The article Cultural Heritage(s) and the Right to the City. A View from Lisbon and Luanda is part of the book Other layers of Cultural Heritage: history and politics, edited by Nuno Lopes, Walter Rossa, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo. This is a collective volume of UNESCO Chair in Intercultural Dialogue on Heritages of Portuguese Influence and will be launched on March 17, 2023, at the University of Coimbra, as part of the 2023 Winter Seminars: Heritage of Portuguese Influence.
“The article focuses on the normative narratives that sustain the contemporary western world’s common perception of cultural heritage(s), all the while sustaining the forging of an ideal(ised) urban society and space. These narratives tend to support dominant strategies, politics and dynamics whilst neglecting or deliberately concealing ordinary practices. Presently, in a hegemonic neoliberal context, these official messages tend to instigate new forms of old market-driven mobilities, resulting in severe exclusionary processes. Nonetheless, they also provide the conditions for ‘rebellion’, the counter-mobilisation of local resistances that, by themselves, and/or reinforced by transnational networks, fight against hegemonic interventions and their fierce consequences. Therefore, they may also contribute to build groundbreaking grass-roots narrative(s) sensed as supporters-constructors of new “cultural heritage(s)” in a much larger scale.
The purpose of this paper is, on the one hand, to highlight the production of political spaces boosting strategic-oriented new legacies and, on the other hand, to clarify how the broad acceptance of these socio-spatial inheritances justify and/or corroborate the shaping of global urbanities. In addiction, the article aims to acknowledge the production of social spaces based on everyday life practices, providing a deeper understanding of the organisation of certain societies based on their needs, actions, and urban realities. Moreover, this reflection intends to explore permeabilities between these two models of production – political and social – as this knowledge supports the building of cooperative reformist spaces. For this matter, I will revisit Lisbon and Luanda’s socio-spatial late-colonial and/or contemporary urban and suburban contexts. I will elaborate on the concept of the right to the city in these capital cities, following Lefebvre’s thoughts, as well. This theoretical-methodological approach invigorates the critical discussion around “cultural heritage(s)”.
The book Other layers of Cultural Heritage: history and politics offers a heterogeneous investigation into the historical contexts and policies that conditioned the emergence and institutionalization of cultural heritage assets, focusing mainly on geographies shaped by Portuguese influence and using the concept of landscape. The topics addressed in each chapter are diverse: contested heritage; social justice; heritage as performance; industrial colonialism; tourism and heritage; heritage management and preservation; conservation, heritage, and landscape.