Urban Studies, Vol.

39, Nos 5 6, 1003 1017, 2002

Heritage as Knowledge: Capital or Culture?

Brian Graham
[Paper rst received and in nal form, December 2001]

Summary. This paper discusses the relationships between heritage and the knowledge-based city.
Heritage itself is conceptualised as the meanings attached in the present to the past and is
regarded as a knowledge de ned within social, political and cultural contexts. It is admitted,
however, that there is relatively little research in this area and that the role of heritage in the
knowledge economy still has to be adequately articulated. The discussion points to the complex
con icts inherent within heritage due to it being a knowledge that ful ls many different economic
and cultural uses. These are explained through the idea of external and internal cities. Finally,
the paper makes some preliminary connections between heritage, the knowledge-base and the
city, pointing to the importance of heritage in creating the representations of place within which
the knowledge economy remains rmly rooted.

Introduction
This paper discusses the concept of heritage
as a social construction, imagined, de ned
and articulated within cultural and economic
practice. I pursue the argument that heritage
is a knowledge that constitutes both economic and cultural capital, and one that is of
central importance in an age in which ideas
of multiscalar space rather than time constitute the dominant paradigm of analysis in
cultural theory. In the rst instance, the paper
brie y considers the de nition and conceptualisation of heritage, which are rendered
more complex by its medley of material and
intangible forms, and also by the dichotomy
between its public and private modes. Secondly, the discussion then addresses the
economic and cultural uses of heritage and
demonstrates how these are interlinked.
Finally, the argument seeks to locate these
ideas of heritage in the broader context of

post-Fordist capitalism and the knowledgebase of the city.

The knowledge economy has been conceptualised through such now-familiar ideas as
clusters and innovation, networks and entrepreneurship. It is fair to state, however,
that these processes are seen largely as lying
in the economic domain. While there is some
recognition of the role of cultural and creative capital in the knowledge-based city,
debate on the broader questions of how the
knowledge economy is rooted in place have
largely ignored the processes through which
this occurs and the contestation of meaning
that results. It is argued here that heritage is
one such key process and that the virtual
society has not replaced economic and
cultural needs which require that the knowledge economy and its creativity are based
within representations of place that are mani-

Brian Graham is in the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages, University of Ulster, Magee Campus, Londonderr y BT48 7JL, UK. Fax:
1 44 028 7137 5435. E-mail: bj.graham@ulst.ac.uk .
0042-098 0 Print/1360-063 X On-line/02/05/61003-15 2002 The Editors of Urban Studies
DOI: 10.1080/0042098022012842 6

1004

BRIAN GRAHAM

fested on the ground in the form of built

space.
The De nition and Conceptualisation of
Heritage
In emphasising the idea of a heritage that is
both capital and culture, it is not the intention
to follow the concept of cultural capital
elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu (1977). He
posits that a ruling elite, upon assuming
power, must capture the accumulated cultural productivity of society and also the
criteria of taste for the selection and valuation of such products (Ashworth, 1994,
p. 20)if it is to legitimate its exercise of
power. Thus it can be argued that dominant
ideologies create speci c place identities,
which reinforce support for particular state
structures and related political ideologies.
But, clearly, this is too constrained a perspective. Heritage is capable of being interpreted
differently within any one culture at any one
time, as well as between cultures and through
time. Further, while Bourdieus thesis implies that evocations of of cial collective
memory underpin the quintessential modernist constructs of nationalism and legitimacy,
it is also apparent that heritage takes a variety of of cial (state-sponsored) and
unof cial forms, the latter often being subversive of the former.
Thus heritage is seen here as a much more
diverse knowledge in the sense that there are
many heritages, the contents and meanings of
which change through time and across space.
Although even the tawdriest pastiche is
likely to be based in some vestige of historical circumstance, heritage does not engage
directly with the study of the past. Instead, it
is concerned with the ways in which very
selective material artefacts, mythologies,
memories and traditions become resources
for the present. The contents, interpretations
and representations of the resource are selected according to the demands of the present. It follows too that the meanings and
functions of memory and tradition are
de ned in the present, albeit constrained ultimately by the adage that one sells what one

has. Further, heritage is more concerned

with meanings than material artefacts. It is
the former that give value, either cultural or
nancial, to the latter and explain why they
have been selected from the in nity of the
past. In turn, they may later be discarded as
the demands of present societies change, or
evenas is presently occurring in eastern
Europewhen pasts have to be reinvented to
re ect new presents. Thus heritage is as
much about forgetting as remembering the
past.
The idea that heritage is de ned by meanings is rendered even more complex by the
quali cation that these are applied to both
tangible and intangible forms of heritage.
This distinction has been adopted by UNESCO and re ects the frequent criticism that
Western heritage is all too often envisaged as
the built and natural environments. Thus the
list of European and North American World
Heritage Sites is dominated by walled cities,
cathedrals, palaces, transport artefacts and
national parks. Conversely, however, heritage in Africa and Asia is often envisaged
through intangible forms of traditional and
popularor folk culture that include languages, music, dance, rituals, food and folklore. In part, this re ects the ephemeral
nature of the built environment in many societies. Japanese historic buildings, for example, may be quite regularly completely
rebuilt, may incorporate modern materials
and building structures and may even be
moved without seemingly compromising the
perceived authenticity of the site and structure (Fitch, 1995). To reduce the tangible intangible dichotomy in heritage to an
east west or north south division is, however, unduly simplistic. All societies contain
both, even though the balance may vary spatially.
It follows, therefore, that if heritage is the
contemporary use of the past, and if its
meanings are de ned in the present, then we
create the heritage that we require and manage it for a range of purposes de ned by the
needs and demands of our present societies.
Perhaps the easiest way of conceptualising
this interpretation of heritage is through the

HERITAGE AS KNOWLEDGE

idea of representation. Hall (1997) argues

that culture is essentially concerned with the
production and exchange of meaning and
their real, practical effects.
It is by our use of things, and what we say,
think and feel about themhow we represent themthat we give them a meaning
(Hall, 1997, p. 3).
Although he is writing speci cally of language as one of the media through which
meaning is transmitted, heritage can be regarded as an analogous process. Like language, it is one of the mechanisms by which
meaning is produced and reproduced. Hall
proposes a cultural circuit, which can be
extended to include heritage. Meaning is
marked out by identity, and is produced and
exchanged through social interaction in a
variety of media; it is also produced through
consumption. These meanings further regulate and organise our conduct and practices
by helping to set rules, norms and conventions
It is usin society, within human culturewho make things mean, who signify. Meanings, consequently, will always
change, from one culture or period to another (Hall, 1997, p. 61).
But the synonymy between language and
heritage is not precise because the latter also
exists as an economic commodity, which
may overlap, con ict with or even deny its
cultural role. Heritage is therefore a contested concept and quite inevitably so.
Tunbridge and Ashworths thesis of dissonant heritage (1996) represents the most sustained attempt to conceptualise this facet of
heritage and its repercussions. Dissonance is
a condition that refers to the discordance or
lack of agreement and consistency as to the
meaning of heritage. For two sets of reasons,
this appears to be intrinsic to the very nature
of heritage and should not be regarded as an
unforeseen or unfortunate by-product. First,
dissonance is implicit in the market segmentation attending heritage as an economic
commodityessentially comprising tangible
and intangible place products, which are

1005

multi-sold and multi-interpreted by tourist

and domestic consumers alike. That landscapes of tourism consumption are simultaneously other peoples sacred places is one
of the principal causes of heritage contestation on a global scale. Secondly, dissonance
arises because of the zero-sum characteristics
of heritage, all of which belongs to someone
and logically, therefore, not to someone else.
The creation of any heritage actively or potentially disinherits or excludes those who do
not subscribe to, or are not embraced within,
the terms of meaning attending that heritage.
This quality of heritage is exacerbated because it is often implicated in the same zerosum de nitions of power and territoriality
that attend the nation-state and its allegories
of exclusive membership. In this sense, dissonance can be regarded as destructive but,
paradoxically, it is also a condition of the
construction of pluralist, multicultural societies based on inclusiveness and variablesum conceptualisations of power. Whether
through indifference, acceptance of difference or, preferably, mutuality (or parity) of
esteem, dissonance can be turned round in
constructive imaginings of identity that depend on the very lack of consistency embodied in the term.
If heritage is contested along several different axesthe temporal, the spatial, the
cultural economic and the public privateit
also functions at a variety of scales in which
the same objects may assumeor be attributeddifferent meanings (Graham et al.,
2000). The importance of heritage as a concept is linked directly to that of modernist
nationalism and the nation-state and the national scale remains pre-eminent in the
de nition and management of heritage; UNESCO World Heritage Sites, for example,
are nominated by national governments.
Nevertheless, even when heritage is de ned
largely in the national domain, the implementation of policies and their direct
management is likely to be conducted at the
more localised scale of the region or city.
Hence, heritage is part of the wider debate
about the ways in which regions are being
seen as the most vital sites within which to

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BRIAN GRAHAM

convene and capitalise on the ows of knowledge in contemporary globalisation. As

MacLeod (2000, p. 232) argues, networking,
entrepeneurialism, collaboration, interdependence and a shared vision are all vital prerequisites for regional economic regeneration.
Simultaneously, other institutions and agencies are also involved in strategies that can
serve to circulate and capitalise on existing
and other sources of knowledge, heritage
among them. Indeed, it may well be a critical
factor in that heritage creates representations
of places that provide necessary timeenvironments within which more essentially
economic processes of wealth generation and
marketing can be articulated.
It is a key feature of the post-Fordist capitalist society that knowledge is both an input
and an output in economic activities. Castells
(1996) argues that cultural expressions in
what he terms the network society are abstracted from history and geography and become predominantly mediated by electronic
communication networks. These latter, which
allow labour, rms, regions and nations to
produce, circulate and apply knowledge, are
fundamental to economic growth and competitiveness. Castells sees a world working in
seconds, while the where questionssuch
as sustainabilityare in long-term, glacial
time. Power, which is diffused in global networks,
lies in the codes of information and in the
images of representation around which societies organise their institutions, and people build better lives, and decode their
behaviour. The sites of this power are
peoples minds (Castells, 1997, p. 359).
Heritage is one fundamental element in the
shaping of these power networks and in elaborating this identi able but diffused concept
of power. It is a medium of communication,
a means of transmission of ideas and values
and a knowledge that includes the material,
the intangible and the virtual. Even, arguably,
heritage professionals constitute, as Castells
would have it, one of the global networks that
produce and distribute cultural codes. But at
the core of these ideas lies the key assertion

that the global network has diminished place.

Certainly Castells (1998, p. 357) admits to the
re-emergence of local and regional government as being better placed to adapt to the
endless variation of global ows but this also
points to heritage being a knowledge that is
rooted in place and region. Its narratives may
communicate the local to the global networkfor example, through the representations of international tourism and marketing
imagerybut, critically, they are often far
more intensely consumed as inner-directed or
internalised, localised mnemonic structures.
The rise of the network society does not
necessarily lead to the demise of place; rather,
it points to a rede nition of place at the scale
of the local and the regional. Knowledgebased cities are like regions in that they can
only be thought of satisfactorily if placed in
historical context (Agnew, 2000, p. 106).
The Uses of Heritage
To reiterate, heritage is that part of the past
which we select in the present for contemporary purposes, whether they be economic or
cultural (including political and social factors). The worth attributed to these artefacts
rests less in their intrinsic merit than in a
complex array of contemporary values, demands and even moralities. Thus, heritage
can be visualised as a resource but simultaneously, several times so. Clearly, it is an
economic resource; one exploited everywhere
as a primary component of strategies to promote tourism, economic development and
rural and urban regeneration. But heritage is
also a knowledge, a cultural product and a
political resource and thus possesses a crucial
socio-political function. Thus heritage is
accompanied by a complex and oftencon icting array of identi cations and potential con icts, not least when heritage places
and objects are involved in issues of legitimisation of power structures.
The Economic Uses of Heritage
As Sack (1992) states, heritage places are
places of consumption and are arranged and

HERITAGE AS KNOWLEDGE

managed to encourage consumption; such

consumption can create places, but is also
place-altering. Landscapes of consumption tend to consume their own contexts,
not least because of the homogenising effect
on places and cultures of tourism (Sack,
1992, pp. 158 159). Moreover, preservation
and restoration freeze artefacts in time,
whereas previously they had been constantly
changing. Heritageboth tangible and intangibleis the most important single resource
for international tourism. Although the market is highly segmented and different types
of tourist will consume heritage at different
levels, that consumption is generally super cial for culture is rapidly consumed.
Tourism is an industry with substantial externalities in that its costs are visited upon those
who are not involved in tourism consumption. The same also applies to the transport
industries upon which tourism depends. Thus
tourism is largely parasitic upon culture, to
which it may contribute nothing. If taken to
the extreme, the economic commodi cation
of the past will so trivialise it that, arguably,
it can result in the destruction of the heritage
resource which is its raison detre. Thus,
major urban European heritage sites such as
the medieval cities of Carcassonne or Bruges
(their present appearance largely attributable
to 19th-century restoration) may be regarded
simultaneously as either successful and
pro table providers of satisfying heritage experiences, or little more than stage-sets for
mock medieval displays and tawdry souvenir
shops that demonstrate the primacy of economic exchange.
Tourism producers operate in both the
public and private sectors. They may be development agencies charged with regional or
urban regeneration and employment creation,
or they can be private-sector rms concerned
entirely with their own pro t margins.
Whichever, tourism producers impose what
may well be relatively unconstrained costs
on heritage resources. In turn, the relationship between costs and bene ts is very indirect. It may well be that the capital from
tourism ows back to heritage resources only
indirectly (if at all). It follows, therefore, that

1007

heritage tourism planning and management

has enthusiastically embraced the idea of
sustainable development. If heritage is regarded as a resource, sustainability in this
context has three basic conditions. First, the
rates of use of renewable heritage resources
must not exceed their rates of generation: in
one sense, all heritage resources are renewable because they can be continuously
reinterpreted. Their physical fabric, however,
is a nite resource, one factor promoting the
immense widening of what might be called
the heritage portfolio. Secondly, the rates of
use of non-renewable physical heritage resources should not exceed the rate at which
sustainable renewable substitutes are developed (for example, the substitution of irreplaceable sites or artefacts with replicas).
Finally, the rates of pollution emission associated with heritage tourism should not exceed the assimilative capacity of the
environment. Heritage management is thus
implicated in the belated recognition that the
growth in personal mobility in the Western
world cannot be sustained inde nitely. One
outcome is the move towards virtual consumption of heritage, which can apply to
both its tangible and intangible forms.
The Cultural Uses of Heritage
Heritage is simultaneously knowledge, a cultural product and a political resource. In Livingstones terms (1992), the nature of such
knowledges is always negotiated, set as it is
within speci c social and intellectual circumstances. Thus, key questions include why a
particular interpretation of heritage is promoted, whose interests are advanced or retarded, and in what kind of milieu was it
conceived and communicated? If heritage
knowledge is situated in particular social and
intellectual circumstances, it is time-speci c
and thus its meaning(s) can be altered as
texts are re-read in changing times, circumstances and constructs of place and scale.
Consequently, it is inevitable that such
knowledges are also elds of contestation.
As Lowenthal (1985, 1996) has argued,
this suggests that the past in general, and its

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BRIAN GRAHAM

interpretation as history or heritage in particular, confers social bene ts as well as

costs. He notes four traits of the past (which
can be taken as synonymous with heritage in
this respect) as helping to make it bene cial
to a people. First, its antiquity conveys the
respect and status of antecedence but, more
important perhaps, underpins the idea of continuity and its essentially modernist ethos of
progressive, evolutionary social development. Secondly, societies create emblematic
landscapesoften urbanin which certain
artefacts acquire cultural status because they
ful l the need to connect the present to the
past in an unbroken trajectory. Thirdly, the
past provides a sense of termination in the
sense that what happened in it has ended,
while, nally, it offers a sequence, allowing
us to locate our lives in linear narratives that
connect past, present and future.
Although Lowenthals analysis is couched
largely in cultural terms and pays little attention to the past as an economic resource, it is
helpful in identifying the culturalor more
speci callysocio-political functions and
uses of heritage. Building on these traits
which can help to make the past bene cial to
people, Lowenthal sees it as providing familiarity and guidance, enrichment and escapebut also, and more potently, validation
or legitimation. This latter trait is particularly
associated with identity in which language,
religion, ethnicity, nationalism and shared
interpretations of the past are used to construct narratives of inclusion and exclusion
that de ne communities and the ways in
which they are rendered speci c and differentiated (Donald and Rattansi, 1992; Guibernau, 1996). Central to the concept of identity
is the Saidian discourse of the other,
groupsboth internal and external to a
statewith competingand often con ictingbeliefs, values and aspirations. These
attributes of otherness are fundamental to
representations of identity, which are constructed in counter-distinction to them.
The past validates the present by conveying an idea of unbroken narratives that embody what are perceived as timeless values.
Thus, for example, there are archetypal na-

tional landscapes, both urban and rural,

which draw heavily on geographical imagery, memory and myth. Continuously being
transformed, these encapsulate distinct home
places of imagined communities (Anderson, 1991), comprising people who are
bound by culturaland more explicitly
political networks, all set within a territorial
framework that is de ned through whichever
traditions are currently acceptable, as much
as by its geographical boundary. Although
many contemporary regions lack this sense
of a xed entity set in history and time, it is
apparent that some are evolving as culturally
de ned bounded spaces in which the regionstate aspires to emulate the national state.
Both may depend on traditions and narratives
that are invented and imposed on space, their
legitimacy couched in terms of their relationship to particular representations of the past.
In these constructs, the cityparticularly the
national or regional capitalbecomes a landscape that embodies what is de ned as public
memory marked by its morphology (the ceremonial axis, the victory arch), monuments,
statuary and street names. This urban landscape, in turn, becomes the stage-set for national and regional spectacle, parades and
performances.
Implicit within such ideas is the sense of
belonging to place that is fundamental to
identity. Lowenthal sees the past as being
integral both to individual and communal
representations of identity and its connotations of providing human existence with
meaning, purpose and value. Such is the
importance of this process that a people cut
off from their past through migration or even
by its destructiondeliberate or accidental
in war, often rebuild it, or even recreate
what could or should have been there but
never actually was. European cities, for instance, contain numerous examples of
painstakingly reconstructed buildings that replace earlier urban fabric destroyed in World
War II. In the Polish city of Gdansk (formerly Prussian Danzig), for example, the
Gothic/Baroque city centre, largely destroyed
in World War II, has been reconstructed, not
least to link the heritage patrimony of the

HERITAGE AS KNOWLEDGE

post-war Polish state to the medieval era

before the city became part of the Hanseatic
League (Tunbridge, 1998).
Inevitably, therefore, the past as rendered
through heritage also promotes the burdens
of history, the atrocities, errors and crimes of
the past which are called upon to legitimate
the atrocities of the present. Lowenthal
(1985) comments that the past can be a burden in the sense that it often involves a
dispiriting and negative rejection of the present. Thus the past can constrain the present,
one of the persistent themes of the heritage
debate being the role of the degenerative
representations of nostalgic pastiche, and
their intimations of a bucolic and somehow
better past, that so often characterise the
commercial heritage industry.
Heritage and the External City
This raft of economic and cultural uses, and
the cultural industries and agencies that service them, help to de ne urban heritage capital and the images through which places are
marketed in economic and cultural terms. As
Ashworth (1998, p. 277) contends, the
dif culty lies not in accepting that the conserved urban landscape is communicating
messages about place identity, but in determining which identities [and place products]
are being shaped by which messages.
There is rst an external city in which
heritage can be linked to innovation and
tourism as one factor promoting the international performance of a city (Simmie,
2001). Super cially, at least, a city can be
encapsulated in one or two signature buildings or landmarksSydney with its Harbour
Bridge and Opera House; the Guggenheim
Museum in Bilbaobut, more widely, urban
conservation has always been motivated by
the desire to enhance distinctive identity at
the local scale and to distinguish one place
from another. As Ashworth (1998) argues,
however, the more conservation is practised,
the less locally distinctive identity is likely to
become. Widespread attempts to emulate San
Franciscos Fishermans Wharf mean that
heritage waterfronts, for example, have be-

1009

come a global cliche as restaurants, craft

shops and leisure spaces replace working
harbours. If the model is successful in San
Francisco, then why not in Halifax, Nova
Scotia, Wellington, New Zealand, Singapore
or Cape Town, South Africa?
In terms of the functions of heritage to the
external city, this standardisation and the loss
of distinctiveness that it implies, undermines
the marketing images being portrayed
through the medium of urban heritage. These
still function to establish the singularity of a
place and to mark its advantages over other
placesnot only as a centre of innovation,
but also as a vibrant and attractive living
urban environment. Some form of conserved
historic urban core which embodies culture
and acts as the milieu for predictable urban
activities such as restaurants and specialist
retailing, is a sine qua non in achieving that
latter aim. At worst, if there is no identi able
or acceptable historic core, one may even be
constructed. This does not necessarily have
to take a material form because it can be
based on intangible heritage that often
de nes both meaning and even the physical
form of cities. Logan (2000, p. 261) points to
the Ancient Quarter of the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, where the key elements are pagodas, temples and communal buildings that
have a symbolic value linked to the intangible heritage of myths and legends, rather
than a value based on the authenticity of
their physical fabric.
The external city is also a function of the
role of the heritage city as tourism capital.
Ashworth and Tunbridge (1990; 2000) developed the concept of the tourist-historic city in
which separate commercial and historic cores
evolve over time, the latter being the valued
and conserved parts of the original city. The
extent to which this occurs will re ect a
combination of the scale and condition of the
architecture and design, the pressures for redevelopment on the area, and the effectiveness of the local conservation lobby. The
demarcation of the historic core is also related to urban functions. Some activities will
experience pressures to migrate out of the
heritage area, while others will be attracted

1010

BRIAN GRAHAM

to it. Conservation designations and policies

will impose costs upon occupiers of preserved buildings and conserved areas through
higher maintenance costs, restrictions on the
use and adaptation of buildings, or constraints on some forms of accessibility. Alternatively, conserved areas or buildings offer
increased bene ts to users through their enhanced historicity and the physical presence
of people who are attracted to them. Simply,
some activities can pro t from the historic
city, despite the extra costs, while others
cannot. The result, with or without deliberate
planning policies, is likely to be a partial
physical separation of the heritage city and
the central commercial city. This model was
derived mainly from the experience of European cities in which the preservation of
forms usually led to the out-migration of
functions. In North America, the sequence of
events has frequently been reversed in that it
was typically the abandonment of areas by
commercial and residential functions which
has led to the creation of zones of discard
subsequently being conserved through either
public or private initiatives (Graham et al.,
2000).
There are numerous variations of this general model re ecting local circumstance and
cultural experiences. The North American
variant of the tourist-historic city has much
in common with the Europeanif only
through the similarity and interactivity of
their market economies, conservation
philosophies and even tourism industries.
There are, however, obvious differences in
the quantity and antiquity of urban historic
resources. The locations of many tourism
facilities tend to be more widely distributed
than in western European cities, partly as a
consequence of the early development of
private transport, and it is thus more dif cult
to de ne the heritage city in narrowly innercity terms. For example, Ford (1994) has
identi ed both the existence of an old town
close to the traditional CBD corevery
similar to the European-derived heritage
cityand also many urban villages with
heritage components, revitalised heritage
waterfronts and festival market redevelop-

ments. One outstanding example is the urban

region extending around Boston, Massachusetts.
Elsewhere, former colonial citiesincluding Hanoi (Logan, 2000), Hong Kong and
Nairobioften display a dualistic colonial
indigenous urban structure; this complicates
their heritage presentation and commodi cation, particularly given the creation
of national identity in post-colonial societies
for functional reasons of political and cultural cohesion. This, for example, is one
potent factor protecting Hanois Royal
Citadel, while, conversely, the former French
Quarter is less well safeguarded from contemporary capitalist development. A variant
of the tourist-historic city model, developed
in the context of Fremantle, Western Australia (Shaw et al., 1997), also appears applicable to other former British imperial cities
located around the Indian Ocean littoral. This
involves the transformation of declined colonial ports through a sequence of decay
restoration pastiche, in which the nal stage
represents the complete commodi cation of
heritage for tourism consumption.
The precise form of the tourist-historic
city thus re ects contingent local circumstance and the vagaries of historical circumstance from which the heritage resources are
created. In terms of contestation, this can
lead to both benign and malign outcomes, as
is demonstrated by the variants of the touristhistoric city found in Iberia and North
Africa, which re ect Islamic precepts and are
very different from the monumental Western
city. The Islamic city has a morphology
dominated by a dense con guration of contiguous enclosures in which buildings that
lack any external architectural detailing face
inwards to central courtyards. They are separated by a maze of alleyways which open off
marginally wider through-routes lined by the
small individual shops of the suqs, the citys
markets (Morris, 1994). In the Andalucian
city of Granada, dominated by its Alhambra
Palace, the old Moorish Albaic n quarter,
with its low, courtyard houses and formless
alleys, now provides a picturesque alternative to the rather grim rectilinear morphology

HERITAGE AS KNOWLEDGE

of the 16th- and 17th-century Spanish

Renaissance town located around the cathedral. This can be consumed without
marked dissonance, not least because it entirely lacks any monumental focus. The contrast with the Moroccan medina city of Fe`s
El Bali is marked. Dominated by an incoherent maze of alleys and straggling throughroutes, the citys plan lacks the discernible
patterning and morphological aggrandisement of its European contemporaries. In this
context, the tourist-historic city is indistinguishable from the city as a whole. Dissonance is overt as Western tourists, pressing
sprigs of mint to their offended nostrils, gape
at men who are thigh-deep in vats of luridly
coloured liquid as they dye hides in the citys
tanneries.
Heritage and the Internal City
Beyond the external city, however, but obviously overlapping with it, is the internal city
of the mind that re ects the cultural dimension to heritage. This is much more an innerdirected mnemonic city; one that is
concerned with social inclusion and exclusion, lifestyle, diversity and multiculturalism. It is a place of complex, overlapping
and ambiguous messages, not least because
most European cities, for instance, were
plurally encoded by socially pluralist societies and are now also decoded pluralistically (Ashworth, 1998, p. 269). Much of the
iconography is not decoded at allless because it is intelligible, but more because of
its irrelevance to contemporary multicultural
urban societies. The conceptualisation of
multicultural heritage remains an outstanding
research problem, although it is clearly a
medium for the transmission of pluralist
messagesdistinct, for example, from the
hegemonic dominance of one-dimensional
nationalism.
The evidence for diverse and hybrid representations of the city is, however, less than
convincingone reason why of cial narratives are often subverted by unof cial spectacles, parades and the like that embrace the
heritage narratives of other peripheralised

1011

groups. Because of the enduring importance

of the national, central cities still tend to
embody and represent the iconography of the
relevant nationalist ideology while the heritage of minority groups is con ned to their
generally segregated residential areas. Multiculturalism is more likely to refer to a mosaic
of many peoples, cultures and heritages than
to a melting-pot or integration. In the name
of hybridity and cosmopolitanism, it may
deny the hegemony of previously privileged
perspectives and recognise previously marginalised identities. Migration is crucial to
this process and to the creation of diasporic
identities, which help to undermine the imagined coherence of the nation-state.
That this is so re ects the enduring importance of nationalism and also the commonplace resistance to multiculturalism. In
positing the decline of space and the fragmentation of identity in the network society,
post-structuralist theorists have underestimated the enduring nature of attachment to
place as the living environment in which
people ground their everyday lives and
through which they express aspirations and
feelings about themselves. In the real world,
political agency is constituted, not in ux
and displacement but in given historical locations, by having a coherent sense of place,
of belonging, of some stable commitment to
ones class or gender or nation (Ahmad,
1995, pp. 14 and 16). Although the other
may be external and remote, it is all too often
internal and expressed through racism, ethnocentrism and sectarianism. Thus, a sense
of hybridity may fail to move beyond the
ephemeral and contingentfood fashions,
for examplethat merely mask long-term
social and political continuities. Consequently, multiculturalism in societies at
largebut particularly in cities, where it is
likely to be most apparentis not necessarily progressive and is, moreover, commonly articulated within the national context.
Cultural hybridity has limits and anti-hybridity discourses continue to stress cultural
boundedness: rather than being open and
subject to fusion, identities seem to resist
hybridisation (Werbener, 1997, p. 3). Fur-

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BRIAN GRAHAM

thermore, if the forsaking of modernism,

which generates a return to roots, leads to a
strengthening of countervailing subnational
and ethnic identities (Friedman, 1997,
p. 72), multiculturalism can be held to represent an abandonment of modernist ideas of
assimilation. The outcome of hybridisation
may actually be greater con ict and dissonance in cities as identities resist hybridisation that is seen as a threat to their
continued existence.
Because of the complexity of these processes and the ways in which they vary
spatially, it is dif cult to generalise about
urban heritage in multicultural societies.
Clearly, the national can remain pervasive
as in Boston, where the Freedom Trail connects the sites associated with the
revolutionary war against the British, or as
expressed through the omnipresent memorials to the Great War in Australian and New
Zealand cities. The urban morphology of
Canberra, for example, is dominated by the
axis that links the federal Parliament Building to the Australian National War Memorial, a mall that is lined by monuments
recording the campaign honours of Australian armed forces from Gallipoli to Vietnam. The central cores of European cities
remain dominated by the heritage of
nationalism and empire while that of immigrant groups is largely con ned to poorer,
often peripheral estates and banlieus. It is
arguably the case, however, that monumental
city centres are read in so many diverse ways
as part of the external and internal city that
the power of the national is diminished to
little more than a backdrop. The centre therefore becomes not contested space, but a common ground in which many social groups
feel relatively unthreatened. Nevertheless,
there are obvious limits to such ideas, not
least the exclusion from capitalist consumption through poverty of many immigrant
groups in Western society.
The inculcation of multiculturalism into
the urban landscape is also often a calculated
and planned process as societies seek to
reposition themselves and cope with changing social realities. Interestingly, too, in view

of the post-structuralist diminishing of the

meaning of place, these processes are often
conscious reinsertions of ethnic places previously eradicated by planning. This suggests
that a sense of place and an appropriate
urban heritage landscape may be necessary
for social stability. In Singapore, for example, the success of the city-state in creating a
new post-colonial identity through authoritarian state-directed mechanisms was compromised by cultural resentment and tourist
perceptions of boredom and blandness.
Consequently, the urban landscape is now
replete with a confusion of deliberately injected, but ultimately disorientating, heritage
associations and markers that re ect the
states multiple culturesChinese, Malay,
Indian and British. As Powell (1997) argues,
in these circumstances, heritage planning becomes an ideological tool.
While the experience of Singapore points
to a belated recognition by the state of the
importance of tangible heritage, other examples show that unof cial provision of heritage will occur if the state fails to provide or
if its messages are inadequate. People will
impose their identity on, and thus their claim
to, urban space through marching, spectacles,
carnivals, the erection of unof cial monuments and the creation of visual representations such as wall murals. Urban space in
parts of Belfast, for example, is dominated
by unof cial and often overtly violent visual
heritage sponsored by paramilitary groups
and which is markedly dissonant with of cial
images of normalisation promoted by the
Northern Ireland Tourist Board. Interestingly, it is this unof cial heritage of wall
murals and memorials to the dead soldiers
of republicanism and loyalism that seems
more successful in tourism consumption
presumably because it provides some vicarious thrill and conforms to a stereotypical
imagery of place.
Heritage and the Knowledge-based City
Both of cial and unof cial forms of heritage
can be seen as knowledges that shape the
external and internal cities, which are then

HERITAGE AS KNOWLEDGE

multiply consumed and sold as economic and

cultural capital. It is this plethora of roles,
forms and uses that makes heritage such a
ubiquitous but simultaneously ambiguous
form of knowledge in the city. It is also the
factor that conceals its importance to innovation clusters and to the measurement of
innovation in cities and perhaps explains
why heritagea serious and profound topic
in these circumstancesis often reduced to
little more than an adjunct to urban tourism
and place marketing. The potential for contestation and con ict endemic in the duality
of urban heritage as economic and cultural
capital provides a classic example of dissonance. This occurs along many axes but is
rarely overtly acknowledgedor even recognisedin urban development, promotion and
planning. This is partly attributable to the
multiplicity of agencies involved in the urban
knowledge-base, and also represents a failure
to recognise that representations of place and
the narratives of the past are more important
than simply pastiche packaging. The external
and internal cities may coincide but, for
many urban-dwellers, the knowledge-based
city is remote, while attempts to promote it
may simply underline their sense of exclusion from the place images being promoted by public- and private-sector agencies.
Heritage is not ubiquitously a source of dissonance, but it is all too often the case that
there is an inherent and very powerful tension between the economic exploitation of an
urban heritage and its social and political
uses. In theoretical terms, this points to the
central inadequacy of the argument that the
network society can be abstracted from history and geography and predominantly mediated through electronic communication
networks. Any one individual occupies the
network society only as one expression of
her or his much more complex demands for
material reward, cultural identity and political needs. Many of those demands are set in
both material and imagined placepersonal,
symbolic and as locations of consumption
mediated through personal experience and
values.
Heritage is all too often marginalised in

1013

the discussion of the knowledge-based city,

partly because it is seen as a cultural factor in
an economic domain. Also, the tourism imperative is so powerful an economic commodity that it generally overrides the cultural
dimension to heritage and obscures the importance of the internal city. In part, this can
be addressed at the level of practical urban
management. As urban space is obviously
nite, the most obvious problem is the actual
physical land-use con ict between different
users of the space upon which historical sites
and monuments are located. Often, these
con icts can be solved through the exercise
of planning controls and management policies, which often involve more balanced exploitation of heritage resources within the
space available because heritage placeproducts are not necessarily in xed supply
(Ashworth and Tunbridge, 1990; 2000). A
peculiarity of heritage consumption is that
many different consumers can consume the
same product simultaneously or sequentially
without necessarily reducing the quality of
the experience. Good place management can
increase capacities, while the extreme selectivity of heritage users in space and time
generally allows much room for expansion.
In Venice, for example, most tourists consume a small area around the Piazza San
Marco and the circuit from Piazza Roma
over the Accademia and Rialto bridges. Expanding the product-range in time or space is
thus an option; for example, the huge former
naval Arsenale could be appropriated as a
major heritage tourism resource (Graham et
al., 2000).
At another level, however, this same quality of multiple consumption raises serious
problems. Heritage is a highly competitive
market characterised by oversupply but also
by very distinct consumption patterns which
mean that many if not most sites suffer from
underconsumption, relative to capital investment. Conversely, some sites experience
such heavy visitor numbers that the actual
physical fabric of the tangible heritage is
itself under threat. Further, there is no
ef cient pricing system for urban heritage in
that many resources are unpriced so that the

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BRIAN GRAHAM

negative externalities incurred by the resource and imposed on its wider environment
are not re ected in charges to heritage users.
All these arguments support the view that the
location of the resources largely outside the
production accounting system leads to serious imbalances in costs and bene ts, with the
former being born mostly by heritage resources and the latter accruing to heritage
products. The problem remains, however,
that is very dif cult to internalise the externalities incurred by heritage tourism and to
ensure that costs are borne by the users.
Nevertheless, heritage is a vital factor in the
urban economyalthough there is surprisingly little evidence as to precisely how important it is. In general terms, the most
successful heritage cities are those of
suf cient size to offer numerous amenities,
including heritage, but not dominated by it.
Over and beyond its role in tourism, heritage
ful ls three important marketing roles in the
branding of the knowledge-based city: these
are: cachet, animation, and externalities
(Graham et al., 2000).
Cachet, which depends on the assumption that historicity and urban design are
critical components of place identity, is an
all-pervasive factor but one that is dif cult to
isolate or quantify. Heritage buildings, locations and associations, together with the
products, events and experiences produced
from these, bring an aura of respectability,
continuity and artistic patronage to a city.
The intense competition to join the list of
European Capitals of Culture provides one
example. Externally, the heritage elements
provide a stage or background for other
pro t-seeking enterprises, while also facilitating the success of these undertakings. Signature restorations or buildings, or even
urban landscapes, symbolise a city in the
imagination of external investorsone vital
reason for the focal position of heritage in so
much urban marketing. The restored Faneuil
Hall Marketplace, centrepiece of the Boston
Waterfront, Dublins Temple Bar, or Bilbaos Guggenheim Museum, were not
necessarily economic or even social investments, if measured by the balance between

building and/or restoration costs, current returns and negative externalities. Still, their
value to the wider economies of their respective cities is incalculable. Internally, they
may contribute psychic stability and aesthetic
satisfactions to the individual citizen and
provide cohesion and sense of well-being for
the communities in which they are located.
Conversely, they may be a further source of
dissonanceas in Dublin, where Temple Bar
has gained a well-earned reputation for various forms of anti-social behaviour, not least
on the part of tourists attracted by the very
success of the areas heritage-based development.
Secondly, heritage can also contribute
animation to the city. It attracts visitors to
the city who combine with the local population to introduce a liveliness that becomes
spectacle in itself. As we have seen, heritage
areas of cities include a fairly familiar range
of functions, most notably restaurants, bars,
street cafes, specialist retailing such as antiques and craft shops, and some commercial
and service sector uses that derive prestige
from historicity. All these activities contribute to the sense of public theatre as consumers act as both performers and audience
in public space.
Finally, heritage facilities, perhaps not
economically viable in themselves, are often
included in multifunctional urban projects
because of a whole range of externalities,
which they contribute to developments and
districts. The actual value-added potential of
heritage and the arts to urban and economic
development remains largely unresearched
and the economic value of these externalities
may well be relatively weak (Lewis, 1990).
Public art, for example, can be little more
than a visible symbol of reassurance to locals
and investors that something is being done
about public spaces in degraded areas. At
worst, it may seem irrelevant or irritating to
local residents who see these spaces being
colonised by an external cultural elite when
other dimensions to urban investment seem
more pressing (Miles, 1997).
Any one of these processes of cachet, animation and externalities therefore contains

HERITAGE AS KNOWLEDGE

the potential for heritage dissonance, a problem accentuated by a lack of research on the
importance of heritage beyond the construction of pastiche living environments. A recent report by English Heritage, The Power
of Place (2000), points out that, while the
historic environment is the context in which
new development occurs and thus a powerful
generator of wealth and prosperity, it is also
a very positive factor in the value of life and
lifestyle of urban residents. The problem is,
as the report admits, that it is dif cult to
quantify these claims and therefore decisions
about the historic environment rely largely
upon value judgements. There is also a
dearth of integrated research which integrates
the economic and cultural dimensions to
heritage knowledges and which addresses the
differing demands of the external and internal cities.
This means that heritage provision in the
knowledge-based city is driven not by detailed research on the needs, demands and
consumption patterns of the internal and external cities, but often by the availability of
grants and others forms of public and private
nance (including the Heritage Lottery Fund
in the UK) for capital expenditure. Crucially,
however, such funding is rarely available for
recurrent expenditurea problem exacerbated by the often unduly optimistic predictions of visitor numbers that occur in
feasibility studies. Indeed, the nancial wellbeing of the heritage sector is bedevilled by
shortfalls between predicted and actual visitor numbers. Civic rivalry is also a potent
process in heritage provision and one that
often leads to nancially unsustainable developments. Heritage investment is further
frequently justi ed by its importance to education. This, however, is a value judgement
in that there is almost no research on the
effectiveness of heritage in this regard beyond its positive impact on visitor numbers
to particular sites. (It is often the case that
schoolchildren constitute 50 per cent of all
visitors.)
The importance of value judgement in
heritage provision also stems from the almost
complete lack of research on the importance

1015

of the internal city. One major exception is

Ennens (1999) study of the two Dutch cities
of Leeuwarden and Alkmaar, both of which
have substantial historic environments that
are carefully integrated into other urban planning and management schemes. This study
concluded that less than 20 per cent of the
respective urban populations actively consume and support heritagethe connoisseurseven though most urban-dwellers
have positive responses to heritage and the
historicity of living in monuments. This is
replicated by English Heritages study in
which 98 per cent of respondents believed
the historical environment to be a vital educational asset, while 87 per cent thought that
its preservation should include public funding. However, Ennens conclusion that the
largest group of urban-dwellers were take-itor-leavers with respect to heritage suggests
thatbeyond such broad aspirational attitudesan actual engagement with the urban
historic environment is very much the preserve of a minority. Ennen concludes that
there are fragments of meaning and fragments of consumption and that urban heritage as an instrument of urban policy is
useful only when there is adequate research
into the meaning which urban heritage has
for its users.
Conclusion
Much of what has been said here about heritage and the knowledge-based city stems
from other conceptual contextsthe touristhistoric city, the more general uses of heritageand this re ects the absence of
research speci c to the relationships between
heritage and the knowledge-based economy.
It is clear that heritage as a knowledge constitutes both economic and cultural capital. It
is also apparent that heritage has multiple
uses and interpretations which immensely
complicate any assessment of its role. Dissonance is intrinsic and because it re ects on a
peoples sense of themselves, not something
to be taken lightly, particularly in the super cial tourism packaging of places. While
the external city is a valuable economic

1016

BRIAN GRAHAM

resource, the internal city is that in which

people ground their everyday lives.
Contrary to the arguments advanced by
many theorists, the knowledge-based economy is still set in representations of place
that are largely de ned by what has been
de ned and discussed here as heritage. Theory has often confused spatial location and
place as an arena of meaning. We have to
remember that these are not necessarily
bounded placesalthough they can bebut
hybrid places, occupied by overlapping and
fragmented identities and social groups and
consumed economically by multiple markets.
The regions and their cities that are emerging
as the powerhouses of the global economy
visualise themselves in cultural as well as
economic terms. Although they are rarely
regions in the political and institutional sense
(Agnew, 2000), we must be open to the sense
that their reality is encapsulated in narratives
of time, place and the multiple cultures that
occupy them. If this internal region and city
are ignored or denied, then the promotion of
the knowledge-base of the external city is
compromised. Heritage is an elusive, ambiguous and hybrid knowledge that roots the
elements of the knowledge economy in
place. As such, it is also one of those elements.
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