Creating Value and Authenticity: Urban Conflicts Around Historical Buildings

Abstract

This paper considers the production of historical value of buildings and examines the role of this process in the dynamics of (re)development conflicts. The authors focus on three cases from big Russian cities: recent conflicts around the demolition of Blockade electrical substation in St. Petersburg, Arskie quarters in Kazan and historic buildings in Ilyinskaya Street, Nizhny Novgorod. They argue that historical value and authenticity do not exist in these conflicts as something given: instead, they are claimed, legitimized, contested or revised in the actions and rhetoric of various actors. To grasp the dynamics of historical value / authenticity formation, the authors apply two concepts: politics of authentication and aesthetics of persuasion. Using strategic interaction perspective (the analytical framework accounting for conflict players and arenas), they show what labour historical value performs and how it orders the arenas of conflicts and the (inter)actions of actors in these arenas. In the cases under study, the value of buildings was a procedure that included, on the one hand, detailed work in the generation of contexts, categories and semantic continuums in / through which buildings became meaningful and, on the other hand, struggles for the formal status of 'valuable objects.' This historic value (not) created in various arenas shaped further conflictual interactions, opened up new arenas, engaged new players or excluded old ones. The research shows that an object does not simply become valuable and preserve this status as a result of efforts taken by experts, lobbyists, activists, local residents and other actors. Instead, in the explored cases the value of buildings was a procedure that was launched when the buildings were impinged or dismissed, and that included a set of (un)allowed ways of dealing with objects and strategies designed to reproduce the allowed ones and exclude the unallowed ones.