The cosmopolitan city in the 21st century

The so-called society post (post-Fordist, post-industrial, post-modern, post-analog, and also post-COVID) in which we live, constantly confronts us as individuals with ambiguity, the new defining substance of the character of urban life in the 21st century.

Any attentive look at the various spheres that articulate urban social life – work, leisure, social relations, or the very way in which territory is inhabited – immediately makes evident the triumph of ambiguity as a category that increasingly explains urban spaces and moments.

We are inhabitants of a place, according to population censuses, but transport networks and easy access to mobile telecommunication make us be, rather, territorial, inhabitant continues and obliquely between places, building our day to day between a true patchwork of landscapes, made of fragments of diverse spaces and territories that configure our real lived space.

We are users of a time that is built on horseback and at the same time between productive and reproductive moments, the total sum of which results in a hybrid and blurred temporal structure, which equally contaminates the borders, at other times diaphanous, between interiors and exteriors; between the home and the city; between what is private and intimate and what is public and exposed.

We use a whole digital hyperstructure that saves us time, but its intrinsic vulnerability and the increasingly obligatory and not unlaborious digital security requirements that we implement cause time to spill over again and again through these virtual cracks. Cracks that we must circumvent to finally enjoy the promise of total and continuous connectivity.

The ambiguity of heritage

Heritage, as a cultural construction of a society, must be understood from its definition as a certainly ambiguous reality. The real nature of heritage is that of being an element defined by its ambiguity, while its main value is to constitute itself as the tangible and intangible result of a collective social and cultural construction process that takes place over time.

In the specific case of the processes that end up constructing what is considered or not as heritage content, these have always historically developed from some variables that we know well, such as art's capacity to “heritage-ize” objects and landscapes or the power of a certain social class to “heritage-ize” urban spaces.

In today's society, the ambiguous character of heritage is, however, confirmed and, moreover, acceleratedly, from the progressive development of three major trends in progress that define the relationship between society and heritage from significantly different angles if we compare it with earlier historical moments.

Firstly, the consideration that there has never been such a consistent and stable heritage view in society, which means that, in simple terms, we can state that we are living in the historical moment with the highest conscious production of heritage in history.

On the other hand, the multiplication of heritage also derives from a clear widening of its conceptual boundaries. For which reason, from a heritage "with capital letters", characterized by its monumentality and capacity to highlight certain historical moments or the past success of a certain social class, we have moved to the consideration of cultural heritages deeply associated with people's daily lives. From the exclusivity of unique and reference heritages, we have thus moved to the inclusion of all kinds of heritage elements that absolutely do not share this character. From these two developments, heritage has multiplied.

Furthermore, the digitization process of society and the development of the so-called digital visual culture has led to the relativization of the concept of authenticity in general terms and, in particular, with regard to heritage. In this way, the individual's perception of what is authentic or not; and their ability to identify heritage values, is certainly diminished by the great contamination that the digital reproduction of heritage represents.

In other words, it is possible to have an authentic experience from a certainly inauthentic heritage support, just as it is possible to have an inauthentic experience in contact with an authentic heritage element. From these processes, heritage ceases to constitute a clear objective substance to become an object of consumption endowed with a certainly liquid but, above all, ambiguous character.

Furthermore, the processes of cultural touristification of urban space result from a clear inversion of the perception of heritage “in situ”. In other words, heritage is first perceived digitally in a delocalized and distant way through virtual media, which is why the real physical perception of it then becomes a kind of confirmation of a previous “placeless” perception.

This inevitably leads to a much less stable conception of heritage, as it is not understood as strongly rooted in its place as in earlier historical periods. On the contrary, heritage is perceived as attractive precisely from the opposite: its erratic but continuous presence in cyberspace.

Heritage in the new cosmopolitan city

The cultural dimension of urban space is still associated, however, with the presence of urban heritage of all kinds – historical, cultural, tangible, intangible, etc. In fact, the existence of recognized heritage elements in urban space remains one of the nodal factors that articulate concepts such as urban identity and the very idea of differentiation or hierarchization of the city's places with which individuals relate and identify.

A continuous consumption of heritage that is very well explained by living in a historical moment in which we value the past more than ever, to the point that current urban societies have been defined by the unprecedented success of the so-called "culture vintage".

In this patrimonialization of the cosmopolitan city of the past, a new “local cosmopolitanism” is added, directly derived from the migratory flows driven by globalization, transforming the urban space and the daily life of the city from within. But situations of cultural conflict also occur which actually hide deposits of xenophobia, in the best case, and racism, in the worst, inherited from a clearly ethnocentric European culture.

In fact, from the perspective of public urban policies, including heritage policies, the management of this new cultural diversity in urban spaces is not exempt from ideological biases. If we consider the different strategies that social and cultural public policies have proposed over the last few decades regarding how to confront cultural diversity, we can identify some key elements that can be summarized, necessarily briefly, into three main trends:the abandonment of cultural relativism in favor of the concept of multiculturalism; the transition from the concept of multiculturalism to that of interculturalism; and the innovation regarding the design of urban space from an intercultural perspective.

The new “intercultural city” can indeed be supported by these three aspects of urban public policy – public spaces, facilities, and heritage elements – both to address and mediate cultural conflicts related to diversity management and to adapt local governance conditions, by adjusting urban institutions, services, and attractions to the new needs and demands of an already definitively diverse population.

Defining, therefore, urban heritage from this more performance-oriented approach, adapted to the new context represented by urban cultural diversity, is key today for designing, both in physical and relational terms, the true cosmopolitan city that the new society demands.post at the current moment.

Far from the commodified nostalgia of the city vintage, with the over-visibility of some heritages hiding the invisibility of others; where the value of heritage is reduced to its superficial, urbanized character and instagrammable; the idea of a true “intercultural urban heritage”, shared and managed on the basis of intercultural dialogue, emerges strongly. Not only as a new social opportunity but as one of the clearest ways to project heritage, and the collective urban value it represents, towards the future and not from the past.