Heritage Is Theming

Most preservation theorists tend to dismiss identical reconstructions as “fakes” that offend history by creating problematic “Disneylands” everywhere.Footnote ⁹ These critics usually build upon established preservation guidelines per which new additions to old buildings should always remain visible so that the (uneducated) masses are not deceived.Footnote ¹⁰ Concerns over the “falsification” of history in the field of heritage echo those of urban scholars who, especially since the 1990s, have associated the spread of themed settings with the imperatives of capital attraction in the experience economy.Footnote ¹¹ As David Lowenthal compellingly argued, heritage and urban theming have indeed more in common than most scholars care to admit.Footnote ¹² For one thing, the politics of authenticity—the aesthetic and moral values that people attribute to ideas of what is “real” versus “fake”—underlie the production of historic landscapes as much as they determine the popularity of themed environments. Scholars of heritage have increasingly highlighted not only that the most carefully preserved “historic” sites are inherently staged, but also that the meanings people attribute to heritage landscapes have little to do with their material authenticity.Footnote ¹³ At the same time, urban scholars, including me, have shown that the users of themed settings can construct a sense of “the authentic” not in spite of but, rather, because of the “fakeness” of the spaces that they occupy, use, and produce through their everyday experiences.Footnote ¹⁴

Drawing from these two strands of literature—dealing with heritage authenticity and urban theming, respectively—I suggest that the authentic fakeness of identical reconstructions can enable users to experience a sense of authenticity. This sense of authenticity especially relies on the totalizing atmosphere conveyed precisely by the fact that rebuilt urban fabrics are “fakes.” Before I substantiate this argument with examples in the next part, I summarize literature on theming and clarify its parallelism with heritage.

By definition, a themed environment is organized around an overarching narrative that conveys a sense of another place, time, or culture. This evoked otherness reinforces socially constructed ideas of “us”—the “proper” members of a society—versus “them”—other people, who belong to other places.Footnote ¹⁵ While spaces decorated to convey some exoticness have abounded throughout history, scholars agree that the contemporary prototype of a themed environment emerged in the nineteenth century. Amusement parks, world’s fair exhibitions, and department stores popularized a new way to inhabit cities that put consumption at the core of the modern urban experience.Footnote ¹⁶ Opened in Anaheim, California, in 1955, Disneyland took theming to the next level. It proved that a whole world could be encapsulated within a train track and enjoyed only by those who could afford a ticket to enter.Footnote ¹⁷ Architects and planners soon realized the potentialities of theming as a city-making tool. Providing spaces with decorative narratives, designers believed that they could give people back the pleasurable urban experiences that modernist ideals of efficiency and progress had taken away.Footnote ¹⁸ In the United States since the 1970s,Footnote ¹⁹ and throughout the world since the 1990s,Footnote ²⁰ themed settings proliferated and provided urbanites with new opportunities of excitement and display of wealth.

Critics have long scrutinized the political implications of theming by arguing that powerful actors “disneyfy” urban spaces to control and exclude some people.Footnote ²¹ According to this argument, the “fakeness” of themed settings deceives publics by producing “a filtered version of the experience of cities, a simulation of urbanity.”Footnote ²² And the creation of a staged, themed experience also excludes vulnerable groups. Individuals whose appearance or behavior do not conform to normative ideas of the “proper” become visible as “out of place” users who are policed and banished.Footnote ²³ Nor are themed spaces designed to welcome members of the public whose activities collide with the given script.Footnote ²⁴

Yet, themed settings are more than monolithic spaces of deception and control. Scholars have realized that, while the exclusionary dynamics of theming are unquestionable, people also use, perceive, and transform themed environments according to their own needs.Footnote ²⁵ For example, in China, where market-driven urbanization processes have furthered the production of entire towns themed after North American and European cities, researchers have found that residents not only appreciate copycat architectures because of their imitative scope, but also evade the themed scripts of those spaces by adjusting them to their preferences.Footnote ²⁶ Without neglecting the oppressive ramifications of theming, my work on Thames Town, an “English” village nearby Shanghai, showed how vulnerable groups appropriate and repurpose themed spaces by disrupting staged atmospheres and implicitly challenging exclusion.Footnote ²⁷

While there is no doubt that powerful actors use theming to exclude and control people, then, I align with those scholars who believe that themed environments can also serve as places for individuals to negotiate meanings, create a sense of belonging, and, possibly, contest pre-conceived ideas of “the proper.” These considerations apply equally to heritage sites, which can be interpreted as a type of themed setting for at least three reasons. First, both heritage industries and theming phenomena define—and invent—traditions. Emerging from the nexus of politics and power, theming and heritagization strategies have long served the hegemonic production of unambiguous, dominant narratives.Footnote ²⁸ Second, heritage sites are imitative and staged just like themed settings are. They are imitative in that many sites now considered “original” in fact originated as partial, if not entire imitations, of other places.Footnote ²⁹ They are staged in that the appearance of historic sites relies highly on intentional registers of representation. Preservation itself requires making constant decisions about which built features “deserve” to be saved over others. Some decorations might be concealed to make others visible, elements might be modified to safeguard the structural equilibrium of a building, and walls and passages might be closed off to preserve a specific atmosphere.Footnote ³⁰ These kinds of decisions make any heritage site a curated scene that is staged just like any other, more openly themed environment.Footnote ³¹ Finally, like theming, urban heritage is key to the symbolic production of landscapes in the experience economy. As city administrators compete for capital in the global arena, they rely on both the promotion of “historic landscapes” and the production of themed experiences to attract investors and tourists.Footnote ³²

We Make Places Authentic

Above all, heritage sites and themed settings are similar to one another because their “fakeness,” which constitutes the reason for their popularity,is also somethings that scholars like to concern themselves with. While the desire for “authentic” experiences triggers the production and consumption of landscapes around the world, the question of what authenticity exactly means—and does—is one that scholars have tried to pin down for decades. Critics since the 1980s problematized the modernist conception of authenticity as a material quality possessed only by “original” artifacts. They showed that people construct ideas of “the authentic” based on their own judgments on what is “real” and what is “fake.”Footnote ³³ The pastness conveyed by heritage sites, and also by themed settings, blurs distinctions between “original” and “counterfeit” historical elements. It is this pastness that enables users to construct their own experiences of authenticity.Footnote ³⁴ In contrast with mainstream Euro-centric preservation doctrines that treat authenticity as an objective quality of physical objects, scholars of critical heritage have come to see authenticity as a context-dependent relationship between people, the places they experience, and the meanings they attribute to their own experiences.Footnote ³⁵

By suggesting that authenticity lies above all in the eyes of the beholder, neither I nor these scholars mean to dismiss the importance of materiality. On the contrary, it is through the physical and emotional experience of spaces, mediated through our own cultural and emotional lens, that we make historic sites and themed settings authentic.Footnote ³⁶ Following this line of thought, I suggest that it is precisely the materiality of identical reconstructions that can enable people to experience and construct a sense of authenticity. And this sense that has much to do with the atmosphere conveyed by space but little, if at all, to do with its material originality.

A glance at the website TripAdvisor confirms that people who experience reconstructed heritage sites can construct a sense of authenticity in spite of—and, in some cases, because of—the knowledge that they are dealing with “fakes.” The largest consumer-generated recommender system for tourism worldwide, TripAdvisor allows users to rank attractions from one star (“terrible”) to five stars (“excellent”). While data extracted from TripAdvisor fail to meet statistical sampling criteria, the website’s popularity and economic ramifications have encouraged scholars to use it to grasp people’s understanding of authenticity.Footnote ³⁷ In case of identical reconstructions, TripAdvisor reveals people’s appreciation for “fakes.” Visitors to the rebuilt Dresden Cathedral, for example, express enthusiasm for the church as “a masterpiece of reconstruction” and a symbol of “the power of people to be able to rebuild things by coming together after being completely destroyed.” In a similar vein, most visitors to the Cassino Abbey in Italy refer to the fact that the abbey had been reduced to rubble and reconstructed after World War II. Praising the reconstruction as “mind bowing and true in detail,” many refer to the rebuilt Cassino Abbey as a “unique location” of “stunning architecture and history.” Some commenters point to the reconstruction process itself as one of Cassino’s most valuable assets. For example, one commenter argues that the abbey’s restoration is symbolic of “what humankind can do,” while another argues that the reconstruction of the abbey “where it was, as it was” created jobs in the immediate postwar period while producing “unbelievable” results.Footnote ³⁸

One might argue that Trip Advisor’s comments display only tourists’ views without showing how people who engage with reconstructed sites on a daily basis feel about their authenticity. However, researchers have showed that not only visitors, but also residents can make identical reconstructions authentic by means of their uses and emotions. Scholars have shown, for example, that the residents of several reconstructed historic towns in China perform local rituals not only to convey authenticity to the delight of tourists, but also to help themselves and their families to construct a sense of belonging.Footnote ³⁹ More importantly, and as I argue in the next part, reconstruction processes themselves can create new, shared ideas of belonging among diverse groups of residents. In 1998, surveys conducted in the destroyed town of Stolac, Bosnia-Herzegovina, showed that, despite their many differences, most residents invoked reconstruction as an “essential bestowal of form on the intangible content that it retain[ed].”Footnote ⁴⁰ Voicing similar feelings, in 1999, 68,000 residents of Dresden signed a petition against the redevelopment of the Neumarkt area destroyed during World War II. Opposing plans for new housing projects, diverse residents rallied to have the baroque area rebuilt as it was, with the addition of a few buildings that boosted the historic atmosphere further. Not only was the area a regular destination for tourists and residents alike a few years after completion, but a survey showed that most locals did not care at all that the Neumarkt was in fact a new old town.Footnote ⁴¹

Identical reconstructions, then, typify the blurry distinctions between historic sites and themed settings. They cannot be seen as intrinsically “real” or “fake” just as neither designated heritage sites nor themed environments can. It is indeed the atmosphere that spaces convey by means of their visual and spatial features that enable people to negotiate a sense of authenticity. Even though individuals’ constructions of “the authentic” may be based on subjective criteria, they nevertheless have concrete implications for how people interact with spaces and with each other. As long as users are conscious of the authentic fakeness of sites they visit or live in, I suggest that heritage professionals should abandon their preoccupation with the inauthenticity of reconstructions.

The Emphasis on Public Participation

Once we concede that the “fakeness” of identical reconstructions should not concern heritage professionals, however, a more pressing issue becomes evident: the question of whether rebuilding urban fabrics “as they were” can entail democratic processes and outcomes. Reconstructing historic sites presupposes that trained professionals direct the operations, and that the appearance of the built environment is predetermined. These two facts have led scholars concerned with issues of justice to argue that identical reconstructions marginalize vulnerable groups and reflect uneven power dynamics.Footnote ⁴² Such legitimate concerns echo larger preoccupations with the role of experts in the management of heritage. Starting in the mid-1990s, international and governmental institutions reflected academic debates over the need for more inclusive conceptions of heritage.

Agreements such as the Nara Document on Authenticity, the Convention on the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, the Faro Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society, the Buenos Aires Declaration on a Rights-Based-Approach Initiative, and the Nara + 20 document speak to efforts toward more equitable heritage processes.Footnote ⁴³ These documents expanded the very definition of heritage by adding vernacular landscapes and intangible cultural practices to more traditional repertoires of historic architectures and artifacts.Footnote ⁴⁴ They also acknowledged the ability to access and use heritage as a right of each individual that governments and professionals should prioritize.Footnote ⁴⁵ And international agreements also established a consensus that heritage “experts” should serve local communities rather than imposing solutions on them.Footnote ⁴⁶

As efforts toward more inclusive heritage processes continue, practitioners have increasingly relied on participatory methods to involve and empower local groups. Yet, participatory processes not necessarily lead to just outcomes. Urban planners have long learned this lesson. Since the 1970s, they have institutionalized participation as a key tool for facilitating dialogue between diverse residents, institutions, and governmental agencies.Footnote ⁴⁷ While practitioners and theorists of planning continue to rely on participation, heritage professionals have also increasingly empowered local groups to produce and manage their heritage.Footnote ⁴⁸ In line with this trend, participation has emerged as the primary strategy—if not the only one—that heritage professionals rely on in post-traumatic contexts. Tools such as interviews and focus groups, participated design workshops, and memorializations through artistic performances have become familiar to “experts” of post-traumatic planning.Footnote ⁴⁹

Involving those people whose heritage sites were destroyed remains essential indeed, especially when their emotions have to do with death, pain, and loss. But the emphasis on participation does not–because it cannot– resolve the contradictions that are inherent to heritage processes, and in fact to urbanizations in general. For one thing, public participation is no less political than other heritage approaches, and its results can further justice as much as they can reproduce inequalities. Powerful institutions such as international agencies, donors, and governments have put great effort into covering participation costs since the 1990s. But, as scholars have suggested, this mechanism is intrinsically partial because funding organizations privilege some historical narratives (and people) over others, and end up producing landscapes that reflect uneven power dynamics.Footnote ⁵⁰ A second aspect that participatory methods have sometimes failed to address is diversity within local communities, which can further inequalities because of time and budget constraints in post-traumatic contexts.Footnote ⁵¹ Observers have found that individuals whose status is higher within local groups or who have more time to dedicate to meetings are able to voice their needs much more forcefully than others. Reconstructions that might seem “participated” to external observers, then, end up perpetrating inequalities as scholars have pointed out occurred, for example, in Italy, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Cambodia.Footnote ⁵² A third puzzling aspect of participation lies in the fact that it sometimes accentuates social frictions and, in fact, may even produce “heritage that hurts.”Footnote ⁵³ This is what happened, for example, in post-conflict North Ireland and Uganda, where participatory methods ended up representing history from the perspective of some groups while neglecting and further traumatizing others.Footnote ⁵⁴

A fourth critical aspect of public participation in post-traumatic contexts, and one that is especially pertinent to my argument, is that heritage professionals often dismiss residents’ desires for identical reconstructions in the name of “building back better.” In other words, participatory methods are often used to justify new projects that have little to do with the needs and desires of local populations. Patrick Daly and Yenny Rahmayati, for example, found that most residents of post-Tsunami Aceh, Indonesia, wanted their towns to be reconstructed in order to reconnect with familiar spaces and practices as soon as possible. As funding organizations instead allocated resources to build “better” spaces, they ended up frustrating residents and exacerbating social frictions.Footnote ⁵⁵ Similarly, following the earthquake of 2009, the residents of the Italian town of L’Aquila mobilized to have their city reconstructed with the same appearance it had before. Their frustration grew over time as the national government funded new housing projects scattered throughout the region, forcing people to live away from friends and family. The resentment of L’Aquila’s residents grew further as authorities transformed the historic center into a militarized, inaccessible “red zone” where the imperatives of “scientific restoration” imposed lengthy time periods for the reconstruction of most buildings.Footnote ⁵⁶

To be sure, by highlighting the limits of public participation in post-traumatic contexts, I do not mean to suggest that heritage professionals should renounce the empowerment of local groups. Nor do I mean to dismiss the fact that residents’ requests for identical reconstructions might mask uneven power dynamics within local communities, or that claims in favor of rebuilding could be instrumentalized by powerful actors as in the case of other bottom-up initiatives.Footnote ⁵⁷ The point I wish to make is that in post-disaster contexts both participatory methods and identical reconstructions have shortcomings but, at the same time, are not fatally flawed: participatory approaches may address undemocratic aspects of restoration but fall short of guaranteeing just outcomes, and identical reconstructions may lack material authenticity but be more democratic than one might think. The importance of reconstruction processes and outcomes lies in the practices they enable among diverse groups of people. As I explain in the next subpart, these practices may allow people to claim their “right to the city” by using, appropriating, and signifying rebuilt urban fabrics.

A Right to the (Fake) City?

Even though identical reconstructions sometimes do a better job than newly built environments in satisfying residents’ needs, one might still legitimately concern that rebuilt urban fabrics deny people the right to participate in the production of their own heritage. Reconstructing urban areas with historical accuracy in mind does not leave much room for changing the form and appearance of the built environment. This fact may exacerbate the exclusionary implications of heritage by silencing dissent and impeding “non-experts” from voicing their views. Scholars have indeed documented how international agencies and local authorities alike can use reconstructions to favor speculative urbanizations and suppress locals’ resistance.Footnote ⁵⁸ They have equally shown how powerful residents can marginalize less privileged groups by supporting partial or privatized reconstructions.Footnote ⁵⁹ There is then no doubt that rebuilding landscapes can perpetrate injustices. I believe, however, that seeing identical reconstructions as unequivocally unjust overlooks the crucial role of everyday activities and signification processes in the production of space.

Arguments that rebuilt landscapes are fundamentally exclusive speak to established critiques against urbanization processes that deny people what Henri Lefebvre called the right to the city.Footnote ⁶⁰ At its core, Lefebvre’s right establishes that all city inhabitants—and, especially, marginalized groups—should be entitled to produce the spaces that they use. In Lefebvrian terms, the production of space goes beyond the arrangement of physical settings as it encapsulates both the material and intangible aspects of urban societies.Footnote ⁶¹ Taking control of the production of spaceimplies governing the social structures of city life. The right to the city then does not simply allow people to use urban spaces, but it also calls for a renovated urban condition that empowers all city dwellers to “urban life, to places of encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and time uses.”Footnote ⁶² Scholars have analyzed the ways in which built environments and the everyday life that unfolds in them are crucial to the right to the city.Footnote ⁶³ They have highlighted how, at once socially produced and productive of social arrangements, built environments can exclude urban dwellers, but can also serve as the battleground for marginalized groups to fight injustices.Footnote ⁶⁴ Explorations of how diverse people appropriate, occupy, and attribute meanings to spaces have led to a consensus that everyday practices can ordinarily, but effectively, enable vulnerable groups to participate in the production of their city, thereby pushing back against dominant attempts to exclude them.Footnote ⁶⁵

The everyday experiences that enable people to participate in the production of space can take place in diverse kinds of environments, including identical reconstructions. This implies that rebuilding processes do not necessarily deny people a right to the city, but they can enable individuals to use, signify, and appropriate spaces no less than any other piece of urban fabric. Two sets of examples illustrate this point. First, scholars have proven that reconstruction processes can elicit people’s resistance just as they can trigger their participation.Footnote ⁶⁶ As local authorities “invented” the heritage of post-earthquake Lijiang, for example, residents protested against the inaccurate appearance of the reconstructions and critiqued the fact that funds were allocated to rebuilt touristic landmarks rather than housing. As a result of asymmetrical power relations, these bottom-up protests did not succeed in reversing state-led developments. However, as Su Xiaobo observed, sentiments and practices of dissent enabled diverse residents to share a common sense of belonging, re-signifying spaces and emplacing their own affective geographies in rebuilt Lijiang.Footnote ⁶⁷

Of course, grassroots protests in favor or against identical reconstructions do not always advance the interests of vulnerable groups. In L’Aquila, for example, intellectual elites appropriated residents’ pro-reconstruction claims by favoring the very neoliberal processes that protesters wanted to oppose in the first place.Footnote ⁶⁸ Similarly, the resistance of local architects and planners against the modernist reconstructions of central Beirut in the early 1990s inspired the Souks Project, a “historic” retail district finished in 2009 for the exclusive use of tourists and elites.Footnote ⁶⁹ These examples show that well-intended protests can end up producing unequal outcomes. But this fact should not let us dismiss reconstructions as monolithic, top-down enterprises. On the contrary, the lesson that I and other scholars take from the fact that people worldwide mobilize against—or in favor of—rebuilding processes is that reconstructions are emotionally charged. And it is precisely the emotional values at stake that enable diverse people to participate in rebuilding processes by confronting one another and, possibly, sharing new common views.Footnote ⁷⁰

A second point is that rebuilt urban fabrics can function as reconciliatory sites.Footnote ⁷¹ For example, if the reconstruction of the town of Mostar in the late 1990s romanticized—or perhaps even invented—the idea of a peaceful multicultural Bosnia-Herzegovina, these heritization processes also diffused ethnic tensions among diverse residents. Going back to the same town 20 years after the reconstruction, Gustav Wollentz found that, groups of diverse residents that once opposed one another considered the rebuilding process as constitutive of a new shared identity, and an identity that long-timers believed people who arrived in post-reconstruction Mostar could not appreciate.Footnote ⁷² The Jewish-themed district of Kazimierz, Cracow, also functions as a site where diverse groups encounter and negotiate tensions. The district remained largely dilapidated until the early 1990s, when non-Jewish residents started re-opening and decorating shops and restaurants that transformed Kazimierz into a popular “Jewish” destination. While most scholars have criticized the district’s Disneyfied character, Erica Leher has found that Kazimierz elicits unique social dynamics. For example, by acting as “heritage brokers” and meeting with Jewish international tourists, non-Jewish Poles are forced to confront their past and expand ideas of “Polishness and Jewishness all together.” At the same time, the crafted atmosphere of Kazimierz makes the district a safe space for local Jews who feel more welcome there than in other parts of the city.Footnote ⁷³

Identical reconstructions can thus become arenas for encountering difference. They can be places where diverse people confront, question, and expand ideas of belonging. Without glorifying the “healing” properties of rebuilt fabrics, or dismissing the fact that they can perpetuate injustices, heritage scholars should concede that identical reconstructions do not necessarily deprive urban dwellers of the right to participate in the production of their heritage. Rebuilt landscapes can instead enable people to negotiate meanings, express their dissent, and interact with others just as it happens in other historic or themed settings.