more than the half humans We inhabit a globalized, urban and digital world. Cities and their citizens find themselves in this paradoxical situation: between the immateriality of the digital and its physical and analogical reverse.

The preponderance of virtuality leads the city to be inhabited from solitude and the distance of “connected rooms”, turned into a telepolis. How to participate in your improvement and planning? What role can the citizen play?

‘Postfordism’ and creative city

Power is no longer measured by the physical accumulation and distribution of items. surpassed the traditional fordist capitalism, the value lies in the ability to transmit messages and analyze a huge amount of data. In the global market, the power of the image has made the “creatives” decisive, understood by some as new (and attractive) social class.

In the era of post-industrial and digital capitalism, the generation and transmission of information via the Internet will be the first and strongest mechanism for the production of wealth also for a city. An element that completely disrupts its communication methods, redirecting them to a primarily economic objective from the point of view of the marketing or the branding.

Art and heritage have thus acquired increasing importance, as they add symbolic value and great capital gains to the equation. Artistic practices have adapted to the new economic rules of culture.

aesthetic regeneration

Thus, urban regeneration has largely moved into an area that is not only political or urban, but also aesthetic. The projects undertaken in recent years have prioritized representation over physical and tangible aspects. It is the image that is projected.

The “Guggenheim effect” set this pattern from the timely success of the process in the concrete and specific case of Bilbao. Since then the formula has been copied to exhaustion in all kinds of cities in all latitudes, not always generating the desired impact.

Pharaonic (and failed) projects such as the Galician City of Culture, in Santiago de Compostela, serve as an example of the megalomaniacal eagerness of certain political sectors. This type of monument exemplifies an erroneous idea of ​​art and culture as tools alien to the true needs of the citizen.

The goal was attract tourists, “talent” and investors thanks to the change in the image of the city. However, this equation was never as easy to achieve as it was intended to be. In very few cases did it have an impact on the economic structure and in the long term. The structure, the script, the story failed. And what is even more important, its adaptation to the character and consensus with the most decisive element in the composition of a city: its inhabitants.

After the campaigns to rehabilitate neighborhoods or the construction of new museums and cultural centers, the physical reverse of daily life in the city, plagued by conflicts and problems to be resolved, has thus been hidden. The image projected abroad has not always been consistent with reality.

Urban story and citizen participation

If the city requires stories that feed it and project it into the future, without a doubt these stories will necessarily be digital. The advantages are obvious: they are an open method of communication, democratic and inclusivecheap and accessible.

The urban story must be claimed as a heritage tool. It activates the memory and spaces of the city and allows, at the same time, to share the visions of citizens about the future.

The opening of the narrative is key to achieving a fair, resilient and sustainable city, objectives set by international institutions such as the UN within its new urban agenda.

The citizen as generator of the story

Cultural institutions are beginning to take into account this new context of the citizen, no longer as a passive recipient of messages, but as active user and producer thereof.

From big projects like Europeana until some regional, or small neighborhood museums, the new trend is to collect and accommodate objects, experiences, stories and personal or collective memories as heritage in itself. Even the corporate image of the city can be open, creative and participatory, as the cases of heart of napoli in Naples or It’s Bologna… in Bologna.

Cultural heritage: a reconstruction of the future from a living past

Cultural heritage becomes the link between past and future, between physical reality and immateriality, between great stories and the emotional connection and the intra-history of the citizen.

There is an unquestionable sentimental connection with the spaces of the city, even more so with those marked by their relationship with historical landmarks. Heritage reactivates memory and reinforces community ties and social cohesion.

How to reconstruct that past, how to make it useful for the present and future of the city is always a challenge. A city is a living space, where there are constant movements of people and products. Heritage must adapt to these changes if it wants to be part of urban life and not simply be a parenthesis on an archaeological visit, a mummification of a past remains.

Historic neighborhoods must be restored economic and social nerve centers of the city: living examples of resilience, they give character to the city and are habitable after short pedestrian journeys.

Instead of abandoning them to the effects of the iconic and picturesque image, it is possible to use them as an antidote and not a propellant to the effects of touristification and gentrification.

Shared city: social cohesion

The urban narrative thus acts as an element of social cohesion. It empowers and gives voice to all the social groups that make up the city, including those that have been historically and traditionally silenced and ignored. This helps to understand the spaces and historical events from a more empathetic perspective, closer to the experiences of the common citizen.

Culture and heritage act as the main drivers of this inclusion of stories. It is the public, common spaces, in the form of libraries, museums, squares, parks or markets that must appear as open participation platforms.

The shared story does not dispel the discrepancies or social problems that are part of the city. includes them. And it entails a reappropriation of what was inherited from the past and a projection into the future. Heritage, culture and art have much to contribute in this regard.

Luis D. Rivero MorenoLecturer in Art History, University of Leon

This article was originally published on The Conversation. read the original.

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