Heritage and the right to the city: When securing the past creates insecurity in the present

Abstract

The contested concept of heritage has increasingly been used by powerful and privileged actors-the state, the wealthy, corporations, and even universities-to justify their expropriation of inner-city areas. Appealing to an alltoo-often ignorant version of “high culture,” they have increasingly excluded the poor, ethnic minorities, and other supposedly marginal groups from the right to inhabit areas designated as “historic.” One response has been the increasingly globalized “Occupy” idiom of social protest; another has been through local traditions of resistance grounded in long years of experience (as in several Asian countries). All such responses produce distinctive readings of the past; t..