VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Anthropological scholarship has devoted close attention to the aestheticization of cities and its role in fostering consumption not just in, but also of urban space. Yet, at a time when the consumption of heritage is promoted across the social spectrum, its exclusive association with privileged urban groups has to be revisited. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Genoa, Italy, since 2016, this paper investigates how activists residing in a postindustrial periphery known as Bisagno Valley seek to mobilize resistance to redevelopment by teaching fellow residents new ways of sensing and making sense of their valley’s materialities—namely, by shaping a vernacular version of heritage that draws on the valley’s pre-industrial past. Developers are attempting to turn the Bisagno Valley into a US-style commercial suburb, thus perpetuating the neighborhood’s utilitarian status as a marginal service periphery. Activists, instead, strive to rally residents around what they define as the valley’s heritage and its beauty to resist yet another “cementificazione” (overbuilding) wave. Through an analysis of the tactics activists enact to mold new spatial sensibilities, this paper illuminates how grassroots movements may strategically embrace neoliberal economies of heritage and aesthetic experience in order to challenge neoliberal urbanism from within. As they teach residents how to “use” rather than “consume” the valley and its materialities (cfr. Agamben 2015), activists promote a non-commodifying approach to heritage: one that, by subtracting it from the utilitarianism of redevelopment, encourages residents to create a sensory and affective bond with the places of their everyday life.