Space, politics, heritage: engaging in a political geography of heritagisation

Abstract

Heritage Studies has become an interdisciplinary research area, by engaging in an approach to heritage policies and practices as a complex power relationship always subject to changes, negotiations and contestations. heritagisation, as a process of negotiation of the visibilization of narratives, voices, memories, affections and emotions involved in heritage-making, displays the politics of a community representation and exhibition. One central dimension of this negotiation is the spatial one, since the production of heritage usually entails a spatial demarcation and a social identification.

Previous research has already contributed to the conceptualization of scale to the analysis of heritage; that is, enforcing that the scale of heritage interpretation becomes a political act. An effort to define those particular collective memories and past events upon which communal values and identities are grounded. Scalar dimensions are produced through negotiation with individual and collective actors, histories and the environment, and this scalar politics may also affect the interpretation of the meaning of heritage sites by visitors and/or local communities.

Drawing in fieldwork developed in EU´s borders heritage sites and events at the Spanish-Portuguese borderland, in Carabanchel Prison (Madrid) as a heritageized space of Spanish dictatorship repression claimed by social movements, and in the Boetticher warehouse (Madrid) as contested architectural industrial heritage, this chapter may open a space standing for a reading of heritageization as an inherently political-geographical discourse. Using different representational spaces and practices, heritage-making will be read as scalar politics. By approaching how communities are framed by visual regimes of visibilization of certain scales, the making of the spatial horizons of political communities will be discussed.