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Description
In 2013, the star architect responsible for the new subway station in Naples’ Piazza Garibaldi declared that he was “a little jealous of the other metro sites [in Naples], where there are some ruins, where there are some traces of history.” Preliminary archaeological surveys had revealed, in the architect’s words, an underground space “that history hadn’t taken over yet.” The shared understanding between the architect, municipal officials, and engineers leading the project was that Piazza Garibaldi and its underground lacked elements that could be valued as archaeological, architectural, or intangible heritage. Moreover, because of its immediate vicinity to the central railway station, Piazza Garibaldi has long been a contested and socially diverse space, home to migrant residents and urban cultures that are overwhelmingly devalued in the mainstream media and public opinion.
In a context marked by both the absence of heritage-worthy historical traces and the presence of stigmatized urban cultures, the architect made a bold claim: he posited that his design firm must “create“ its “own traces of history.” This paper begins with this curious idea—the creation of historical traces—, to shed light on aspects that influence much of heritage-related planning praxis but are often ignored: the unquestioned presumptions about what counts (or not) as heritage; the practices and agents through which heritage is actually imagined, contested, and materialized; and the ways in which such manufactured heritages interact with and further transforms their context.
To answer these questions, we examine the case of Piazza Garibaldi. Its perceived lack of heritage-worthy elements is often attributed to its location. Before the 1840s and the construction of the old central railway station (which would be demolished a century later), the site of the piazza lay outside Naples, in an area of agricultural wetlands that stretched beyond the city’s medieval fortifications. Today, Piazza Garibaldi is situated between the new 1950s railway station and Naples’ densely urbanized, three-millennia-old historical center. In the early 2000s, the normative limits of the historical center and of zones of archeological interests were expanded, eventually including Piazza Garibaldi. While the 1950s railway station remained excluded from these designations, it was nevertheless listed as a noteworthy example of post-war modernist architecture.
Despite this partial inclusion in the city’s formal heritage, Piazza Garibaldi continues to be regarded by planners, architects, and city officials as outside the core of Naples’ historical and cultural identity. Drawing on recent heritage and planning literature influenced by assemblage thinking, we argue that in historically and socially contested places like Piazza Garibaldi, heritage-worthy elements are best understood as “relational objects” (Lieto, 2018). This perspective allows us to consider the open-ended “reassembling [of] bodies, techniques, technologies, materials, values, temporalities, and spaces” as the process by which invented heritage is made a reality (Harrison et al., 2020:6).
To demonstrate how this approach can guide more contextually sensitive planning practice, we draw on ethnographic research methods to examine the empirical processes by which urban heritage was invoked, interpreted, and manufactured during the design and construction of the new subway station at Piazza Garibaldi. First, we explore how the architect paid homage to the modernist railway station, offering a concrete example of how historical traces and heritage-worthy elements are created. Second, we investigate the decade-long controversy surrounding the imagined and contested nature of Piazza Garibaldi’s “authentic” market activities. This dispute involved city officials, architects, migrant residents, and users who sought to assert their urban cultures on their own terms, alongside a range of practices and material agents. Finally, we consider how the heritage thus manufactured interacted with the socio-spatial configuration of Piazza Garibaldi, reshaping its urban context.
References
Harrison R., DeSilvey C., Holtorf C., Macdonald, S. (2020) ‘For ever, for everyone ...’. In
Harrison, R., DeSilvey C., Holtorf, C., Macdonald, S., Bartolini, N., Breithoff, E., Fredheim, H., Lyons, A., May S., Morgan, J., & Penrose, S. Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices. London: UCL Press.
Lieto, L. (2018). Planning and Authenticity: A Materialist and Phronetic Perspective. In Tate, L., Shannon, B., (eds.) Planning for AuthentiCITIES. London: Routledge.
| Keywords | invented heritage; socio-material assemblages; authenticity |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
