IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section B

Abstract

Urban heritage is highly valued as a lucrative source of regeneration crucial to the neoliberal city. Regeneration is often associated with exclusionary, racialised processes of gentrification and a commodification of public space which can be made sense of through the prism of settler colonialism (Kent-Stoll 2020; Ellis-Young 2021). At the same time, material traces of slavery and colonialism have increasingly been contested in recent years. #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter protests have drawn attention to the need to remove remnants of colonial urban heritage such as statues of colonial heroes (Kølvraa and Timm Knudsen 2021). Alongside these calls for the ‘decolonisation’ of urban space, ‘places of pain and shame’ such as massacre and genocide sites are considered as heritage sites that should be conserved and marked instead of erased (Logan and Reeves 2009). Drawing on a social semiotic analysis, this paper focuses on the spatial transformation of the Royal Arsenal in South-East London from an armament factory to an upmarket residential area with a creative district. It examines how the violent military past associated with the area is both remembered and silenced through information displays, marketing brochures and objects and buildings. It argues that the sanitisation of the area’s implication in violent histories should be understood in relation to the racialised nature of regeneration in a neoliberal age in which private actors increasingly control and curate public space. In this way, the paper demonstrates and reveals the multiple layers of violence associated with both the military past and the regenerative imaginaries of the future.