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Assembling the Historic City: Dwelling, Translation, and the Mobility of Local Lifeworlds in a Cuban UNESCO World Heritage Site

Thu, May 28, 2:00 to 3:45pm, TBA

Abstract

This paper examines the value of assemblage theory for conceptualizing processes of ‘heritagization’ as part of the “dynamic, relational and generative nature” of urbanization itself (McFarlane 2011). In particular, I examine how local projects of inhabiting the city become constituted as heritage through processes of ‘inscription’, in which impoverished local lifeworlds such as tenements and ‘informal’ housing are materialized as ‘heritage’ through conservation plans, historic sketches, and simulacra which realign them in inventive ways (ibid.). These inscriptions can then travel as mobile representations through national and international heritage and donor organizations, and in some cases, realign local lifeworlds with new configurations of urban actors, forms and processes. In this paper, I explore how heritagization acts as a type of inscription that is used to reorient local forms of inhabiting, engineering and constructing the city, creating mobile representations of tangible and intangible heritage that can subsequently travel and act at a distance. I illustrate these processes of heritagization-as-urbanization through two case studies from Old Havana. The first involves a densely settled, republican era square with degraded tenements and a 1950s era car park that is translated through conservation plans, a UNESCO international donor campaign, and a heritage tourism company into a reimagined 19th century plaza, ultimately leading to its de-/ and re-territorialization as Old Havana’s preeminent tourist square. The second case involves a local grass roots community development project involving the intangible heritage of hair cutting that is subsequently inscribed in an official heritage project, turning it into a UNESCO award-winning example of the potential for intangible heritage to transform local lives through ‘integral’ community economic development.

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