VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages
Abstract
This paper proposes an interdisciplinary and innovative theoretical approach to analyse the role played by the preservation of industrial heritage in the processes of urban regeneration in the neoliberal city. This study has been developed in the framework of the Curbatheri/Deep Cities project (JPICH 699523; AEI PCI2020-112069). It deals with the recovery of Cosme Toda, a factory located in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, a municipality that historically has maintained an unequal relationship of centre-periphery with the city of Barcelona. Because of this, L’Hospitalet has been experiencing real estate and speculative pressures over the last twenty-five years with the massification of the housing market, which have generated social conflicts over the conservation of the buildings listed as heritage. In order to analyse it, a theoretical framework is proposed recovering the contributions of architecture, urban planning, anthropology and archaeology. The aim is to detect and analyse the social, economic and political dynamics involved in the production of industrial heritage. The methodology is based on a historical reconstruction of the territory through, first, a bibliographical review. Archival work on the urban plans implemented and the press reports have also been consulted and they all show the different discourses that circulate in the media regarding what deserves, or does not deserve, to be valued as heritage. From this perspective, we will explore the preservation of architectural heritage as a field of dispute between institutional technical criteria, the profitability interests of the real estate sector and the demands and imaginaries of the public. The aim is to provide analytical and methodological keys to rethink the conception of heritage within the complexity of urban dynamics.
María Gabriela Navas Perrone is an architect and holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Barcelona. Her academic career has focused on exploring the interactions between built environments and people’s lived dimensions in urban space. She is currently co-directing the postgraduate course “Anthropology and Architecture. The social life of the built environment” at the University of Barcelona, and a postdoctoral researcher in the European project Curbatheri-Deep Cities, at the same university.
ICREA Research Professor Margarita Díaz-Andreu’s interests include the social and economic value of heritage, World Heritage, the development of archaeological tourism, ethics, the politics of heritage, and the role of heritage within new migrant populations in Europe. She is the leader of GAPP, the Group of Public Archaeology and Heritage (www.ub.edu/gapp). She has been the Principal Investigator of the Spanish team of the European JPI Heritage & Values project, and the JPICH Deep Cities/Curbatheri project (https://www.curbatheri.niku.no/).
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Thursday 29th June, 2023