ancient cities

354 Heterotopia
castle that predated it, is an example of city heritage
rejection and reversion. The redevelopment of
the Museum Quartier from the Imperial Stables in
Vienna into a “Shopping Mall for Culture” is
another approach. Here, contemporary culture
(museums, galleries, theater spaces) was created
within the walls of an historic structure.
Heritage City Tourism
The globalization of tourist space has fueled the
exploitation of city heritage sites as places of internal
and external consumption. This latter phenomenon
has become common to major cities and
urban heritage sites and is not a recent development
but an expansion of inscribing power through
the materialization of bourgeois ideologies that has
occurred since the nineteenth century. Historic City
quarters, along with medieval, old town areas,
have been rediscovered and zoned as heritage
assets, necessitating the displacement of poorer,
often working-class and migrant communities.
These now serve as locations for culture-led regeneration,
with the siting of contemporary cultural
facilities such as Pompidou (Paris) and MACBA
(Barcelona) and the associated gentrification
through residential, office, and retail property use.
Entire cities can adopt the heritage tag where
built environment and heritage legacy is of sufficient
scale and homogeneity, notably in heritage
cities such as Venice and Florence. The use of
heritage designation for industrial sites and cities
has also helped repair postindustrial decline in
places such as Lowell, Massachusetts, and Bradford,
Yorkshire (UK). Former industrial complexes in
ports and docklands, mines, mills, and manufacturing
plants have also been recognized by heritage
listing, such as Essen, Germany (coal mining),
and the open museum at Ironbridge, Shropshire
(UK). Redundant industrial buildings increasingly
serve as atmospheric sites for cultural facilities,
whether celebrating industrial heritage itself
(e.g., brewery buildings: Heineken, Amsterdam;
Guinness, Dublin) or, more often, undergoing
conversion to modern galleries and museums,
such as the Tate Modern (a former turbine station
in London); Salts Mill, in Bradford, Yorkshire;
Musée D’Orsay (a former railway station in Paris);
and Parc de La Villette (a former slaughterhouse,
market in Paris).
As perhaps the location for the ultimate accumulation
of artifacts and architecture and subject
to continuous interpretation, the city defies a single
heritage branding such as “Gaudi Barcelona”
or “Macintosh Glasgow.” Moreover, the imperative
for heritage policies and selection can be counterproductive,
when the drive for being different
and unique indicates how much cities have become
the same. As postindustrial cosmopolitan cities
multiply in number and in the range and layers of
their heritage, they become both invisible and selfconsciously
visible through the official narratives
and interpretation of heritage. As a consequence,
cities become more and more alike.
Graeme Evans
See also Cultural Heritage; Historic Cities; Tourism
Further Readings
Ashworth, Greg J. 2003. “Conservation as Preservation
or as Heritage: Two Paradigms and Two Answers.”
Pp. 20–30 in Designing Cities: Critical Readings in
Urban Design, edited by A. R. Cuthbert. Oxford, UK:
Blackwell.
City Mayors. 2008. Historic Cities—Living Cities. Paris:
World Heritage Centre. Retrieved March 24, 2009
(http://www.citymayors.com/culture/historic_intro
.html).
Evans, Graeme L. 2002. “Living in a World Heritage
City: Stakeholders in the Dialectic of the Universal
and the Particular.” International Journal of Heritage
Studies 8(2):117–35.
Evans, Graeme L. 2003. “Hard Branding the Culture
City—From Prado to Prada.” International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research 27(2):417–40.
Larkham, Peter J. 1996. Conservation and the City.
London: Routledge.
UNESCO. 2003. World Heritage Papers 5, Identification
and Documentation of Modern Heritage. Paris:
UNESCO World Heritage Center.
He t e r o t o P i a
The term heterotopia was first used in a social–
theoretical context by the French philosopher
Michel Foucault. It refers in one sense to a place
that is socially different from the (implicitly normal)