Heritage-making or heritage-unmaking? The role of urban culture in the neoliberal city. Buenos Aires (1990-2020)

Abstract

Starting from a series of case-examples of the City of Buenos Aires over the last 30 years, we propose to demonstrate that, in a dominant way, the public recognition of the legitimacy and need for a “enhancement” or a “reactivation of heritage” does not depend so much on the value that can be given to a building, an area or an institution based on any of its intrinsic qualities, but rather on the effectiveness that this heritage-making process has in the construction of an image of a place or neighborhood as "attractive”, “authentic”, and on the intensification of the expansion of tourist or cultural consumption circuits and of real estate interests. This article aims to show that social recognition and duration in time of patrimonial value are based on the relationship between those authenticity and identity features given to urban goods and wider processes of requalification of the area in which they are located. As we will see, in some cases, heritage-making processes operate as the spearhead of such requalifications; in others, as their reinforcements.

For this, some cases of “successful” places, areas and practices (that is, that were publicly recognized as “heritage” even regardless of their historical or cultural qualities and that managed to last in the time hand in hand with its economic revaluation or its symbolic impact on the surrounding area) are presented. As counterexamples, other cases are then analyzed that, despite having some characteristics that would make them susceptible to being publicly recognized as “heritage” (age, community value, among others), were made invisible, destroyed or transformed without appealing to its patrimonial condition, within the framework of other dynamics or temporalities of urban requalification.