Читать книгу Enrichment - Luc Boltanski - Страница 20

In addition to interest in exceptional items, a second factor in the creation of wealth is currently growing in importance. This factor is linked to various processes that can be called processes of heritage creation.⁴¹ While they affect real estate in particular, they can also be extended to other types of goods. Examples can be found in apartments situated in the historical center of a large city, in residences located close to monuments or sites viewed as exceptional (“the loveliest villages in France”), or in housing near zones categorized as “parks” that have been subjected to “protective” measures after an administrative process of selection. Such measures typically require that they be maintained “as before” – often after the location in question has been subjected to an attempt to reconstitute a more or less fictional past. This process has a significant economic impact, since wherever it occurs it leads to major price increases in the associated lands and property, and it has important repercussions for tourism as well. For example, in the historic districts of major cities one now finds real-estate agencies advertising themselves as specialists in “collectable properties.”

A concomitant phenomenon is what might be called made-to-order heritage creation. The patrimonial effect is triggered in this case when new establishments such as museums or cultural centers are created in a given locale or when local events (festivals, commemorations, and so on) are inaugurated. In addition, there are many cases in which some part of the built environment previously deemed lacking in interest and destined to be razed – often a former site of industrial production – is rehabilitated in view of housing artistic or cultural activities that are apt to give rise to “events” or “happenings.” Heritage creation, whether made to order or not, can be achieved without regard to the venerability of the site or the building; indeed, these may have been entirely reconstructed, reconfigured, or even newly created, for heritage creation is based primarily on a narrative that inscribes a place within a genealogy.

One example of direct heritage creation, now classic and widely imitated, is that of Bilbao, an industrial city in decline whose luster has been restored by the addition of a Guggenheim museum designed by Frank Gehry. This operation was part of a broader project undertaken in the late 1980s at the initiative of the Guggenheim board in New York: its aim was to set up a “global museum” housed at various sites, chiefly in order to extend and diversify the existing exhibit spaces, which the acquisition of new collections had rendered inadequate. The plan included the establishment of a vast museum devoted to conceptual and minimalist art in North Adams, a small Massachusetts industrial town in decline. But that project ran up against the tension between the local authorities’ insistence on highlighting local identity and honoring the workers in the former factory and the Guggenheim’s wish to promote worldwide art.⁴² Many similar cases can be found in France: for example, the efforts made by the authorities in Nantes to enhance the image of the city by reorienting its activities toward art and culture. Among other measures, the former site of the LU cookie factory has been transformed into a national theater, the Lieu Unique (Unique Place); an “artistic itinerary” has been set up along the Loire estuary, including a series of “installations” created by well-known artists; “events” such as exhibits or festivals have proliferated; and the establishment of luxury shops has been encouraged.⁴³ An example resembling that of Bilbao even more closely is the Luma Foundation in Arles, which called upon the same famous architect, Frank Gehry, to build a museum on the site of former train repair workshops (closed in 1984) for the purpose of developing increased tourism.

In more general terms, heritage creation has become a technique of “territorial development,” with its experts in “local development strategies” who know how to “reveal” the “territorial agents” and to highlight their hidden “potential.” The instrument of choice is “relaunching,” which transforms a dormant legacy into an active heritage by stimulating the capacity of the actors to “appropriate history for themselves, even if that means transforming it.” The case of chestnuts in the Cévennes, once associated with poverty, is a good example: producers have taken steps to orient their product toward gastronomy and to protect the crop legally by a Protected Designation of Origin (Appellation d’origine contrôlée). These “heirs of history” use history with the goal of adding value to the goods and services they provide, so as to “specify” and to “differentiate products and services with respect to their competitors.” This systematic exploitation of the past via “relaunching” is what French experts call “patrimonial innovation.”⁴⁴ This form of innovation often relies, as we have seen in the case of vineyards, on the reactivation of an ancestral figure whose ties with the site being highlighted may be more or less tenuous; the choice of a central figure and the way he or she is (re)invented play a major role in the success of the business, as Stéphane Gerson has shown in the case of Salon-de-Provence. This small city, a residential suburb of the industrial zone of Fos-sur-Mer, had little to attract tourists; owing to the decline of the petrochemical industry, it sought to give itself new luster, starting around 1975, by reactivating the only historical figure associated with its past: Nostradamus. The effort ultimately failed, quite probably because the local “great man”⁴⁵ has never been the glorified subject – whether hero or villain – of a work of art or fiction that could have attracted interest – unlike Count Dracula, for example, whose presumed castle in the Carpathian Mountains draws visitors thanks to Bram Stoker’s novel and its numerous televised and film versions (such as Roman Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires).

The processes of heritage creation have affected not only ancient cities and buildings deemed historical, moreover, but also rural areas, especially those in which the passage from an economy of agricultural production toward a residential economy has been most pronounced and most advanced.⁴⁶ These processes have involved villages, sites, and even entire regions. In these cases, things from the past, often falling into ruin, are – on the same basis as collectable objects – selected, rehabilitated, and associated with historical narratives designed to orient their interpretation and enhance their value. In contrast, unlike mobile objects, these entities cannot be moved; thus associating them with other entities and inserting them in a series can be achieved only at a distance, by getting them added – often with the support of a public organization – to a list modeled on UNESCO’s repertory of worldwide heritage sites.⁴⁷ By means of such lists, these entities can be represented as equivalent or in a hierarchical relation to one another (for example through attribution of Michelin-type stars). The listings, which are reversible, are generally associated with commitments – especially financial – on the part of the local authorities responsible for preserving the entities in question. This type of heritage creation has given new life to regions – in France, especially mountainous ones – threatened with depopulation beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, owing to the industrialization of European agriculture that had marked the postwar decades and the resultant decline in small family farms. Such rural regions were in a position to benefit from a sort of aesthetic heritage because their “traditional” character and their geographic specificities were already anchored in the minds of a broad public, having been highlighted by writers, landscape painters, and local scholars during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.⁴⁸ It is in these regions in particular that the remaining farmers have been encouraged to take part in the “conversion of agricultural space to landscape,” a process in which the regional parks were a driving force. Under way since the mid-1980s, this trend benefited from the support of European institutions; justified above all by ecological considerations, it has been coordinated in France by a government agency devoted to “nature and landscape” under the auspices of the ministry responsible for environmental issues. It has also provided a way of facing up to the problem posed by European agricultural surpluses and, especially, a way of stimulating the attractiveness of rural areas, sought for their qualities as landscapes and increasingly for their value from a residential standpoint. The Landscape Law of 1993 extended to all such spaces a “landscape-oriented attention” that had previously been concentrated on exceptional sites. Animal breeders and farmers have thus found themselves involved in agro-environmental measures and encouraged to contribute to the “common good” by supplying an “environmental service” that turns them, sometimes against their will, into landscapers.⁴⁹