higher. They are already just outside the door to propose a very high amount of money to an elderly person, I think, an elderly person because I think they’re vulnerable. Not necessarily to be honest, but to someone who thinks that 500,000 euros is a lot of money, they might get this money to move out, but a similar detached house might be worth one million euros in the market. Real estate agents are very keen on this type of quick resale process. This is absolutely the risk there. Audience 3: But I mean, even in twenty years, the problem then will arise again. I believe it’s… and then I was thinking about the gentrification resistance that you were talking about. In this case specifically, doesn’t it trigger at the same time some segregation dynamics, though? Like all proclaiming themselves a sort of fortress against the market value, the real estate, big players and stakeholders? Doesn’t it kill a little bit the purpose of public housing, which is actually allowing social mobility? Sandra Annunziata: Yeah, but this is kind of a tragedy, an untold tragedy in public housing. Public housing in Italy does not allow mobility because you pass it through generations. This is, let’s say, let me be honest in that. But of course, this claim of the tenants, that is sort of a defensive claim. In a sense it reproduces sort of the desire of living in a little enclave with people you know since… because they say, ‘I was born here. I would stay here. I want my son to be here, and we all know that we can live everywhere’. Changing place is not such a tragedy in your life career. This kind of rhetorical discourse of radicalization, territorialization, being there, being the native. We’ve all seen nativity or indigeneity as an important claim in many anti-gentrification struggles. In this

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case I see it as completely the opposite, as a strategy of self-segregating or self-segregated against the real estate market. Audience 3: Yeah, I just believe, I just don’t have here in my mind if the value is on social housing and the potential it could have, has for the people living there, or in actually the people and the fact that they’ve lived there and they want to keep living there. I feel a lot of sense of possession. Sandra Annunziata: Yeah, yeah. There is an implicit sense of possession of public housing. In this case and generally speaking, public housing in Italy. Audience 3: I’m just wondering if it’s right or wrong. Sandra Annunziata: No, it’s wrong. Moderator: More will be discussed, I guess, at the end, but also two announcements. Now we will have a short break, twenty minutes. Those who are freezing, there is warm coffee here, and don’t go away because we will have two important things, a presentation by Daniel and a discussion by the panel.

Reflection by Loretta Lees It was very difficult for me to read and edit the English in this (as I have done so many times for Sandra over the past five years) as I felt that my wonderful friend and exemplary critical urbanist was standing by me as I was doing this. I miss her presence massively. It is a shame that we did not get to discuss this particular piece of work given my own work over the past few years on the gentrification of public housing in London, specifically the impacts on those who bought their council properties through right to buy (leaseholders). Resisting gentrification by becoming a property owner goes against the grain of most of the resistance literature in gentrification studies which argues almost the opposite – the decommodification of housing, and public or community ownership. Sandra appears ambivalent about private ownership as an act of resistance, but what is clear is that in this case, at this time, it has allowed some residents to stay put when confronted with the direct threat of gentrification. Sandra mentions other work that argues similarly, like that of Gallaher (2016) who discusses how tenants in Washington DC rental apartments being converted into condominiums fought back by exploiting an unusual District of Columbia law granting renters the right to stay if the majority wanted to organize and purchase the building

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for themselves. Yet in London, as my recent work has shown, buying and owning (through right to buy) your council/public housing property does not protect you from gentrification. Indeed, in a recent three-year ESRC project we have shown how, if anything, leaseholders suffer worse gentrification-induced displacement experiences than council tenants (see Elliot Cooper, Hubbard and Lees 2020). But San Saba is an historic neighbourhood that is protected via the city plan as it is located inside the Aurelian wall; it is not a post-war council estate seen to have no historical or architectural value like those we studied in London. Sandra is right – there is potential, emancipatory potential even, emancipation from gentrification pressures, in buying your property as a public housing tenant through right to buy, but at the end of the day it is deeply ambiguous (even ambivalent, even ironic?) as a strategy of resistance. But if that is the only strategy possible, then why would a tenant not go for it? The idea that Sandra floats about this privatization enabling social mix is interesting, but that mix I would vouch is unlikely to last. As Sandra says, this is an interesting case that deserves much more attention. I agree. Sandra Annunziata was an architect, urbanist and activist. Just before she passed away she had obtained one of the very few permanent academic positions in Italy – as an Assistant Professor of Urbanism at Roma Tre University. She attained an MA in Architecture and Urbanism from IUAV Venice (2004) and a PhD from Roma Tre University (2008) for which she won the Giovanni Ferraro Award, a nationally recognized prize in Italy for urban and planning research that reaches beyond the frontiers of current planning knowledge and transcends established disciplinary boundaries. Sandra was awarded an EU Marie Curie Fellowship 2014–2016: AGAPE: Exploring AntiGentrificAtion PracticEs and Policies in Southern European Cities at the University of Leicester, mentored by Loretta Lees. The major outcome of this project was S. Annunziata and L. Lees (2020), Staying Put: An anti-gentrification Handbook for Southern European Cities (http://www.eticity.it/w/ wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Toolkit-Staying-Put-English.pdf ). Loretta Lees is an urban geographer who is internationally known for her research on gentrification/urban regeneration, global urbanism, urban policy, urban public space, architecture and urban social theory.  She has been identified  as the seventeenth  most referenced author in urban geography worldwide and the only woman in the top twenty  (Urban Studies, 2017). Since 2009 she has co-organized The Urban Salon: A London Forum for Architecture, Cities and International Urbanism (http://www.theurban​ salon.org/). She is currently Chair of the London Housing Panel (https:// www.trustforlondon.org.uk/issues/housing/london-housing-panel/).

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References Annunziata, S. 2019. ‘Probing the Right to Buy: Changing Forms of Tenure in Garbatella, Rome’, in Mary Corbin Sies, Isabelle Gournay and Robert Freestone (eds), Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press. Annunziata, S. and C. Rivas Alonso. 2018. ‘Resisting Gentrification’, in L. Lees, with M. Phillips (eds), Handbook of Gentrification Studies. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, Chapter 23. Bridge, G., T. Butler and L. Lees (eds). 2011. Mixed Communities: Gentrification by Stealth? Bristol: Policy Press; rRepublished, 2012, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elliot Cooper, A., P. Hubbard and L. Lees. 2020. ‘Sold Out? The Right to Buy, Gentrification and Working-Class Displacements in London’, Sociological Review 68(6): 1354–69. Gallaher, C. 2016. The Politics of Staying Put: Condo Conversion and Tenant Right‐to‐buy in Washington, DC. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hartman, C. 1974. Yerba Buena: Land Grab and Community Resistance in San Francisco. Totowa: Rowman and Allanheld. ______. 1984. ‘The Right to Stay Put’, in C. Geisler and F. Popper (eds), Land Reform, American Style. Totowa: Rowman and Allanheld, pp. 302–18. Hartman, C., D. Keating and R. LeGates. 1982. Displacement: How to Fight It. Washington DC: National Housing Law Project.

8 CHAPTER 9 Public Art, Docile Bodies and the ‘Post-Conflict’ City Daniel Jewesbury

Introduction I’ll begin this chapter with a story about the successive reinscriptions of a particular space in Belfast. I’m using the word ‘reinscription’ in both a metaphorical and literal sense: I’m concerned with the ways in which new urban spaces are produced in an attempt to obscure or erase the old, an attempt which I believe always fails, or which at least always contains within it the germ of its own failure. But I’m also speaking about inscriptions as writing, texts that are literally written on the fabric of the city as graffiti, or written about the city in ephemeral publications; or representations of the city that are produced in works of art. My aim in looking at these inscriptions, and the way in which they inform and subtly subvert one another, is to allow a reconsideration of the dominant nature and function of public art in the contemporary city. I want to problematize the category of public art, to ask what comes to be given that name, and why; and to reimagine it, furthermore, as a practice that can make visible, and even destabilize, the various disciplinary technologies of the city, rather than itself being one of them.

Ulster Has Suffered Enough My story begins at a wall on Union Street, on the northern edge of Belfast city centre, around the time of the signing of the Good Friday or Belfast Agreement, in 1998.1 Union Street is in a small quarter consisting of a grid of blocks between Royal Avenue, the Victorian city’s central commercial

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street, and the ‘Westlink’ inner urban motorway, which cuts the northern and western inner city off from the city centre itself. At this point in the city’s history, this quarter was largely derelict, and comprised the back of some large newspaper offices and printing works, some small terraced houses, a couple of pubs, several large, empty Victorian brick warehouses, and a great number of vacant lots which had become surface car parks, having been cleared during earlier failed attempts at redevelopment. The wall itself was a red-brick shopfront, the windows and doorway of which had been filled in in with grey concrete bricks at some point. Across the blank, grey window frontage, in white spray paint, were the words ‘NO TOPLESS BATHING’. Underneath, in red spray paint, the slogan continued: ‘ULSTER HAS SUFFERED ENOUGH’.2 There is some evidence that the second contribution begins in the same hand as the first, but that someone else has completed or overwritten it (the shape of the capital letter E in ULSTER is the same as that in TOPLESS, but different from those in SUFFERED ENOUGH). In October 2004, I wrote a short article in a Belfast satirical magazine, facetiously suggesting that this valuable piece of urban heritage should be restored by art conservators at the Ulster Museum. The red letters had faded almost completely and the full text was no longer legible: surely it should be made good for future generations, so that they might know how we had lived, I argued. Nascent already within this glib text was the serious contention that the way in which politicians, planners, private developers

Figure 9.1. ‘No Topless Bathing’, photographer unknown, no date.

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and public arts agencies had monopolized the definition and commissioning of public art could be challenged. Shortly after this text was published, another contributor to the magazine, also an artist, decided that he should take the suggestion of my article seriously. With sufficient alcohol taken both to embolden him and to impair his powers of observation, he set about the restoration with a can of red paint. Whether because of strong drink or poor street lighting, the restored text was different to the original. Not only had one of the words changed entirely, but a spelling mistake had also been introduced. The second half of the slogan now read ‘BELFAST HAS SUFFERD ENOUGH’. The effort, such as it was, was soon made pointless by the redevelopment of some of the buildings along this part of Union Street, which saw the derelict premises refurbished, and reopened as a men’s barbers. Two blocks further south along Union Street, at the time I wrote my article, was a pub called The Tavern. It was the subject of a photograph called Cage II Belfast, made in 1997 by the artist Paul Seawright. Seawright has devoted a large amount of his work to documenting Northern Ireland’s political conflict and its material culture. In the photograph we see the security cage around the entrance to the pub. Customers wanting to enter would have to press the small doorbell by the gate, and wait for the barman, watching via CCTV, to give them entry via an intercom. Measures such as these became common in pubs around Northern Ireland after both loyalist/protestant and republican/catholic paramilitaries engaged in random attacks on pubs in each other’s communities, ‘spraying’ them with automatic weapons. The pub may not appear to have been particularly welcoming to a casual clientele, but its interior was more jolly than Seawright’s photograph suggests. Around a pool table were multiple posters of Elvis Presley and the Glasgow Celtic football team; the drinkers who had braved the cage were mostly old men who had been barred from other pubs. The Tavern has also been refurbished since this time. It is still a pub but it is now called the Sunflower, and on one of its outside walls is a large wooden sign, bearing the carefully hand-lettered slogan, ‘NO TOPLESS BATHING / ULSTER HAS SUFFERED ENOUGH’, spread across two lines. Inside the pub, the Elvis and Celtic posters have been replaced with other memorabilia and artworks. Hanging on one wall is a small, highly detailed watercolour, by Belfast artist Stephen Shaw, also showing the graffiti that was once visible just up the street. However, Shaw has opted to represent not the original slogan, as used in the sign outside, but the ‘inaccurate’ restoration, complete with misspelling. What is the point of this whimsical, circular narrative? Is there one? I hope that it does not stretch the argument too far to suggest that this little history demonstrates that alternative understandings of what might constitute ‘art’

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Figure 9.2. Paul Seawright, Cage II Belfast, colour photograph, 1997, courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. can be found even in this highly contested public sphere and public realm. We can also begin to see a way in which Belfast’s recent history is legible in those artworks, official and unofficial, and that art produces valuable reflections and interpretations of its culture and society. What’s more, we see an insistence here on the street itself as a common heritage, one that is always

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Figure 9.3. The Sunflower pub, Belfast. Photo: Allan Leonard, 2016, Creative Commons licence Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/.

Figure 9.4. Stephen Shaw, No Topless Bathing, watercolour, 2009, courtesy of the artist.

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in the making, and that is always open to remaking by its inhabitants, by those who know its fine grain. As we will see there are always those who view the city from above and who seek to inscribe it in maps and development plans; they believe absolutely in the totalizing power of their vision. But there are also those who write on the city directly. The marks they make can never be erased entirely by the demolition crew.

The ‘Post-Conflict’ The generally accepted version of recent Northern Irish history is that, in the mid-1990s, after thirty years of violent sectarian conflict, the main combatants (the paramilitaries on both sides, and the British government, whose army was visible and active on Northern Ireland’s streets) all wanted to find a way out without having to ‘lose’. Successive British governments entered into secret talks with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to enable this; the paramilitary groups declared ceasefires; and finally, in 1998, the new Labour government persuaded the political parties to sign a peace agreement (Coulter and Shirlow 2019). As has been pointed out by Peter Shirlow (2006) and by many others since, the conflict didn’t simply disappear. Rather, it was sublimated into other less visible forms. I want to assert here a ‘non-exceptionalist’ understanding of what constitutes social conflict, against the exceptionalism of what I believe to be the self-serving academic niche of ‘post-conflict studies’. Conflict in Belfast, and in Northern Ireland more generally, has transformed into more ‘normal’ urban forms, into class division, and the mundane battle for control over space and land. Brendan Murtagh (2018) writes, ‘… the city is “post-violent” rather than “post-conflict” with a toxic mix of territoriality, poverty, paramilitarism and intensifying segregation’ (444). It is less useful to compare Belfast with Sarajevo or Johannesburg than to attempt to find in it the signs that mark any other rapidly restructuring, neoliberalizing city. Belfast is fragmented by around 100 so-called ‘peace walls’, barriers many metres high, made of steel, concrete or brick, which separate communities, often by cutting directly across a street. The vast majority of these have been built in the last twenty years, in other words, during the ‘peace’. The walls are intended to protect the communities on each side from one another. It is often stated that the communities prefer it that way and do not want to desegregate, but as Murtagh (2018) shows, there is a certain circularity about the way in which very partial attitudes surveys, perhaps disproportionately representative of those with a stake in continued division (such as identitarian political figures, or paramilitaries), are used

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to justify continued segregation. Separate development becomes a self-­ fulfilling prophecy. Apart from this continued segregation in working-class housing, there are still separate schooling systems for the vast majority of protestant and catholic children, and even separate education systems for their educators. The Agreement itself, it has been argued, cements segregation, since the ‘consociational’ power-sharing model which it put in place privileges parties on the ethnonational extremes, for whom there is little incentive to move toward a parliamentary system based on more familiar, less tribal modes of representation and political affiliation (Nagle and Clancy 2010; Nagle 2018; Shirlow and Murtagh 2006). It is still unclear exactly what it has really achieved, beyond the minimum goal of making a return to conflict less likely.3 In this ‘post-conflict’ era, it has often seemed as if the only mechanism with which the Assembly and the Westminster government can imagine transforming the social sphere is an accelerated progress through the ­economic, organizational and financial restructuring that has taken place in other cities internationally over the last forty years. Their prescription for Belfast is to neoliberalize, and to do it quickly: to deregulate, privatize, financialize and globalize. The construction of shared social space is made to depend on the dogma of perpetual regeneration; but as increasingly complex means are found to leverage the debt that funds new urban development, the profit only flows outward. Almost nothing trickles ­ down  from the spectacular property speculation in the city centre to the working-class communities just a ten-minute walk away. Meanwhile, the city’s class divisions become more accentuated, and come to take on new dimensions: shared space can be readily found in more affluent areas of the city. What is significant about the widely circulated image of contemporary Belfast as a post-conflict city is not only that it masks the reality of entrenched ethnoreligious segregation becoming accentuated by newly spatialized class division. More crucially, it naturalizes the neoliberal restructuring described above with a spurious ‘morality’. Post-Agreement Northern Ireland has, to a significant degree, become a story in which the twin moral goods of political ‘normalization’ and economic neoliberalization are folded into one another. Belfast has become the exemplary site of this new politics of socio-economic development. On every side of the city it’s possible to see ways in which heritage discourses are mobilized to naturalize this development – in the theming or naming of its different districts (such as the former docks and shipbuilding yards, which were almost totally torn down in order to be rebuilt as the Titanic Quarter, or the successive regenerations of the cultural

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district, known as the Cathedral Quarter: see chapter 7); but also in the way in which the decline of industries and the destruction of communities has been presented as a natural or organic process, masking economic processes which were only marginally to do with the political conflict. Certain works of public art seek to introduce a theme of continuity in spaces which have been entirely reconfigured; in Belfast this often takes the form of murals commemorating vanished streets or neighbourhoods (replacing murals that celebrated armed paramilitaries), a sanitized recuperation that naturalizes the ‘objective violence’ of urban planning and private development, as if it were a simple law that the ‘old’ must always make way for the new. Collectively these statues, murals, mosaics, tiled panels and so on turn the city into a vast, open-air memorial garden; a pathetic nostalgia comes to permeate the perpetually regenerating city, but clearly it’s felt that this recuperative gesture is a paradoxical necessity, for only once political and economic processes that contain their own ‘normalizing violence’ have been reinvented as ‘heritage’ is it possible to complete the restructuring necessary for urban space to be turned into a profitable, exchangeable commodity. The global economic processes and political choices that led to the closure of the shipyards, and made redundant a massive industrial workforce in just a few years, must necessarily be obscured, and this specific history must be reinvented as heritage; in this way, the moribund shipyards can be turned into the Titanic Quarter. Public art is thus effective in ‘decommissioning’ inconvenient histories, by sanitizing them and regurgitating them for tourist consumption. There are various ways in which we can conceptualize how meaning is produced by emblematic public art. David Harvey (2002) describes the economic logic of urban space as a monopoly from which rent can be derived. Furthermore he defines the process of competitive cultural branding, which cities deploy in their struggle to distinguish themselves, so that they can ultimately all become exactly the same space. Manuel Castells (1998) talks about the emergence of the dual city that functions both as a ‘space of flows’, connected at the level of the image with other metropolitan centres, and a ‘space of places’, where lived experience, ‘everyday life’, goes on at ground level. Bree Hocking (2015) has written about the way in which this duality, or tension, between the local and the global produces public art that reproduces either the ‘civic identikit of flows’ – art which claims status because of its size, and which can call to mind other places which have similar large pieces of public art, and thus affirm the space in which the viewer stands as somehow ‘globally important’ – or the ‘civic identikit of place’ – art which tells us our history, in an adapted form.

Figure 9.5. Ross Wilson, Titanic Yardmen, bronze, 2012. Photo: William Murphy, 2019, Creative Commons licence Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 (CC BY-SA 2.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.

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Figure 9.6. Andy Scott, Thanksgiving Square Beacon, steel and bronze, 2007. Photo: Edwin Klein, no date, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Figure 9.7. Wolfgang Buttress, Rise, steel, 2011. Photo: Alan Meban, 2011, Creative Commons licence Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 2.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/. I think that before approaching these questions of the plane at which such art produces meaning – the global flows in which it’s implicated – one of the most useful ways in which we can make a meaningful connection between (i) public art commissioning, (ii) moral economies of perpetual regeneration, (iii) the sublimation of visible, spectacular conflict into more mundanely violent processes of urban restructuring, and (iv) the mobilization of ‘heritage’, is with a reference that Hocking herself introduces only to discard almost immediately, which is Foucault’s description in Discipline and Punish (1977: 231) of biopolitical technologies that observe, monitor, regulate, condition, control and ultimately produce ‘docile bodies’. In writing and speaking about public art over many years I’ve talked repeatedly of my lack of interest in the specific aesthetics of individual public art commissions (although I find it curious that a debased, simplified, formal pseudo-modernism should so stubbornly have become the lingua franca of large-scale public art). Rather than critiquing the outward appearance of public art, I would like us all to engage more fully with its functioning, as one of a set of disciplinary spatial technologies that produce us as suitable subjects for the neoliberal city. No other technology, not even the

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architecture which is the most obvious definition of any city centre redevelopment, is quite as efficient as public art in naturalizing the complex processes by which space is reconfigured, or in silencing dissonant readings of that space. In closing with an account of specific pieces of public art in Belfast, I want to suggest that Hocking’s either / or categorization is too neat, and to demonstrate that the space of flows and the space of places become entangled in the disciplinary rhetorics enacted by these works. It is possible for public art to aspire both to ‘tell us our history’ (channelling official heritage discourses) and to ‘tell us where we’re going’ (naturalizing the idea that neoliberal urban restructuring makes possible a good future which departs radically from the bad past). In doing so, it seeks to produce us both as the subjects of that future, and that history-as-heritage.

Wish Wish was a temporary public art commission managed by the Belfast Festival at Queen’s and undertaken by the artist Jorge Rodriguez Gerada. It occupied a site in the Titanic Quarter, adjacent to the newly opened Titanic Belfast Museum, a piece of statement architecture which performs a ‘historical cleansing’ of the hastily demolished former shipyards and which cost £95m of public money.4 To ‘research’ the work, Gerada made a very brief visit to Belfast, during which he stopped a young girl in the street and asked her to make a wish about the future. While the child made her wish, Gerada took a photograph

Figure 9.8. Jorge Rodriguez Gerada, Wish, earthwork installation, 2013. Photo: Gerada Studio via Wikimedia Commons, https://creative commons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

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of her. Having produced a halftone version of the image, he then upscaled it to fill an area of approximately 1.5 hectares, and set about ‘drawing’ it on the ground in the former docklands. The image was produced by a small crew of unpaid assistants, using recyclable or biodegradable materials. On completion, the image was so large that it could not be read from the ground; the Festival then circulated the news that the piece would be visible from the top of the Titanic Belfast building, but again the proximity of the building to the site meant that it was dramatically distorted. Then, it was suggested that the best view would be available to passengers departing from and landing at the nearby City Airport – again, unfortunately, this turned out not to be true, as the airport, though close, used a flightpath that sent planes in the opposite direction from the artwork. Finally, it became clear that the point of the artwork was not actually to be seen by any actual viewer, but to be photographed. In 2013, before the widespread availability of drones, this meant using a helicopter crew to make an official image that could then be distributed to international media. The artwork, it turned out, was only ever intended as a spectacular logo – one with a trite narrative attached about a wish for future peace, one through which the Festival could generate publicity and please its local funders and sponsors, and one which, for a short time, did the rounds as an image that represented what the new Belfast wanted to be. The work was extremely efficient in mobilizing various artistic ­discourses – the unpaid assistants were rebranded as volunteers who had come together from Belfast’s two divided communities, so the piece was able to present itself as a peace-building engagement; the materials and non-­ permanence meant that the work could use contemporary art languages concerned with sustainability and site-specificity; but the unavoidable fact was that this was a spectacle, intended as marketing for a recently rebranded, restructured, deindustrialized urban site. It neither activated nor produced a public, nor did it set out to invent a novel reading of space or place; it treated its public as already existing, passive, consumers of a press image which would tell them who they were and where they now lived.

The Magic Jug I conclude this chapter with a story of a piece of public art, and a conquest of public space, that was prevented, at least in part. The Magic Jug was a proposal for a public artwork which was received from artist Joss Smith in 2010, in response to a brief for a new sculpture to be sited on Fountain Street in the city centre. The proposal specified a three-metre-high black granite sculpture of a water jug, supposedly to

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Figure 9.9. Joss Smith, artist’s visualization for The Magic Jug, 2010, courtesy of the Department for Social Development for Northern Ireland.

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commemorate the site of the city’s first public drinking water fountain. On top of the jug would be a large rendering, in aluminium, of a symbol called a triskel, visible in 5000-year-old stone carvings at Newgrange in the Irish Republic. On top of this was yet another element, a kingfisher, intended to function as a ‘symbol of good fortune for the city and its bright future’ (Northern Ireland Executive 2010). The brief for the commission, which had been drawn up for the Department for Social Development (DSD) by civil servants in the Central Procurement Department, was part of a larger package of road and footpath improvements in the city centre called the ‘Streets Ahead’ scheme. Only after studying a sketch plan in the DSD’s Westside Regeneration Masterplan (DSD 2009: 20–21) – published around six months after the brief was advertised – was it clear that the Magic Jug would be positioned in front of a building that had been approved for demolition: development plans for the area showed a new curved street, intended to function as a shortened pedestrian route from Fountain Street to CastleCourt Shopping Centre, for years the city’s prime retail site, opened in the mid-1980s. The site was also positioned at the end of an existing east-west laneway, at the other end of which was another large public artwork, newly installed in 2009, made of twisted steel  sections in a circular formation, and called Spirit of Belfast. This artwork also stood close to the entrance to a shopping centre, in this case the new, and much-hyped Victoria Square, subject of a major redevelopment, which involved the covering-over and privatization of a number of Belfast streets. It was thus apparent that the two pieces of public art were intended to function as route markers on a new ‘retail circuit’ (as it was termed by the DSD), between the two shopping centres. A shopper emerging from one of the shopping centres and walking to the adjacent artwork would then have a direct sightline to the next artwork, and would thus be guided to the next shopping centre. Following the publication of the DSD’s press release and Smith’s rough sketch of the artwork in March 2010, a group of artists, architects and urban activists, including this writer, began a campaign against the Magic Jug. A public meeting was held in the gallery of PLACE, an organization dedicated to the promotion of architecture and the built environment, which was only a few metres away from the intended site of the artwork on Fountain Street. Following this, an open letter was drafted to the DSD ( Jewesbury et al. 2010), listing a number of objections to planning permission being granted for the artwork; these were grouped under the headings Procurement, Location, The Wider Plan and Sustainability. In taking such a technical approach to this objection, we made the decision that a media campaign aimed at discrediting the sculpture on aesthetic grounds

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would be entirely irrelevant. Our objection was not to the (admittedly, poor) formal conceptualization of the piece but to the use to which it was being put, the disciplinary function it was being designed to fulfil, on the citizens of post-conflict Belfast. In this, as in a number of cases that were highlighted in other campaigns, the artist was, to a large extent, an unwitting bystander, caught up in a technocratic capture of space. It appeared odd to some radio and print journalists that artists were campaigning to block a public art commission; but as our letter made clear, we were asking for adherence to the guidelines that already existed for best practice in such commissioning, and for the inclusion of artists in the devising of public art commissioning briefs. We also felt that other, more critical artistic interventions in public space, of a kind which had always happened in Belfast, were rendered invisible by the coverage given to a banal sculpture intended as a decorative street sign. The open letter ran to eight pages, five of which were the names of the more than 200 signatories who supported it. The four headings were each followed by summaries of the objections that were detailed beneath: Procurement We do not believe that sufficient expertise was made use of in devising the brief, or in assessing the applications. Location The combined width of the sculpture and the adjacent seating leaves almost five metres of Fountain Street inaccessible for pedestrians. The Wider Plan The DSD’s wider vison (including the proposed curved street) has not been submitted to or approved by the planning service or Belfast City Council. Since this new streetscape appears to be a crucial context in determining the siting of the new sculpture, we consider [that] submitting the sculpture now for planning [permission], separately, to be premature, presumptuous, and of high risk. Sustainability We do not consider that carving a jug measuring 3m x 1.38m monolithically from Black Shanxi granite and shipping it halfway around the world meets standards for quality and sustainability. ( Jewesbury et al. 2010)

Following the submission of the letter to the DSD, it was announced in September 2010 by the new Minister for Social Development, Alex Attwood, that the Magic Jug commission had been cancelled. It was asserted that this was solely due to budgetary constraints and that it had nothing to do with a campaign by what the minister described as ‘a handful of artists and architects’.

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Conclusion The uses to which public art is put in the neoliberalizing city are complex and they do not follow a unitary rationale. They seek to naturalize or legitimize a vision of change that is being enacted through privatization, de- and re-regulation, financialization and globalization. Enfolded within that vision of a certain kind of future is a version of a certain kind of past, one in which particular economic and political processes – involving the destruction of working-class communities and the reorientation of entire industrial economies – are presented as purely organic, or incidental. These processes have a profound effect in a city which is still marked by ethnoreligious segregation and which is experiencing another respatialization based on deepening class division. However, there is still a potential for art to be a critical activity in the neoliberal city, and there are still ways in which the city can be made to speak against the grain, and against the apparently incontrovertible flow of perpetual regeneration. Even as whole streets are torn down, and idealized regimes of disciplined consumption and wealth extraction appear in their place, dissident aesthetic practices introduce the grit of remembered use and unlicensed production of meaning, unauthorized modes of being-in-public, and a new cycle of urban decay is initiated amongst the ruins of tomorrow. Daniel Jewesbury is a senior lecturer in Fine Art at HDK-Valand Academy of Art & Design, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He lived for over ­twenty-five years on the island of Ireland, where he conducted extensive research on the instrumentalizations of professional and community art practices, by both state, public and private actors. He is a practising artist, whose film and video works explore the limits of human agency in the ­neoliberalizing city. NOTES 1. The Good Friday Agreement was the peace agreement negotiated by the British and Irish governments and the political parties in Northern Ireland, which aimed to bring an end to the political conflict that had continued there since the late 1960s. It set out terms for a devolved representative Assembly in Belfast, in which unionists and nationalists would share power, and for co-operation between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic (the ‘north-south’ axis), and the Irish Republic and the British government in London (the ‘east-west’ axis). It has been revised several times following various political crises during which the Assembly has been suspended. Most recently the Assembly was suspended for three years from January 2017 until

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January 2020, following a scandal involving financial corruption in the ruling unionist party Democratic Unionist Party. 2. Ulster is one of the four historic provinces of Ireland, and has nine counties. Northern Ireland is composed of six of those nine. Unionists have habitually referred to Northern Ireland as ‘Ulster’, to the annoyance of nationalists who point out that a third of the province is in the Irish Republic. 3. Even this has been endangered, by the continued uncertainty around Brexit. The Agreement was founded in European law and an expectation that EU institutions of the EU would continue to prevail. The complexities of this are thankfully beyond the scope of this short chapter. See Boyle, Paddison and Shirlow (2018). 4. The building now features as one of the icons of Britishness adorning the pages of the British passport; in 2016, the then Foreign Secretary declared that Brexit would be a ‘Titanic success’.

References Boyle, M., R. Paddison and P. Shirlow (eds). 2018. Space and Polity – Special Issue: Brexit Geographies 22(2). Castells, M. 1998. The Informational City: Economic Restructuring and Urban Development. Oxford: Blackwell. Coulter, C. and P. Shirlow. 2019. ‘From the “Long War” to the “Long Peace”: An Introduction to the Special Edition’, Capital & Class 43(1): 3–21. DSD [Department for Social Development for Northern Ireland]. 2009. Westside Regeneration Plan. Retrieved on 12 March 2020 from https://www.communities-ni. gov.uk/sites/default/files/publications/dsd/brd-westside-regeneration-master​ plan.pdf. Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline & Punish. New York: Pantheon Books. Harvey, D. 2002. ‘The Art of Rent’, Socialist Register 38: 93–110. Hocking, B. 2015. The Great Reimagining: Public Art, Urban Space and the Symbolic Landscapes of a ‘New’ Northern Ireland. New York: Berghahn Books. Jewesbury, et al. 2010. An Open Letter to the Department for Social Development Regarding Proposals for a Public Sculpture in Fountain Street, Belfast. Retrieved on 12 March 2020 from https://www.scribd.com/document/31754022/ Open-Letter-Regarding-the-Magic-Jug. McLaughlin, G. and S. Baker. 2010. The Propaganda of Peace. Bristol: Intellect. Murtagh, B. 2018. ‘Contested Space, Peacebuilding and the Post-Conflict City’, Parliamentary Affairs 71(3): 438–60. Nagle, J. 2018. ‘Between Conflict and Peace: An Analysis of the Complex Consequences of the Good Friday Agreement’, Parliamentary Affairs 71(3): 395–416. Nagle, J. and M.-A. Clancy. 2010. Share Society or Benign Apartheid? Understanding Peace-Building in Divided Societies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Northern Ireland Executive. 2010. Press Release: Magic Jug Sculpture for Fountain Street. Retrieved on 12 March 2020 from https://wayback.archive-it.org/11112/​ 20150609130444/http://www.northernireland.gov.uk/index/media-centre/

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news-departments/news-dsd/news-dsd-march-2010/news-dsd-290310-magicjug-sculpture.htm. Shirlow, P. 2006. ‘Belfast: The “Post-Conflict” City’, Space & Place 10(2): 99–107. Shirlow, P. and B. Murtagh. 2006. Belfast: Segregation, Violence and the City. London: Pluto.

8

EPILOGUE

Reflections on Heritage, Gentrification, Resistance Daniel Jewesbury, Feras Hammami and Chiara Valli

Drawing this book together from a short series of events, relying on empirical research and theoretical conversations around the key concepts of heritage, gentrification and resistance, we have become very aware of its specificities and shortcomings. The particular conjunction we have set about investigating almost by definition implies an interdisciplinarity that can open up to unedited cross-fertilizations but might also be considered to be problematic; we had particular reasons for accepting that complexity, and we have followed it through, bringing together methodologies and research from history, geography, sociology, critical heritage studies, cultural studies, architecture, urban studies, spatial planning and resistance studies. We hope that this heterodox approach has allowed us to synthesize new ideas and to arrive at a whole that is more than the sum of the parts. However, as editors we are aware that this gesture, whilst important in a particular way, is nonetheless limited, and that furthermore, there is much that is unsaid in the current volume. There is an absence from this book, or perhaps a shadow within it. While our project had a clear and quite specific aim, and originated in work done in contexts that were local to us, we are aware that the empirical focus has been on cities in the ‘global North’, and that uncritical reflections on our reference points might sustain structural relations of difference in a ‘NorthSouth’ divide. We therefore see why studies such as this must acknowledge their blind spots – the ideological lacunae that may arise from habits of academic thought, which condition our choice of subjects and case studies and the methodological choices we make in delimiting them. It is perhaps true that our syncretic approach to the disciplines impinging on our subject

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matter could be read, generously, as being in sympathy with programmes of intellectual decolonization that have developed in the humanities and social sciences in the last quarter of a century (Mignolo 2018; Grosfoguel 2008; Robinson 2003; Roy 2016); but we are under no illusion that this alignment discharges us of an ongoing duty to acknowledge and address the concerns raised here. In this epilogue, we attempt to outline the ideas and understandings that we have developed in the process of preparing this book for publication, and which we look forward to being able to develop further in future interdisciplinary collaborations.

The Tension of Relatedness We live and work still in a world that has quite literally been built upon – given its familiar material form through – colonial exploitation: not a historical process now thankfully concluded as we continue our relentless progress toward a global just society, but an ongoing, deep, multiply experienced inequity, structured in ways far more ruthlessly productive and ingeniously complex than any former imperial appropriations. But while this exploitation and domination is still perpetuated on the lines of the familiar colonialist metropolis – periphery binary model (so that, for instance, coerced or starvation labour and environmental destruction and instrumentalization are common in the peripheries, and the rhetoric of cultural superiority and civilizational development concentrate privilege in the metropole) nonetheless we witness the presence of the periphery in the heart of the metropolis too. In this volume, Holgersson, and Hammami and Valli detail the invisibility of non-prioritized classes and ethnic groups within official processes of heritagization; Mitchell, and Martire and Skoura explore the processes of displacement and eviction – urban erasure – which characterize gentrification in northern Europe and America; while BrownSaracino expounds how identities and class intersect in ever evolving ways to reaffirm privilege through space. However, there is a deeper engagement to be had, from the perspective of our three conjoined thematics (heritage, gentrification and resistance), with the necessity of some particular phenomena to the neoliberalization of urban space. This does not only mean the spatial inequality that is now exacerbated by transformations in urban governance, particularly processes of de- and re-regulation (Pinson and Morel Journel 2016; Peck 2010). It also refers to the production of specific forms of labour exploitation, environmental degradation, housing injustice, militarized policing (and privatized, financialized imprisonment and immigration detention), educational deprivation, and continued political invisibility, which characterize neighbourhoods at the centre of cities in

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the imperial and other Western countries: the global periphery is also in the centre itself. Fanon’s (1994) colonial city is reproduced in every contemporary metropole. It is not enough to balance somehow the emphasis on study of the urbanization processes of ‘the North’ with comparative examinations of Southern sites, relativizing the ways in which globalization and economic exploitation are performed in contrasted locales. It is also no longer relevant to only acknowledge the relationship between the periphery and the metropole in order to reveal the global difference – primitive/ advanced – that has governed science, lifestyle and societal development since the beginning of (settler) colonialism and imperialism. Instead, a decolonial and cross-disciplinary approach must be aware that relationships of exploitation, extraction, material and cultural dispossession, and political domination today are deeply structured by centre-periphery tensions that exceed simple geographical scales, and cannot be reduced to them. The transmodern, subaltern consciousnesses that are produced in the cities of the non-periphery generate specific forms of urban resistance. This resistance is not spatially determined, limited to the local geography of the urban, rather it sprawls across geography and challenges the ­periphery-metropole structure. Our disciplines therefore need to engage fully not only with difference across the space of global economic exploitation, racial injustice and cultural degradation. They must also prepare to engage with that ­difference in the traditional centre.

Detemporalization The detemporalization that authorized heritage discourses produce, privileging the material effects of a particular period of history and neglecting or erasing all others, has a significant relevance here. In this volume, Kisić urges further exploration of heritage as a politicized arena where people become subjectified and through which societies are governed. Hammami and Valli also explain how the multiple layers of history that characterize an area might be reduced to selected periods that are separate from each other and often do not include the present. Critical heritage studies confront this problem explicitly, foregrounding the manner in which history as a process of social struggle becomes evacuated from people’s everyday life by the normalised power of authorized heritage practices, as well as the way in which the present is rendered equally inevitable, a kind of ‘best of all possible worlds’. Exorcized from this are the spaces and social practices deemed unworthy of heritagization: they languish outside of history, outside of progress, outside of time itself. In this volume, Mitchell explains how periods of economic, political or social decline become ignored

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when a city moves through a new process of becoming. Temporalities that marked the dark periods of history might thus become erased and are forgotten when more favourable conditions occur, despite the relatedness of these unfavourable and favourable temporalities. Nation states have only recently become interested in commemorating their collective pain, especially defeats in war, rather than celebrating their victories only. A related process of detemporalization – historical erasure – is visible in the history of what became known in post-war times as heritage with global or universal value. Since the ratification of the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World’s Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972), and its associated programme of World Heritage Sites, particular areas from different countries, especially those in the metropole, were selected to represent the narrative of value. The experiences of the non-monumental societies, especially those in the former colonies, were undermined or went unrecognized, disinherited from the global discourse of material heritage. Recognized sites in the peripheries were either linked to prehistory or colonial history, yet they were managed based on standards defined by UNESCO. What other temporalities might a decolonial approach to heritage prioritize? What cosmologies and experience will it need to engage with to produce irreducibly differentiated understandings of inclusive engagement in history, and geography and societies, so that it might better articulate living, transglobal, resistant heritages and heritages of resistance? And how might such renewed understandings also contribute to a move toward greater valorization of non-material heritages – oral and musical cultures, for example, which can challenge the material-immaterial divide rather than prioritizing one at the expense of others? Central to this is an awareness that it is not sufficient to examine sites in the periphery, or accounts of subaltern experience, through the established methodologies of academic disciplines. An engagement with subaltern epistemologies, wherever they happen to be deployed, is essential, too.

Deterritorialization Connected, of course, to authorized heritage discourse’s (AHD) temporal flattening and erasure is the deterritorialization produced by urban neoliberalization. The attempt to create what have variously been called ‘smooth spaces’ or ‘non-places’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988; Augé 1995), in which impediments to the global flow of capital and goods are de-regulated away, involves different scales of deterritorialization. At the local level, routines are developed to de-particularize processes of land accumulation, property development and estate management; this requires the manipulation or

Epilogue • 189

takeover of organs of local governance, and the enfeebling of potentially troublesome structures for democratic participation and deliberation. The aim is to rationalize costs so that one site can be managed in the same way as any other; often the same development templates can even be deployed in multiples sites simultaneously. The corollary of all this erasure of local texture or context is the facilitation of deterritorialization in the global sense: the expropriation of profit to offshore zones free of onerous tax liabilities. In this multi-scalar understanding of twin processes of deterritorialization, we see a pattern familiar from political-economic studies of urban neoliberalization and Western-centric globalizations of the past. As a model of idealized capital flow, it is clearly both highly effective and extremely corrosive at the level of the streets where its effects are directly felt. However, the presumption that it is always executed precisely according to plan falls prey to a deterritorializing impulse similar to that in the model itself, since it erases or diminishes local practices of resistance that are widely differentiated, and anchored in knowledge of the specificity of space, and its fullness with everyday lived experience. The model needs to be understood in all its globalizing entirety but the resistances to it are many, and they are carried out at other scales, predominantly at the most granular level of a street, a quarter, a neighourhood, or a favela, shanty or camp. There is an opportunity for critical decolonial heritage and spatial studies to engage with the implications of so-called ‘glocal’ understandings of the production of space (Robinson 2003; Ritzer 2003) and again, to re-prioritize the epistemic practices deployed in sites of resistance around the world. Such inquiries can also contribute to emerging debates within heritage studies on activism and governmentality at global and local levels, especially in the face of established North-South / state-society relations, and the way in which these relations foreground institutionalized cultures and practices of interpreting the past and negotiating memory and material culture politically (Mozzafari and Jones 2020; de Cesari and Dimova 2019; Hammami and Uzer 2018; Meskell 2015). Rather than dealing with heritage, gentrification and resistance solely within areas deemed to have special historic significance, we specifically talk here about the deterritorialization of experience, memory and the right to past, present and future, whether in a heritage area or any other urban site.

The Urban and Heritage in New Logistical Flows of Capital If we pay attention to these questions of scale, and the interrelationship of local and global, beyond any spatial, societal and historical boundary, another

190 • Daniel Jewesbury, Feras Hammami and Chiara Valli

lens is suggested through which we might better understand the c­ oloniality inherent in both contemporary urban studies and heritage studies. Neilson et al.’s work on ‘logistical capital’ (2017, 2018) stresses the networks through which goods and capital flow, as a means of u ­ nderstanding the global scale at which capital is organized. Networks are not just virtual, informational or abstract; they are the logic – the l­ ogistics – a­ ccording to which the precarious, often dangerous labour of many millions of workers in complex global chains of production and distribution is organized, timed and valued. They are also determinative of the trades and industries which service them, and the spaces that develop around them. Neilson et al.’s work has focused on these sites of production and distribution, and on materializing the networks themselves, in South and East Asia. While much work has been done on the development and redevelopment of slums, favelas, shanties and workers’ camps (Davis 2006; Carolini 2020; LeGates and Stout 2020), the work on logistical capital allows questions to be framed around whether the urban can really be construed as a ‘site’, available to empirical research as a bounded space and specific set of practices, or whether it is a process, or set of processes at different scales. If we come to this understanding of urbanization, as a complex of extractive processes dependent on the uneven flows characterizing logistical capital, we see that centre and periphery (and periphery-in-the-centre) continue to be joined in relationships characterized by coloniality and imperialism. Resources, goods and profit move according to agencies that are both human and non-human. (For example, it can be argued that money represents a kind of pure agency, detached from the complex motivations of the uncountable individual agents who circulate it; its ability to disappear into the unmapped spaces of ‘offshore’ demonstrates its inalienable global sovereignty.) The industrialized rainforest is an urbanization process; opaque, invisible ‘offshore’ is an urbanization process. The urban, traditionally understood, is the site only of the most easily identifiable parts of this agential network. The things, labour and credit which make spectacular urban neoliberalization possible are at the other end of very long chains that encircle the globe many times over. Heritage, gentrification and resistance are not processes enacted in or inscribing otherwise stable ‘sites’; rather, they are elements of much larger dialectics shaping space and time. More fundamentally, despite the broadening of the scope of heritage (the gradual inclusion of immaterial heritages, non-Western experiences and interpretations of the past, and the process of articulating heritage), the focus and the preference are still on material monumentality, historic significance and the visual. The growing economic dependency of many cities on tourism has prompted (Western) governments to select, boost or even invent specific sites of attraction. A number of factors have informed

Epilogue • 191

that process. While historic significance remains among the obvious factors, other important factors include the singular national narrative of the state, and the colonial histories that reveal the supposed superiority of the metropole in their former colonies. However, the imperial system that foregrounds the global politics of heritage management and which shapes AHD ideologically made it natural for many governments in the metropole to integrate the sites that represent their colonial histories into a bigger system of capital. Capital, memory, material cultural and peace are today propagated as foreign policies for mutual benefits between the metropole and the peripheries. We see these new processes of capital and authority production as a new political stage of coloniality in which heritage is weaponized and politically exploited.

Disciplinarity We conclude these considerations by returning to the disciplinary questions with which we opened. An intention to be really ‘rigorously open’ in our disciplinary approach requires us to go beyond what is traditionally understood as the interdisciplinary and to note that any amount of attentiveness to terminological or methodological nuance runs up eventually against forms of disciplinary policing. Terms have been misused, it is insisted, or methods misappropriated. Discussing the contrasting approaches of social sciences and humanities to the study of colonial dynamics, Ramón Grosfoguel (2011) writes, ‘many world-system scholars acknowledge the importance of culture, but do not know what to do with it nor how to articulate it in a non-reductive way; while many post-colonial scholars acknowledge the importance of political-economy but do not know how to integrate it to cultural analysis without reproducing a “culturalist” type of reductionism’. Grosfoguel argues for the necessity of strategies of ‘entanglement’ and ‘heterarchy’ (Kontopoulos 1993) but we might also recall a concept developed by the philosopher Brian Holmes (2007), who described an ‘extradisciplinary’ turn in contemporary art. Holmes writes that extradisciplinary practice ‘never neglects the existence of the different disciplines, but never lets itself be trapped by them either’. Grosfoguel (2011), meanwhile, argues that ‘the notion of entanglement is crucial… The moment multiple hierarchical relationships [of gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality] are considered to be entangled… no autonomous logics or domains remain’. In other words, any disciplinary rigidity which insists on its own exclusive interpretative capacity is sealing itself off from the insights, experiences and critiques that are to be found elsewhere, across a disciplinary fence, in another ‘field’.

192 • Daniel Jewesbury, Feras Hammami and Chiara Valli

Academic border crossing, intellectual promiscuity, methodological innovation, disciplinary impurity, détournement, even a healthy disrespect for the technics and linguistics of the policing of knowledge production and critique – these terms might be thought to describe ambitions rather than actual possible practices, but perhaps we can identify some principles that help us to define a workable approach, irrespective of what we name it. Finally, being ready to admit when we are using different specialized languages to describe the same phenomena will help us to lower our own boundaries and be more ready to conduct the kind of radical, deeply collaborative critique necessary to decolonize the ontological tropes that govern the topics that we have here attempted to broach. Daniel Jewesbury is a senior lecturer in Fine Art at HDK-Valand Academy of Art & Design, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He lived for over ­twenty-five years on the island of Ireland, where he conducted extensive research on the instrumentalizations of professional and community art practices, by both state, public and private actors. He is a practising artist, whose film and video works explore the limits of human agency in the ­neoliberalizing city. Feras Hammami is associate professor of conservation at the Department of Conservation, University of Gothenburg. His research concerns the politicization of cultural heritage within urban planning and development, with a specific interest in the purposeful practices of heritage in the conduct of s­ocieties and geographies. His current research projects include reconciliatory heritage, urban marginality and resistance, and heritage and peacebuilding in relations to sites located in Palestine and Sweden. Chiara Valli is social and economic geographer and associate senior lecturer at the Department of Urban Studies, Malmö University. Chiara’s research deals with housing, gentrification, housing financialization, socio-­ economic and ethnic urban segregation, displacement, social movements and r­ esistance, with empirical research in Sweden, Italy and the US.

References Augé, M. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London and New York: Verso Books. Carolini, G.Y. 2020. ‘Aid’s Urban Footprint and Its Implications for Local Inequality and Governance’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 53(2). doi: 10.1177/ 0308518X20947099. Davis, M. 2006. Planet of Slums. London and New York: Verso Books.

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De Cesari, C. and R. Dimova. 2019. ‘Heritage, Gentrification, Participation: Remaking Urban Landscapes in the Name of Culture and Historic Preservation’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 25(9): 863–69. doi: 10.1080/13527258.2018.1512515. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II. London: Athlone. Fanon, F. 1994. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Grosfoguel, R. 2008. ‘ Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality: Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy’, Eurozine. Retrieved on 11 February 2022 from https://www.eurozine.com/ transmodernity-border-thinking-and-global-coloniality/?pdf. Hammami, F. and E. Uzer. 2018. ‘Heritage and Resistance: Irregularities, Temporalities and Cumulative Impact’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 24(5): 445–64. doi: 10.1080/13527258.2017.1378908 Holmes, B. 2007. ‘Extradisciplinary Investigations: Towards a New Critique of Institutions’, Transform 1. Retrieved on 10 October 2020 from http://transform. eipcp.net/transversal/0106/holmes/en.html. Kontopoulos, K. 1993. The Logic of Social Structures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LeGates, R.T. and F. Stout (eds). 2020. The City Reader. Abingdon: Routledge. Meskell, M. 2015. Global Heritage: A Reader. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Mignolo, W. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mozaffari A. and T. Jones. 2020. Heritage Movements in Asia: Cultural Heritage Activism, Politics, and Identity. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Neilson, B, N. Rossiter and R. Samaddar. 2018. Logistical Asia: The Making of a World Region. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Neilson, B and N. Rossiter. 2017. Logistical Worlds: Infrastructure, Software, Labour. No. 2, Kolkata. London: Open Humanities Press. Peck, J. 2010. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pinson, G. and C. Morel Journel. 2016. ‘The Neoliberal City – Theory, Evidence, Debates’, Territory, Politics, Governance 4(2): 137–53. doi: 10.1080/21622671.2016.1166982. Ritzer, G. 2003. ‘Rethinking Globalization: Gloca- lization/Grobalization and Something/Nothing’, Sociological Theory 21(3): 193–209. Robinson, J. 2003. ‘Postcolonialising Geography: Tactics and Pitfalls’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24(3): 273–89. Roy, A. 2016. ‘Who’s Afraid of Postcolonial Theory?’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40(1): 200–209. doi: 10.1111/1468-2427.12274.

8 Index A actor-network theory, 33 adaptive reuse, 13, 37 affordable housing, 116–117, 139 for middle class, 117 AHD. See authorized heritage discourse antifascist identity, 157, 159 anti-gentrification campaigners, 94 strategies, 159 struggles, 162 anti-immigration, 105 anti-landscape, 16, 104, 107, 108 and gentrification, 109 (see also Bethlehem Steel) inhabitation, 108 preservation, 110 production, 110 architecture Victorian, 47–48, 56, 166–167 arson, 108 art reflecting culture, 169 resisting neoliberalism, 182 asset transfer, 4 authentic buildings, 56 authenticity, 115 definition, 126 feelings of, 48 residents, 114 sense of, 12, 43, 52 authorized heritage discourse, 4, 10–11,



15–16, 31, 64, 72, 75, 84–85, 91, 177, 188 conflicts, 10 detemporalization, 187 erasure, 8 exclusion, 27 exploitation, 78 indigenous struggles, 87 resistance, 16 urban change, 66

B Belfast, 17–18, 125, 166 bordering, 171 class division, 172 (see also Cathedral Quarter) deindustrialization, 173 Matthew plan, 128 neoliberalization, 172 North Street, 125 peace walls, 171 as post-conflict city, 171–172 redevelopment, 129 (see also SaveCQ) Titanic Belfast Museum, 177–178 Titanic Quarter, 173–178 urban heritage, 128 Belfast City Centre, 130 demolition, 129 development pressure, 128 Gateway Project, 131 Local Development Plan, 139 North East Quarter, 133

Index • 195

Belfast Festival, 177–178 Wish, 177 Berlin Wall, 91, 97, 98 Bethlehem Steel, 29, 105 anti-landscape, 110 heritage exclusion, 29 BID, 68, 74. See also Gamlestaden BID Birgersson, Lisbeth, 43, 57 Black Lives Matter, 9 bordering, 3, 10, 27, 28, 91 centre-periphery tensions, 187 history, 37 industrial heritage, 35 narrative, 30, 32, 38 struggles, 98 borders, 9–10, 13 agency, 90 bordering practice, 9 embodying, 10 Brexit, 84, 183 building authenticity, 48 built heritage, 126 Burra Charter, 5 Business Improvement District. See BID C California, 106–107 Cathedral Quarter, 173 Castlebrooke Developers, 136, 138–139, 147 development, 131 demolition, 136 Center for Political Beauty, 98 Chicago, 16, 114, 117 Argyle neighbourhood, 114, 120 lost dyke bars, 118 CHS. See critical heritage studies class, 28, 31, 34 class conflict, 33, 158 dynamics, 38 exploitation, 35 heritage exclusion, 36, 38 reuination, 33 solidarity, 160 warfare, 29–30 Wheatland Hopsfield Riot, 107

class division, 182 spatialized, 18, 171–172 cleanliness creating sameness, 7 culture-led regeneration, 5 rhetoric of, 64 Cold War, 97 colonial city, 187 colonial exploitation ongoing, 186 colonialist metropolis, 186 community ownership, 130 contested heritage, 86–87, 97–99 conversion, 48 counternarrative, 156 creating sameness, 75 creative cities, 64 creative class, 13 creative industries discourses, 5 criminal gangs, 108 critical border studies, 9 critical decolonial heritage, 189 critical heritage studies, 2, 7, 10, 13, 23, 66, 85–88, 98, 185 class bias, 66 critical urbanism, 151 cultural evacuation, 15 cultural heritage, 48–49, 66 activity, 126 and conservation, 47, 56 conservation, 12, 43 plural expressions, 79 preservation, 57, 71 value, 49 cultural imperialism, 10 D decolonial heritage temporalities, 188 decolonization, 9 decolonizing ontology, 192 deindustrialization, 3 destruction, 105 homelessness, 105 as natural, 173 wounds, 34

196 • Index

demolition gone forever, 140 depoliticization, 97 deregulation, 3, 4, 182 detemporalization, 19, 187 historical erasure, 188 deterritorialization, 19, 189 erasure, 189 of experience, 189 scales of, 188 urban neoliberalism, 188 development piecemeal, 139 slow-paced, 140 disciplinarity, 19 rigidity, 191 displacement, 7, 21, 37, 47, 49, 51, 58, 69, 75 naturalization, 66 process of, 186 dissident aesthetic practices, 182 diversity as a resource, 75 selective preservation, 78 unthreatening, 15 dynamic authenticity, 125–126, 147 E environmental gentrification middle-class, 37 equality method not outcome, 88 performing, 95 politics of, 98 ethnic exclusion, 78 ethnonationalism, 4, 172 Eurocentrism, 5 extradisciplinary, 191 F Facism, 155 Fanon, Franz, 187. See also colonial city financialization, 4 First Fall of the European Wall, 91, 98 Fountain Street PLACE, 180 future prioritization, 17

G Gamlestaden, 15, 64, 67 Bellevue, 72, 74 BID, 69, 74 city preservation programme, 70 cleaniness and diversity, 78 dark history, 75 development plan, 64, 68–70, 72–74, 77 founders, 70 Gamlestads fabriker, 72 industrial period, 70 Landerier, 67, 70, 75–76 Nya Lödöse, 75 preservation programme, 75 selective heritage, 75, 77 spatial cleansing, 72 stigmatization, 79 redevelopment plan, 64, 69, 71, 75, 77 urban renewal, 68 upgrading, 69 gentrification, 2, 10, 17, 23, 38, 43, 48, 64, 112 artists, 13 attracting middle-class, 49, 55, 57, 79 authorized heritage, 11 and class, 7, 3 class bordering, 36 concept origin, 47 conflicts, 7, 8, 15 consensus building, 65 and conservation, 49–50, 56 dyke bars, 117–118, 120 ecological, 28, 37 emancipation, 164 exclusion, 115 and heritage, 14, 31 heritage-led, 16–17 hipsters, 13 industrial heritage, 37 intensification, 119 intensive, 114, 116 legitimization, 36 and marginalization, 9, 11 naturalization, 66 pioneers, 7, 13 policy-makers view, 8 self-gentrification, 32

Index • 197

social preservationism, 113 state-led, 65, 69 third-wave, 65, 69, 79 urban erasure, 186 value, 7 gentrification and displacement, 7, 12, 28, 36, 65, 67, 104, 113–114, 152 gentrification process, 7–8, 12–14, 21, 34 gentrification resistance, 12–13, 17–18, 151–152, 159, 162 homeownership, 163–164 movements, 86 segregation dynamics, 162 gentrifiers, 117 middle-class, 58 Portuguese-American, 119 Swedish, 119 gentrifying class, 112 George Floyd, 10 global heritage, 6 Global North, 63, 185 deindustrialization, 47 Global South, 5 Good Friday Agreement, 166, 182 cementing segregation, 172 good streets definition, 127 good urban development, 138 Google Bus protest, 120 Gothenburg, 12, 15, 42, 48, 52, 56–57, 67–68, 151 Haga, 49 Hisingen, 43, 46 mixed city discourse, 75 grand narratives, 4 graveyard landscape marker, 107 Gustaf Dalén, 15, 42–43, 47–48, 50, 56 authenticity, 54 criminality, 53 Juvel Mill, 55, 57 redevelopment, 46 The Gaza Strip, 46, 53 H heritage ahistorical, 77

apolitical, 84 as a lens, 19 as technology, 38 authenticity, 32 class politics, 66 and colonialism, 87 conflicts, 84, 87 diplomacy, 6 disciplinary technology, 6 discourses, 14 dissonance, 86, 90 empowerment, 7 erasure, 8, 15, 16 exploitation, 17, 66 gendered, 91 ideological, 84 injustice, 17 institutionalization, 7 instrumentality, 6 legitimization, 28, 37 and memory, 91 memory conflicts, 87 monumental, 77 mutual, 6 neoliberal technology, 27 and patriarchy, 91 policed, 98 and power, 87 power relations, 86 process, 2 process-based, 125 rebranding, 105 relational, 2 and resistance, 84 selective, 15, 79 subjective, 8 theorization, 27 transformation, 8 and urban change, 13 urban restructuring, 7 value, 66, 70 violence, 85 heritage activism, 6, 18, 92, 97–98 Bay of Kotor, 91–92 Hagagruppen, 49 heritage-led, 18 images of, 116

198 • Index

heritage activism (cont.) LBQTIA+, 114, 119–120 scholar, 15 heritage as apolitical, 87 heritage as political, 84–86, 99, 187 heritage consumption, 29, 34, 35 heritage exclusion, 5, 30, 78, 79 working class, 29, 32 heritage gentrification, 14, 15 heritage industry, 5, 9 heritage management, 6, 70 politics of, 191 heritage narratives, 15, 29, 105 heritage police, 91, 95, 99 Berlin Wall, 97 feminist critique, 92 and politics, 98 heritage politics, 88, 90, 95 exploitation, 13, 17 hierarchies, 79 methods of equality, 99 nationalism, 6, 86 neutrality, 6 and police, 90, 91 process, 84 repressed, 90 heritage preservation, 114 heritage protection constraints, 129 heritage re-making, 4 heritage resistance, 21, 3, 6, 7, 11 heritage storytelling, 54 heritage tourism, 105 heritage-making, 3, 4, 10, 16, 66 contextual, 113 privilege, 6 and redevelopment, 30 heritagization, 4, 9, 12, 17, 64 exclusion, 187 legitimacy, 64 politics of, 66 processes of, 186 urban restructuring, 9 his torical cleansing, 177 historic urbanlandscapes, 126, 140 change, 146

history as social struggle, 187 history light, 29, 36 Holocaust, 98 homelessness, 91, 94, 96 heritage of, 95 memories of, 94 stuctural political problem, 95 homeowenership as resistance, 152, 163 state-sponsored, 155 housing inequality, 96 hyper-gentrification, 8, 104, 112–113, 116, 120 hyper-gentrified city, 116 I identity, 119 inclusive heritage, 188 industrial archaeological excavations, 71 cool, 52, 56 landscapes, 43 rainforest, 190 uncool, 50, 56 industrial heritage as performance, 31–32 inequality fighting, 95 institutionalized, 90 inner-city, 17 intellectual decolonization, 186 interdisciplinarity, 185–186, 191–192 Iron Age, 84 J Johnstown, 105, 110 false history, 106 flood, 105 racism, 105 justice-making, 19 K Kvillebäcken, 51–52, 57 Consortium, 46 spatial cleansing, 15

Index • 199

L labour struggles, 105 land speculation, 4 landscape as assemblage, 33 contested, 106 production, 105, 106, 107 and struggle, 106 language legitimacy, 14 large developments disruptive, 146 LBQTIA+ working class, 114 lesbian identity, 118 Limhamn, 37 local mixed streets, 17, 126, 147 accessibility, 127 as adaptable and flexible, 126 authenticity, 126 cultural heritage and authenticty, 146 as dynamic, 127 dynamic authenticity, 17, 146 heritage, 128 historic urban landscapes, 125 landscape of, 128 StreetSpace, 140 local resistance, 12 alternative plans, 18 logistical capital, 19 London, 7, 54 neighbourhoods, 36 looting, 108 Lowell National Historical Park, 31 homogenous class, 31 M Malmö, 37 Manhattan de-indurialization, 108 marginalization, 8, 16, 21, 117 Marxism, 106 mental gentrification., 36 meseumification steel-making, 29 middle-class gentrification, 36

protection, 112, 119, 158 migrants anonymous, 107 modernization, 19 MoH. See Museum of Homelessness monuments Confederate, 9 perpetuate racism, 10 museum, 91 as apolitical, 84 ecomuseum, 29 Museum of Homelessness, 91, 94, 95, 96 Museum of Women, 94 Museum of WWII, 84 museumification, 29–31, 35 and gentrification, 30 heritage exclusion, 28 process, 36 Mutual Heritage Programme, 6 N neighbourhood holistic interpretation, 157 neoliberal city, 3–4, 8, 18 conflict, 7, 11, 13 and gentrification, 27 heritage and redevelopment, 38 perceptions, 117 public art, 176 resistance, 13 urban change, 14 neoliberal era, 155 neoliberal regime, 152 neoliberal urbanism, 2, 9, 23 neoliberalism, 2, 18, 36, 110 consumption, 28 nature, 28 precariousness, 94 regimes, 32 neoliberalization, 2–4, 190 and political normalization, 172 processes, 13 of urban space, 186 New Orleans, 117 New York, 117 1977 blackout, 104, 108, 109, 110 heritage as struggle, 109

200 • Index

non-monumental societies, 188 North Street, 127, 129 as a complex ecosystem, 140 demolition, 146 development plans, 131 dynamic authenticity, 138 fragmentation, 129 historic urban landscapes, 139 Lower, 133 managed blight, 147 small businesses decline, 131, 138 Upper, 146 Northern Ireland history, 171 North-South relations, 189 North-South divide, 185 Nya Kulan, 72 Nya Lödöse, 67, 70 commercial hub, 72 heritage narratives, 77 medieval history, 75–77 preservation, 71 Sten Sture, 70 O online campaign, 138, 140 P participatory conservation, 49 past privileged, 23 silenced, 23 people’s heritage destruction, 110 Philadelphia, 49 place authenticity, 8 disciplining, 3 and memory, 91 place-based heritages, 112 place-based identities performance, 36 plot-based urbanism, 140 police brutality, 10 and politics, 89

policing heritage, 90 selective, 88 politics emancipatory, 17 exclusion, 94 as floating signifiers, 88 more-than-human, 89 post-conflict city, 18 post-industrial city, 3, 7, 14–15, 29, 32, 38, 43, 54 cool urban landscapes, 56 heritage, 27 heritage and class, 27–28 heritagization, 36 redevelopment, 36 urban change, 23 urban renewal, 33 post-industrial heritage, 29, 71 bordering class, 34 gentrification, 37–38 Lomma, 30 museumification, 28 performance, 28, 31, 35 ruination, 28, 32–33 scar, 28, 33–35 post-industrial sites, 31 precariousness, 120 preservation, 47, 49–50, 52 advocacy, 119 context specific, 120 prestigious area, 156–157 privatization, 3–4 social mixing, 164 privilege, 119 property speculation trickle down, 172 protest silencing, 15 Provincetown, 12, 16, 114 public art functioning, 176 inconvenient histories, 173 Magic Jug, 178–181 monopolization, 168 naturalizing change, 182 naturalizing space, 177 and neoliberalization, 182

Index • 201

problematization, 166 resistance, 181 spatial continuity, 173 spatial technologies, 176 as spectacular logo, 178 See also Wish public housing gentrification barrier, 155 mobility, 162 resale, 161 selling, 160 sense of possession, 163 tenants, 155 Q queer identity, 118 R racism, 32, 114 urban exclusion, 108 radical democracy, 88 Rancière, Jacques, 88, 95, 99 redevelopment, 29, 34, 42, 47, 51, 64, 167 commercial, 125 consensus building, 65 piecemeal, 130 processes, 65 resistance, 84 stigmatization campaigns, 53 storytelling, 48 working-class, 129 refurbishment authenticity, 57 regenerating city nostalgia, 173 regeneration, 30–31, 63 retail-led, 133 renewal, 37, 63–64 renovation, 47 rent gap, 155 state-induced, 156 rent control, 51 re-regulation, 8, 182, 186 resistance, 11–12, 97 anti-fascist, 84 coalitions, 13

dissident aesthetic practices, 18 right to buy, 153 piecemeal, 161 public housing, 155 right to the city, 58, 120 rioting, 108–109, 120 1977 New York blackout, 108–110 Rome, 12, 17, 151, 157 Aurelian wall, 152 city general plan, 154 right to buy, 160 (see also San Saba) silent conflict, 158 Royal Exchange, 138 ruination, 36 as creative destruction, 33, 35 Newcastle, 33 ruins aesthetics of, 32 redevelopment, 33 S San Francisco, 117, 120, 152 San Saba, 12, 17, 152–153 antifascism, 157 collective memory, 12 history, 154 Instituto Casa Populari, 154 Network of the Tenants, 156 protected by city plan, 164 residential heritage, 159 as Trastevere, 157 SaveCQ, 18, 125, 131, 138, 147 good urban design, 139 housing diversity, 139 list of demands, 145 possible alternatives, 141, 146 Royal Exchange proposal, 140 Scandinavisk Eternit heritage exclusion, 30 Seawright, Paul, 168 segregated city, 43, 56 segregation, 68, 172 ethnoreligious, 182 selective future, 182 selective past, 182 sexual marginalization, 118

202 • Index

sexual minorities, 117 congregation, 119 Shared Cultural Heritage Project, 6 social conflict becoming mundane, 171 social marginalization, 69 value and authenticity, 113 social mixing, 160 social preservationism, 114, 117 advocacy, 112 attitudes, 8 authenticity, 115 class, 112–113, 119 context specific, 121 exclusion, 114 limits, 114 selective, 114 social upgrading, 47 social value construction of, 115 SoHo, 56 spatial cleansing, 7, 75 heritage and diversity, 78 industrial heritage, 11, 38 spatial inequality, 186 spatial injustice, 18 stigmatization, 56 and gentrification, 78 street as common heritage, 169 StreetSpace, 18, 125, 140, 147 MArch Studio, 140 subaltern consciousnesses, 187 epistemologies, 188 experience, 188 performing identity, 96 presence felt, 109 suburbanization, 128 super-gentrification, 116 sustainable city, 43 Sweden Gårda, 11 heritage management, 70 multiculturality discourse, 75 National Heritage Board, 70 See also Gamlestaden

T temporalities favourable and unfavourable, 188 tenant conflict, 159 displacement, 156 justifying conversion, 158 as native, 157 social rent, 154 tenure conversion, 151–152, 159–160 The dual city, 173 The Troubles, 128–130 tourism, 16 growth, 17 industrial heritage, 31 middle-class consumption, 37 post-industrial heritage, 34 spaces, 33 urban dependency, 191 transformation, 55 Tribeca Belfast. See Royal Exchange controversy, 145 new proposal, 145 U Ulster, 166–168, 183 Ulster Architectural Heritage Society, 131 uncool buildings, 43 UNESCO, 5–6 Historic Urban Landscape, 126 standards, 188 Universal Declaration on ‘Creative Diversity’, 5 World Heritage Convention, 5 World Heritage Site, 91 Union Street, 166 redevelopment, 168 The Tavern, 168 urban cleanliness, 64 closure, 10 restructuring, 23 revitalization, 48 urban change, 6–7, 11–16, 34 authorized heritage, 11 conflicts, 13

Index • 203

contested, 3 heritage, 6 resistance, 12, 19 social respones, 13 top-down, 17 violence, 11, 18 urban development, 75 authorized heritage, 10 debt funding, 172 dirty/clean binary, 65 mixed-use, 145 naturalization, 172 urban planning objective violence, 173 urban policy discourse, 66 urban redevelopment, 28 and heritage, 32 legitimization, 27 urban regeneration, 8, 17, 27, 130 large developments, 146 urban renewal, 68, 78 over reuse, 128 urban resistance, 11, 21, 91, 187 urban restructuring, 3–4, 7, 28 and heritage, 27 heritage and borders, 11 justice, 11 violence, 15 urban space, 75 economic logic, 173 heritage and memory, 99 politics of, 91 production, 166 qualities and characteristics, 43

urban studies coloniality, 190 urban transformation, 65, 146 process of, 128 strategies, 64 V value authorized, 72 narratives of, 16, 64, 188 Victorian, 7 virtuous marginality, 16, 113–116, 120 guiding principal, 114 Volvo, 42–43, 67 W wilful amnesia, 29, 37 Wish, 177 trite narrative, 178 women’s history heritage exclusion, 91 history, 92–94 visibilizing, 92 working-class, 15, 30, 47, 55 displacement, 28, 33, 65 exclusion, 78 housing segregation, 172 marginalization, 35 World War II, 107, 154, 155 Y Yes In My BackYard movement YIMBY, 116, 119