Urban Heritage in Divided Cities

Contested Pasts

Mirjana Ristic, Sybille Frank

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429863547
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Urban Heritage in Divided Cities explores the role of contested urban heritage in mediating, subverting and overcoming sociopolitical conflict in divided cities. Investigating various examples of transformations of urban heritage around the world, the book analyses the spatial, social and political causes behind them, as well as the consequences for the division and reunification of cities during both wartime and peacetime conflicts.

Contributors to the volume define urban heritage in a broad sense, as tangible elements of the city, such as ruins, remains of border architecture, traces of violence in public space and memorials, as well as intangible elements like urban voids, everyday rituals, place names and other forms of spatial discourse. Addressing both historic and contemporary cases from a wide range of academic disciplines, contributors to the book investigate the role of urban heritage in divided cities in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East. Shifting focus from the notion of urban heritage as a fixed and static legacy of the past, the volume demonstrates that the concept is a dynamic and transformable entity that plays an active role in inquiring, critiquing, subverting and transforming the present.

Urban Heritage in Divided Cities will be of great interest to academics, researchers and students in the fields of cultural studies, sociology, the political sciences, history, human geography, urban design and planning, architecture, archaeology, ethnology and anthropology. The book should also be essential reading for professionals who are involved in governing, planning, designing and transforming urban heritage around the world.

1

Contested pasts in divided cities

Introduction

Mirjana Ristic and Sybille Frank

Throughout history, urban heritage – those tangible and intangible elements of the city inherited from the past we consider to be meaningful so that we want to keep them – has played an important role in the construction of identities of people and places. Historic urban quarters, sacred buildings, monuments, customs and rituals in public space are all a part of what Hobsbawm (1983) refers to as ‘invented traditions’ – the legacy of the glorious past used by the nation state to give a group of people a sense of continuity and to strengthen their sense of collective self, belonging and attachment to a place or (national) territory. However, contemporary nations and cities are increasingly haunted by traumatic pasts recalling violence and division during wars, conquest, occupation, oppression and persecution by authoritarian regimes (Huyssen 2003). Relics and traces of these events in the cityscape represent contested urban heritage that has the capacity to destabilise the unity of national, ethnic or sectarian groups (Logan and Reeves 2009; Walkowiz and Knauer 2004). This is particularly prominent in the context of polarised, divided and segregated cities where urban heritage is transformed, often violently, as a means of struggle for power over urban territories and the relations between their populations. For instance, in the context of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian war, the Old Bridge in Mostar was bombed in 1993 to divide Bosniaks and Croats (Coward 2009). Additionally, political division and violence often leave behind a disturbing heritage – such as relics of border architecture, prisons or traces of a no man’s land – that poses a challenge to reunification and potentially creates the grounds for further conflict (Logan and Reeves 2009). While the Berlin Wall was torn down quickly after its fall in 1989, the redevelopment of former border crossing points such as Checkpoint Charlie has provoked manifold disputes in the reunited city that are still ongoing (Frank 2016). Urban heritage is also often reinvented, remade and appropriated as a means of camouflaging conflict and division during peacetime. As an illustration, streets in Sarajevo and East Sarajevo have acquired different historic names to mark the otherwise invisible border between the two cities after the war (Ristic 2018). All these examples indicate that urban heritage matters and has the agency to transform socio-spatial relations for better or for worse.

This volume explores the role of contested urban heritage in mediating, subverting and/or overcoming sociopolitical conflict in divided cities. The chapters in this book investigate various transformations of urban heritage – appropriating, rejecting, selecting, destroying, preserving, remaking, sharing – and analyse their spatial, social and political causes and consequences for the division and reunification of cities during both wartime and peacetime conflicts. They cover a range of contemporary and historic case studies that are analysed through the lens of multiple academic disciplines, including architecture, urban design and planning, sociology, conservation, theatre studies and history. Drawing on original research, the chapters of this book provide an insight into the ways urban heritage in divided cities shapes the identities of people and places and the relations of people within places. They highlight how urban heritage operates as a tool for the struggle to demarcate urban territories and construct collective identities. They demonstrate the capacity of urban heritage to mediate political power, exclusion and discrimination, but also resistance and the struggle for inclusion and social justice. They also show how different ways of dealing with the heritage of war, conflict and division can act as a catalyst for a city’s reunification and reconciliation. The volume thus offers rich empirical insights into the relationship between heritage, territory and identity, and it provides different theoretical frameworks and methodological tools for understanding and investigating the sociopolitical agency of the legacy of the past in cities.

The importance of understanding the role of urban heritage in mediating various forms of contestation in cities is stressed in a vast body of scholarship from the fields of architecture, urban design, geography, history, political science and sociology. In the context of war, the concept of ‘memoricide’ (Bevan 2006; Riedlmayer 2007), interpreted as the ‘killing of memory’, addresses the destruction of heritage in and of cities, including historic urban quarters, religious or cultural buildings and open spaces linked to particular national, ethnic or sectarian groups. Proposing the thesis that heritage provides visible evidence of the presence of ‘Others’ or the coexistence of plural communities in a city, Riedlmayer (2007) and Bevan (2006) argue that the destruction of heritage represents a ‘cultural dimension of genocide’ or ethnic cleansing by other means, thus setting the stage for the creation of purified new mono-ethnic enclaves. In a post-war context, physical ruins, relics and traces of war in the cityscape have been referred to by various terms in the academic literature – ‘difficult heritage’ (Macdonald 2008), ‘dark heritage’ (Lennon and Foley 2000), ‘atrocity heritage’ (Ashworth 2004) and ‘places of pain and shame’ (Logan and Reeves 2009). It is argued that such urban heritage ‘hurts’ because it embodies infamous pasts that have the capacity to express the collective trauma or stigma of a social group and create the grounds for continuous political tension and disputes. More than any other form of heritage, this exemplifies what Tunbridge and Ashworth (1994) refer to as ‘dissonant heritage’, because its preservation, conservation and transformation involve contradictory and often mutually exclusive perceptions of the past and disagreements over the interpretations of its meanings by the actors engaged in heritage-making. However, some authors argue that, in recent decades, there has been a shift in how painful and shameful heritage in cities is understood. The disclosure of past wrongdoing has come to be seen as a healing action that generates the value of social integrity (Macdonald 2015) and contributes to the socio-spatial integration and cohesion of previously disputed or divided communities (Silver 2006).

Although these studies provide invaluable arguments and conceptual and methodological tools for investigating and understanding the socio-political agency of urban heritage, they also have some limitations. Most of the existing research is based on a normative conception of urban heritage dominated by Western and European discourses and by the disciplines of history, archaeology, conservation studies and architecture. Such a conception draws on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO’s) definition of heritage as the material and immaterial attributes of a national, ethnic or sectarian group or of a society in general, which are inherited from the past and maintained in the present for the benefit of future generations. Translated into the context of cities, urban heritage is most commonly referred to as old, iconic and approved historic sites that are designated as ‘heritage’ due to their ‘outstanding’ and ‘universal’ values. In this context, urban heritage is connected to the idea of the nation state – its purpose is to give a group of people a sense of duration through history and thus strengthen their collective identity. This notion of heritage is losing credibility in the context of globalisation and migration, which are characterised by the intersection and mixing of cultures and spaces that establish new co-presences and spatial entanglements (Förster et al. 2016). In this context, the idea of a homogeneous nation state is eroding and its heritage is becoming more heterogeneous and infused by the cultural influences of Others.

In this collection, we shift the focus from this normative (and limited) notion of urban heritage to deploy a more inclusive conception rooted in the discourse of Critical Heritage Studies (CHS), which takes into account alternative forms of heritage, including the unofficial and/or currently unrecognised sites and places related to marginalised and/or excluded groups in a society (Campbell and Smith 2011; Smith 2012). We take urban heritage in a broad sense to include tangible or intangible elements of the city – ruins, relics and traces of events in public space, monuments, urban voids, customs and rituals in public space, place names and other forms of spatial discourse – that are significant to a group of people for the articulation of their sense of collective self (Ashley and Frank 2016). As such, urban heritage does not refer to the inherent characteristic(s) of a place but to the value(s) that people give to a place (Frank 2016). It is not merely a social object/product, but also an act/process of the social production of place – the practice of heritage-(re)making – through which people make sense of the world and struggle to establish their place in it. Urban heritage thus involves the idea of contestation, or the struggle(s) over the purpose and meaning of heritage through which people raise their voices in the public sphere (Ashley and Frank 2016).

While other current studies deal with contestations over urban heritage in cities in general, this volume focuses specifically on the role of contested urban heritage in mediating, subverting and/or overcoming sociopolitical conflict in divided cities. We argue that such cities are ‘critical case studies’ (Flyvbjerg 2006) of the ways in which the spatial, social and political agency of contested urban heritage manifests itself. Their analysis provides rich empirical material and conceptual reflections about various mechanisms through which urban heritage sustains socio-spatial separation or has the potential to foster the unification of people and places. Divided cities are polarised in the sense that they involve two or more national, ethnic, sectarian or class groups that coexist without interacting and that contest without conceding supremacy to the other (Hepburn 2004). Divided cities are often demarcated by physical borders and material barriers – walls, fences and/or checkpoints. Famous cases include Berlin (now reunified), Belfast, Nicosia and Jerusalem. Cities can also be socially or ethnically divided in a sense that their populations of different national, ethnic, sectarian or class backgrounds are dispersed across a number of different neighbourhoods or segregated in exclusive, circumscribed, isolated or excluded quarters – ghettos or gated communities. Famous cases of such socially divided cities include Cape Town, Detroit and Caracas. Divided cities are characterised by what Pullan (2011: 31) has called ‘frontier urbanism’, which is defined as a form of place-making that is focused on the creation of physical, symbolic and mental barriers both in the built environment and in the minds of residents. Frontier urbanism is a socio-spatial condition that is characterised by both the ‘settling of civilians as frontier populations’ and the use of various socio-spatial mechanisms to actualise and maintain fragmentation, enclosure and confrontation (Calame and Charlesworth 2009; Pullan 2011). While the architectural and urban dimensions of divided and segregated cities have been explored in a large number of studies, this is the first book to explore the particular agency of urban heritage in mediating the socio-spatial partition and reunification of cities.

This volume builds on three panel sessions organised by the editors of this book at the third biennial conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies, held in Montreal in 2016. It was expanded through an open call for book chapters that was circulated in the wake of the conference with the aim of broadening the geographical range of the case studies. In contrast to the existing research, most of which focuses on internationally famous divided cities in Europe and the Middle East (e.g. Mostar and Jerusalem), this book has a global scope and analyses a broad range of cases in Africa, Asia and the Americas, as well as less researched divided cities in Europe and the Middle East. It includes a total of 14 case studies in different urban, geographic and sociopolitical contexts and regions of the world that are discussed in each chapter. They include cities physically divided along ethnic and sectarian borders, such as Hebron (Israel/Palestine), Aleppo (Syria), Mitrovica (Kosovo), Beirut (Lebanon), Nicosia (Cyprus), Belfast and Derry-Londonderry (North Ireland), socially segregated cities such as Fredericksburg (USA), Amritsar (India), Cape Town (South Africa) and Cartagena (Colombia), and cities that have transcended their borders, such as Berlin and Singapore. Each chapter takes on a different conception of urban heritage and the role that it plays in mediating and overcoming the conflict in divided cities.

Transformations of heritage as ‘conflict by other means’

The first section of the book, ‘Transformations of heritage as “conflict by other means”’, deals with the ways in which urban heritage in divided cities operates not merely as the site and target of the conflict but also as the very instrument for sociopolitical contestation. The chapters in this section investigate the political, social and spatial consequences of the destruction, appropriation and transformation of urban heritage when the tangible and intangible legacy of the past of one national, ethnic or sectarian group becomes ‘displaced’ on the other side of the border. They also analyse how urban heritage is reinvented and remade to demarcate territories, both physically and symbolically, to construct purified forms of collective identities and to keep ‘Others’ at bay.

In Chapter 2, ‘Heritage necropolitics and the capture of Hebron: The logic of closure, fear, humiliation and elimination’, Hammami investigates the role that heritage has played in legitimising the Israeli colonial settlement project in Palestine. He argues that while physical borders are deployed by the Israeli army and settlers to fragment Palestinian territories and residents, heritage and the past are violently targeted and rewritten not only to induce the rebirth of a Zionist version of the biblical Hebron but also to eliminate other representations of history. Drawing on Mbembe’s (2003) notion of ‘necropolitics’, it is in this sense that he regards the transformation of heritage in Hebron and its sociopolitical agency as a form of ‘social killing’ of the non-biblical/Jewish legacy of the city’s past. In this way, he challenges the notion that Hebron is a ‘ghost’ or a ‘divided’ city, as it is labelled in social and political media, arguing that the systematic processes of rewriting its history and geography instead reveal Hebron to be a ‘captured city’.

‘Contested heritage-making as an instrument of ethnic division: Mitrovica, Kosovo’ (Chapter 3) by Legnér, Ristic and Bravaglieri explores the roles that public monuments as tools for heritage-making have played in mediating the ethnic division of Mitrovica, Kosovo, since the end of the war in 1999. Focusing on the area around the Ibar River Bridge, which is the city’s major fault line, they examine the ways in which ethnic heritage has been revived, interpreted and represented, both physically and semantically, to frame the border between the northern (Serbian) and southern (Albanian) parts of the city and shape the relations between the ethnic communities inhabiting them. Their argument is that Mitrovica’s post-war socio-spatial division is fostered by selective, one-sided and opposing versions of heritage-making embedded in the post-war monuments, which serve to mark the ethnic power of territories, produce ethnically exclusive Serbian and Albanian place identities and deny the ethnic ‘Others’.

In Chapter 4, ‘Nicosia hotspot: Visualities of memory and heritage in the Greek Cypriot urban space’, Karaiskou explores the role of urban heritage in memory-making in the Greek Cypriot (southern) segment of Nicosia’s old town. Conceiving of heritage as a mnemonic device, she analyses how the legacy of the Greek Cypriot past is materialised in various types of built form and public space in South Nicosia, including the borderland, street names, political memorials and museums. Her chapter shows how such ‘visualities’ of urban heritage sustain a version of Greek Cypriot national identity that is based on trauma from the conflict and sustained by the narrative of the deprivation of liberty and the loss of land due to the division. Within this framework, Karaiskou argues that such urban heritage frames mutually exclusive forms of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and generates conflicting perceptions of the past and diverse interpretations of the present which affirm the ongoing conflict and division.

Chapter 5, ‘Lefkosa versus Lefkosia: The heritage of conflict’ by Gunay, provides a critical commentary on the reimagining of heritage through the microhistories of division and memories of conflict in North Nicosia and the borderland between the two parts of the divided city. She analyses the difference between the ways in which everyday and official heritage contributes to or contests the division of the city and interrogates the capacity of contested heritage to resolve the conflict in the city ‘where the “past” does not really pass’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Contested pasts in divided cities: Introduction
• Part I Transformations of heritage as ‘conflict by other means’
• Part II Segregated heritage
• Part III Dealing with contested heritage
• INDEX