Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Volume 6, Issue 2-3, 2019

World Heritage, a project of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that aims to protect and preserve tangible and intangible inheritances of mankind, enables the construction of 'distributed, "polycentric" networked economy of cultural production and exchange'. This article focuses on Calle Crisologo in northern Philippines, analysing the ways in which it has been creatively produced as World Heritage Site from postcolonial Vigan's built space. Building on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field, and capital and reading ordinances and an architect's plans, I argue that the World Heritage project reconfigures the once local space into a global spectacle. While World Heritage is a western construct and a result of the experience of late modernity, how it is manifested in Calle Crisologo also shows how vernacular modernity developed in Vigan as a colonial city. With the syncretic mixing of cultures in everyday Calle Crisologo as a resource, western modernity, supposed to be unitary and linear in its aims of progress and development, gets deflected.

This article is a proposal to address visual mapping as a means to reveal the interrelationships between a place represented, a place lived and a place perceived. A form of critical cartography called hybrid-mapping is used to interrogate the combined sociocultural and biophysical legacies of the continually changing landscape. This approach expressly facilitates a focused interpretation of the everyday lives of urban dwellers and the nuanced connections between landscape, history and culture. Offering to a larger conversation about landscape representation, this article introduces, situates and analyses the application of hybrid-mapping in a creative research project entitled Chinatown Invisible about Manhattan's Chinatown. The Chinatown Invisible project uses hybrid-mapping to interrogate the quotidian practice of 'making-do' to adapt existing urban structures to fulfil everyday needs. Capturing and understanding making-do is vital because it sheds light on the ways in which residents informally claim space and how they shape the ongoing physical evolution of their neighbourhood, establishing their 'right to the city'. Chinatown Invisible shows how hybrid-mapping unveils the dynamics between culture and landscape in an urban setting, bridging critical geography and landscape representation to examine multiple ways in which we can interact with the processes of real, imagined and perceived space.

Here, we introduce a series of concepts and debates that provide a meta-context for the papers on the topic of working-class heritage and the city that follow. We propose Henri Lefebvre's seminal work on the dissolution of the city as a theoretical framing device via brief detours through notions of museification, authenticity and 'communicity'. The fundamental problematic, as we see it, is that urban working-class heritage is symptomatic of the dissolution of the industrial city and an attempt – conditioned by economic, social, cultural and political imperatives – to reimagine and/or reconfigure the legacies of this city. While we agree that heritage is an active process – it is selected, curated, narrated and interpreted, or 'decoded' by individuals and social groups in a reflexive manner – we also suggest, on the evidence of the papers collected here, that working-class heritage delivers an ambivalent experience and response.

The histories of former industrial urban areas offer a contested and ambiguous framework for urban redevelopment. Whilst the newly emerged creative industries are framed in continuity with an industrial past, cultural heritage is being mobilized by different actors to authenticate or to contest the redevelopment of working-class neighbourhoods. This article explores the ongoing transformation of post-industrial Amsterdam North, an area that has become subject to active urban redevelopment since the 2000s. Based on ethnographic material, this study examines how 'heritage as development' – based on cosmopolitan ideals of social inclusion – reinforces a process of heritagization grounded on cultural rights that involves working-class memories of solidarity and dissent. I argue that the Amsterdam case complicates dualist interpretations of gentrification and heritagization as processes of categorizing individuals as 'winners' and 'losers'. Heritage practices tend to reinforce cultural differences that produce feelings of exclusion rather than inclusion, but also offer pathways for emancipation and a re-appropriation of local heritage for long-term working-class residents.

This article investigates the affective politics of heritage, memory, place and regeneration in Mansfield, UK. Ravaged by workplace closures from the 1980s, Mansfield's local government and cultural partners have supposedly put heritage at the centre of urban regeneration policies. Principal are ambiguous, and forestalled, ambitions to mobilize the industrial past to build urban futures. Yet these heritages, and their attendant memories and histories, are emotionally evocative and highly contested. The affective politics are played out in the material, embodied and atmospheric remains of the industrial past as Mansfield struggles to make sense of its industrial legacies. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis, archival research, observant participation and interview data, this article critiques heritage-based regeneration; examines interrelations between local memory, class, place and history; and interprets tensions between competing imaginaries of what Mansfield is, was and should be. Contributing to work on memory and class in post-industrial towns, the article demonstrates that affect and place should be central to our considerations of heritage-based urban regeneration. In the case of Mansfield, an 'emotional regeneration' will be denied until a shared practice of remembering the affective ruptures of the past is enabled.

In cities where tourism, creative industries and new service economies are boosting, the continuing impact of de-industrialization is less prominent than in discussions of, for example, former Rustbelt cities. Yet, these cities display new forms of intra-urban inequalities that are, beyond the discussion of gentrification, not strongly visible in urban sociology discourses. While scholarly work on Berlin focuses on its gentrification and touristification, urban social movements and forms of migration, less attention is paid to the city as a site of de-industrialization, economic dislocation, class-based defamations and the resulting labelling of political dysfunctionality of certain parts of the population. Exploring the less visible yet ongoing effects of de-industrialization in the post-socialist context of a formerly divided city, this article contributes to a better conceptual understanding of the economic dislocation of the (previous) working classes of East Berlin. It is argued that effects of deindustrialization are related to the cultural and relational production of class through the organization of socialist industrial work and that these effects are ongoing, yet silenced. Lastly, the article outlines a set of hypotheses regarding the friction of a decreasing public, yet continued personal relevance of industrial and working-class heritage, socially and materially, in the city.

In the context of deindustrialization and urban decline, America's industrial heartland came to be re-imagined as the 'Rust Belt'. Synonymous with outmoded and decrepit landscapes, identities and practices, the term has operated as a form of stigma, as places such as Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh became symbols of industrial, institutional and individual failure. However, in the contemporary period 'Rust Belt' is increasingly accompanied by an apparently incongruous term: 'chic'. Focusing on the narratives and essays of a younger, educated and predominantly white demographic, the article explores discourses of 'Rust Belt Chic', examining the social, cultural and political significance of this emergent phenomena thinking through the ways in which it constructs the past, present and future of deindustrialized landscapes. It is argued that within these narratives the region is valued for its liminality, for its proximities to the industrial past and a sense of history and tradition, along with its distance from what is seen as the failures of the post-industrial city. The article considers this reappraisal of the region and its material and symbolic significance in the context of deindustrialization and urban regeneration, examining how claims about the region are used to articulate a particular form of urban 'authenticity'.

This research looks at an abandoned beer brewery that is set for a new real-estate-led redevelopment project in Beirut between past, present and future. While the building proudly represented a moment of Lebanese modernity and identity formed around industry, it also speaks of the eventual failure of the promise of modernity associated with Lebanon's first republic. The building's story is also closely woven with Mar Mikhail and the history and geography of drinking-culture and leisure-spaces in Beirut. In one sense, Mar Mikhail represents, through its recent street-based, informal re-claiming of public-space, lower prices, minimal overhaul of built infrastructure and attachment to an 'authentic' traditional working-class neighbourhood, a resistance to exclusive urban spaces of neo-liberal consumption. The enquiry highlights neo-liberal capital's tendency to exploit vulnerabilities – for example, that of urban and architectural decay, wherein the re-discovery of 'heritage' makes it appear as revolutionary but in reality it is further incorporation into the capitalist system. The research also reveals the nexus of these shifts with gentrification and social, economic and cultural stratifications of the city. I, thus, analyse the new architectural vision for the brewery site and how it re-inscribes capitalism's hegemony over architecture in advancing gentrification processes in cities: commodification of heritage blatantly visible in architectural terms.