Heritage as a Heterotopic Space. The Tertiary Character and the Hybrid Characteristic as Arguments of Its Heterotopic Character

Abstract

The chapter presents in a condensed fashion the main argument of the present research, outlined along the lines of the initial theoretical segment of the work. The heritage’s tertiary and intermediate character—or otherness—is argued within the preamble, understood as a conceptual entity (the conceptual heritage space, of theoretical space defined through concepts, theories and attitudes that shape the perspectives onto the heritage built object. Related to the thin intermediate character it is also discussed the dichotomist structure of heritage. Underlying this concept is the ideas of selection, of inclusion and exclusion, of valuable and non-valuable, that have (historically) fashioned the heterogeneous nature of heritage itself. Imagined as n-conceptual entity, heritage expresses simultaneously two contradictory desiderata: the utopic one, of unity and universal and democratic representation of all identities, and that of the selection of value, of division between valuable and non-valuable. The heritage requires and establishes numerous internal hierarchies, ramifies series of criteria, values, intensities and nuances, different degrees of protection, etc. The source of this imperative of creating hierarchies and divisions can be encountered in the very desire for unity and inclusion. The entire heritage normative apparatus functions as a mediating dispositif, necessary for managing its heterogeneous nature. The dichotomic, the tertiary or intermediate character are further discussed through an example, the decolonization process, pre-eminently unfolded within the heritage sphere. Thus, the us/them separation in never a fixed one: in relation to the context in which it is discussed, the categories change their “content”. Heritage appears as an assembled reflection, continuously re-adjusted through the negotiation process between the two focal points. Finally, this chapter proposes a condensed analysis tool based on the heterotopic profile. This set of coordinates can allow, in the proposed interpretation, the identification of the heterotopic character and functioning of a specific place. This heterotopic functioning, in its turn, is able to signal an insufficiently visible heritage potential, it can explain a specific evolution of a space and it can also signal the dilution of a heritage value. Traced back to the basic reading of the Foucauldian text, these heterotopic spaces (both conceptual and material) ultimately reflect the image of the society in a specific moment in time and in a specific context; the reading of the heritage space through this heterotopic lenses can delineate such an image not only retrospectively but also in the present—an image that is usually more difficult to grasp due to its very proximity. The ensuing case study focuses on a particular manifestation of balneal spaces—the development of the leisure profile of the Romanian Black-Sea coast during the communist regime. The large scale, state-patroned project is analysed via its material form (architecture, and urban planning), its practices, and its contextual relations—in order to identify its basic heterotopic profile and functioning. Via its leisure profile, the project illustrates a strong multilayered utopian encoding, enhanced through its contemporary evolution. Analysed through the proposed grid of heterotopic coordinates, the coastal network of resorts reveals its heritage potential, threatened by its ongoing processes of disintegration.