Studying Built Architecture as an Intangible Heritage in Unequally Divided Cities

Abstract

This essay reflects on how built architecture can be studied as an intangible heritage, focusing on the specificities of city life in the Iberian states of the European region and in Ibero-American states. This reflection foregrounds the ways in which the concept of built architecture as an intangible heritage may be enabling for those invested in challenging the contemporary dual planning regimes that often govern unequally divided cities in both regions; such situated planning regimes are characterized by persistences of the rationalities of colonialism and development. The essay starts by discussing how architecture research—and architectural history in particular—can articulate critical theories of space that allow research to understand built architecture as a “constantly recreated,” plural assemblage of spatial representations, practices, and imaginations. It will continue with an examination on the methodological implications of this theoretical approach to built architecture as an intangible heritage, notably regarding the possibilities of historical research methods informed by an ethnographic perspective. The reflection draws on an experience of fieldwork and archival research on the history of the late Twentieth-Century urban extensions of Lisbon. In addition, it draws on the valuable debates on built heritage within tradition studies, as well as on the diverse literature on informal spatial production in cities in Brazil, Peru, and elsewhere in the Ibero-American region.     

The reflection will conclude by exploring how studying the built environment as an intangible heritage can illuminate the elisions of urban history in the construction of a domain of built heritage; and in particular on how specific informally produced spaces are conceived synchronically as expressing a timeless cultural heritage, notably of rurality. What are some of the ways in which situated urban histories in Iberia and in the Ibero-American region articulate colonial and developmental rationalities that foster the celebration of certain kinds of built heritage, and the forgetting of others? Furthermore, to what extent does scholarly research, as well as the much maligned practices of poverty tourism, focus on a select number of unequal spaces such as Rio’s Rocinha or Lisbon’s Cova da Moura, often productively placing such spaces in the frame of a bounded, cultural heritage while neglecting situated histories of unequal division, attentive both to plural intangible heritages and to global circulations of prospective imagination.