Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

Our work has its basis in immersion in the Algarve territory in Southern Portugal, where our research is made, in the scope of Tourism Anthropology , concerning the dynamics of cultural changes and their impacts on tangible and intangible heritage. Our scientific approach is based on ethics and emic perspectives, with the support of a literature review on the subjects of heritage memory and authenticity and with data collected within a local population in the scope of participative fieldwork. Territory and spatial identities, seen as elements essential to mark the landscape in its private and public aspects, also serve for creativeness branding for touristic purposes as attraction factors. The peculiar tastes of the emerging social class of newcomers/non-total residents exceed the exogenous ways of building and designing that hype conceptional realities based on theoretical models of new social distinction tastes. Descharacterization and hiperbolization of capitalistic use of urban and suburban spaces, part of them built in natural protected areas, gains strength against good sense policies that favor circular economic development and sustainable ecological balance. We conclude that heritage can be safeguarded in administrative territories with smart technology, in all its applications by local administrations, and personally with AI in mobile communication devices as interpreters of symbolic codes of knowledge that all the five senses can perceive.