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questions of tangibility in post-industrial landscapes and their urban implications Melina Guirnaldos Díaz The Burra Charter, drawn
up by Australia ICOMOS in 1979, included for the first time the ‘cultural significant’
concept to describe the importance of a site by the aggregate of values
attributed to it. Since then, the Heritage concept has been under revision in
an attempt to widen its predominantly Western hegemonic definition. An
increasing number of authors (e.g. Smith, Lowenthal, Harrison) have drawn attention
to the issue of intangible values within Heritage and questioned the
consequences that the dominance of the aesthetic value and material
authenticity have had for our cities. These critiques have changed the
conceptual focus of cultural heritage from the aesthetic-historic to the
anthropologicalcultural axis (Pereira, 2007: 15).
However, despite the evolution of the concept of heritage and its advancement in academic literature, architectural and urban heritage preservation policies and intervention in West countries are still, in the main, based on mainstream approaches, which only emphasize the recovery of the tangible values of built heritage. These practices are guided by conservation principles that privilege the idea of ‘monument’ and facilitate the commodification of Heritage. The incomplete transfer of the intangible values that constitute the inheritance of a place leads to a disconnection between heritage and the contemporary urban and social context. This is identified as one of the main factors of globalization and the generic city. This abstract focuses on
the idea that heritage values are not fixed but culturally created and
historically specific. Values are defined by their meaning within society,
including tangibility issues; therefore, ‘authenticity’ lies in the heritage
significances that people construct for their daily lives.
Post-Industrial
landscapes provide a clear dialectic between the tangible – the
industrial landscape itself – and the social and human interaction with
that
landscape – the uses to which it’s put, the emotional response
to it and so on. Lefebvre points out that reading landscapes of
industrial
ruination serves to highlight the idea that the spatial is socially
constituted
and the social is also spatial, (cf. Lefebvre 1991: Massey 1995: Soja
2000).
This research explores the redefinition of heritage by drawing the meaning of intangible value within the frame of Lefebvre’s socio-spatial theories and through the analysis of the work developed by the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, the Monuments of Passaic essay by Robert Smithson and the presentation of two case studies: Poblenou in Barcelona and Butetown in Cardiff. Finally this research
argues the need to address the issue of value in international policies and its
political and social implications translated through conservation praxis. This
research aims to contribute to the search for more dialogically democratic heritage
decision–making processes
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