InterAmerican Wiki

Historic City Center

A node of the old town of a city with evolutionary character. In Latin America, the historic city center in the case of colonial city centers is reduced to specific buildings with inherent symbolic meaning, in other cases it is treated as if it would practically conform to the whole urban center (Merlin and Choay 1998), resembling some European city centers. In the United States, city grids were primarily oriented towards expansionism. The centrality of historic city centers in Latin-America is multi-dimensional in that it is not only constituted by the location of the center within the modern city. Rather it covers the different purposes of the center as nucleus.

City centers of the post-colonial Latin-American capitals were originally intended to be the central cultural core of the new-born independent nation states, manifesting the identity politics of their times. Therefore they often included a European framework, since France was by then seen as the cultural capital of the modern world and served as a role model for modern urban cultural self-representation in which Paris was the “archetype of urban modernity” (Almanoz 2011). Their central positioning within the interactive communal sphere furthermore ensured the ongoing influence of the concept of the cultural city center on permanent social construction processes.(Segre 2011) The city center thus was meant to be the geographic, social and cultural center of a town with a specific “architectural vocabulary” (Almanoz 2011) and stood for the very embodiment of culture (-al politics). Over time, the functions of the historic city center have changed. After the “revitalization” of the now historic city centers in the second half of the 20th century, the change of functionality culminated in the overlapping of culture and economy. The historic city centers now incorporate culture into economy (politics) and governance (Kaltmeier 2011) and are pandering more and more towards a commercial use (Segre 2011). This coincides with a paradigm change wherein the historic city center is no longer seen mainly as a cultural space, but as a highly ethnicized and therefore politicized sphere and also as the center of the modern tourism-based economy, where all these dimensions intertwine.

Regarding the definition of a historic city center, two perspectives are in a constant struggle. The traditional view, as implemented by UNESCO, proposes a monumentalist approach to the historic city center as a question of cultural heritage. In this case, the historic city center is reduced to its buildings and the preservation of a special symbolism emerging from some major structures. This ideological perspective is founded on the thesis that the past can only be constructed through monuments. In this sense, the historic center is merely treated as a museum (Laine Torres and Villaseñor 2012) and defined by its market value (Carríon and Guardia 2011). The second perspective treats the historic city center as a public sphere with multiple dimensions. Monuments are one dimension of many, but the center as a place of social relations, cultural production and a space where society is constantly re-constituted is the most crucial dimension following this view. The value of the center in this case is thus estimated by highly taking into account its performative part (Laine Torres and Villaseñor 2012). Only individual examples can be given and in this case, Quito serves as the biggest urban center in Latin America (Carriòn and Guardia 2011) and will be referred to from now on.

Urban Development

In Latin America, the historic city centers are a heterogeneous conglomerate. This circumstance makes it difficult to provide a general codex for the handling and the use of the necessary termini and solutions related to issues connected with the historic city centers. Furthermore, this complexity is what makes appropriate politics regarding the historic centers are hard to evaluate. Another dilemma is that nowadays, historic centers often are viewed separately from the context of their origins and mainly as a source of memory, retrospection or nostalgia. Historic city centers no longer depict the everyday life of the city in which they are located, but instead hint toward the origin of the city’s modern life (Carrión 2001). In the colonial era, the big Latin American cities served as administration nodes and therefore their centers were nuclei of power, culture and (Mestizian) society. After this era and while building the nation-states, the function of the urban centers as examples for independence, development, culture and seats of governments was in no sense less important than before. As a consequence, the contemporary historic city centers played a vital part in the history of Latin America for centuries as hearts of power, culture, society and identity construction. Paris served as neoclassical role model for such a cultural center at those times.

During the 20th century, urban development led to a change in thinking regarding the city planning in Latin America. Three major steps were taken as part of urbanization: rapid urban construction and the building of new wards, the correlative distinction between modern city and historic center, and the abandonment of the historic city center (Carriòn and Guardia 2011). In the 1940s, a concept of a modern city was presented – and also applied e.g. to Quito. It included the segregation of districts characterized by race and class and in doing so separated the city into various single wards with each one serving a distinct purpose. The city center was henceforth redesigned as well (Capello 2005). It was no longer meant for production – be it cultural or economic production – but for consumption. The city center lost its central function in the reconcept of the modern urban city (Carríon 2001). Thus it was planned as an “empty space” with no housing, but only for touristic purpose and the administration located therein. A far reaching process of gentrification covered the whole city as a result of this concept, leaving the historic city center detached from the rest of the town and creating an artificial portrayal of a highly separated modern city. By isolating and highlighting the uniqueness of the historic city center, seen in contrast with the other districts of the city, “history becomes a function that can be regionalized in much the same way as other such districts, such as the shopping city, the administrative city, or the residential city” (Ashworth 2010, 360).

Since the end of the 20th century, various national international organizations–like UNESCO–have dedicated themselves to the preservation of the historic city centers as cultural heritage. Fueled in large part by the Banco Interamericano de Desarollo and private investors, the economy of the historic centers was set into motion again and served as incentive for more funding by private and public institutions. This way, the historic center was re-established as a profitable unattached part of the city (Carrión 2001). In Quito, the termini “recovery” and “re-conquest” became the slogan for the modus operandi that was used for the construction of memory emerging from the historic center. Hereby, the “myth” of the historic city center became vital whereas the socializing dimension was discarded (Carriòn and Guardia 2011).

In the United States, the development of many city centers differs from the Latin American model to a certain extent. In some cases, such as Washington D.C., based on the layout designed by the French-born architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the city follows the “modernist” European pattern (Kaltmeier 2011 a, 8), combining late 18th century architecture with a distinctive grid. The grid is in fact the main planning element in the North American urban context, endowed with the “power to neutralize space and its ecological and ethnic diversity in order to render them controllable for an emerging capitalist economy” (Kaltmeier 2011a, 7). The grid upon which most large American cities are built spatializes power as a process of constant expansionism, seemingly not adhering to any definite “center” or locus of power. In many cases, the central city district is the central business district (CBD), with ethnic and historic neighborhoods either adjacent to the central business district or interspersed within other neighborhoods.

Cultural Heritage

Since the end of the 20th century, historic city centers, like Quito’s, have been accepted into the UNESCO list of cultural heritage. Cultural heritage in this case can be defined as a broad spectrum of traditions, monuments, artifacts and cultures. From them, one can draw conclusions on the life and cultural production of the contemporary. However, there is more to it than this. Cultural heritage is not limited to preservation and exposition. Immaterial values like memories and ideas are also imminent for the ongoing process of self- and other- identification.

Quito may be the best known and the best perceived example of cultural heritage in Latin America. It was highly praised for a long time when the monumental perspective remained unchallenged, but this opinion has changed over the years. The monumental approach is characterized by the politics of intervention conducted by governmental and private institutions. Through restoration, systematic city planning and selective upkeep of the historic center, a nostalgic reconstruction based on symbolism and ornaments, is created. This reductionist handling neglects the cultural heritage as a social and historic product and public sphere of a network of relations. In fact, it creates a stereotypical scenario with the historic center as an ensemble of monuments as mediums for memory.

One could argue that in the United States several kinds of historic urban districts may be identified, in cities with a long colonial history, where the historic area may be located downtown, and in other cities, where they serve as ethnic neighborhoods. The 1990s saw the birth of the “revanchist city” (Neil Smith quoted in Kaltmeier 2011 a, 12), in which the urban middle and upper-middle classes sought control over downtown areas in which members of minority groups resided. More recent processes of city center aestheticization and so-called revitalization include a “return to the center” (2011 a, 11) through gentrification in the context of the post-Fordist, consumer-oriented economy, along with historic city theming to increase touristic appeal.

The Ethnic Dimension

When speaking of the formation of a public sphere as a nexus of cultural and social flows converging in the city center, one significant aspect is the very constitution of these flows, which, though indicative of the intra-national and trans-national mobility of recent years, might obscure the processes of dislocation and dispossession among lower-income residents. Often regarded as positive indicators of globalization as an accelerated process of cultural and economic integration and co-dependence, these flows of people, ideas and goods have changed the social dynamics and residential patterns in the historic city center, leading to forced mobility (as intramural relocation) as a form of population displacement among the lower class sectors. Once home to residents of small financial means, historic city centers have increasingly become gentrified, which has spelled the end of housing opportunities for previous residents, now evicted or relocated to other parts of the city, away from the tourist gaze when not functioning as the city’s token ethnic group.

Thus, the preservation and management of historic city centers often involve negotiating the city’s ethnic composition and history. Over the past century in the United States, lower-income residents of historic downtown areas have tended to be members of disenfranchised ethnic or immigrant groups, located in so-called urban “pockets of poverty”. Kaltmeier discusses the “ethnicization and pauperization” (2011b, 239) of historic city centers as a result of the wave of suburban white flight around the middle of the twentieth century. In some cases, urban renewal in the United States, consisting of strategies of redesigning the functionality of key urban areas, has led to the removal of members of non-dominant ethnic groups from the inner city or from other desirable locations, such as historic waterfronts (now historic districts). In the 1960s and the 1970s, urban renewal was dubbed “Negro removal” by its critics, pointing to the social injustice inherent in the revitalization and modernization projects that led to the relocation of lower-income African American urban residents to other, less desirable, areas of the city, due to massive urban systematization or to new housing projects in the form of high-rise tenement buildings. Rachel Brahinsky (2011, 144) suggests that urban removal projects could be read as another form of Great (racial) Migration. In other cases, slum clearance was implemented in the wake of natural catastrophes (Kaltmeier 2011b, 240), such as in New Orleans, following the devastation of the city by Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing need to rebuild it, only this time on a social and ethnic scale of gentrification.

The in-and-out dynamic of socio-cultural life in the historic city center has a two-fold regime. On the one hand, the physical removal of lower-income members of a subaltern ethnic group paves the way for a takeover of the city center by the more affluent classes. On the other hand, urban heritage tourism requires the symbolic re-ethnicization of historic city centers as an element of urban re-branding in the multicultural world. The postmodern aestheticization of everyday life in the form of a simulated spatial and temporal reality and the nostalgia for a recreated past in the near vicinity of futuristic urban landscapes have fundamentally reshaped urban life over the past two decades. Increasing transnational mobility has led to the formation of a modern cosmopolitan urban community, in line with the development of a globally connected service-based post-Fordist urban economy. In these instances, the historic center is made to don the clothes of a “heritage city” (Kaltmeier 2011a, 167), catering to the needs of both tourists and employees of a transnational corporate class, who are to be found particularly in the so-called global cities and who demonstrate an interest in urban cultural diversity. Thus, one major advantage in the global economy of sign consumption is the aesthetic re-indigeneization of the historic city center, meant to underline the complex ethnic heritage of the city. Cities thus re-orient and re-brand themselves on the tourist market as bearers of a recovered history, except that, often times, the recuperation of an indigenous past is both a form of abuse through indigenous identity commodification and a denial of the present concerns and manifestations of indigenous urban life. While lower-income American Indians are pushed out of the gentrified historic city center, in cities built essentially on indigenous lands, urban re-branding on the global market encourages performances of Indian identity as a form of urban distinctiveness through cultural heritage. Thus, while indigenous people seem to be symbolically ever present in the urban imaginary (such as in the case of Seattle, a city spatially marked by totem poles and busts of Chief Seattle), they are seldom allowed or invited to be significant actors in the public sphere.

Outlook

The urban development and the politics of intervention lead to the segregation of the historic city centers of many Latin American agglomerations and the periphery. The monumentalist handling of the historic centers by public and private investigators did their part in this development by the highly selective preservation of historic structures. If Quito’s center is meant to preserve the colonial history, the question arises: “What is colonial?” Creating a sterile environment for a historic center and painting the houses in tourist-appealing colors, as it can be seen in Quito, surely does not seem very colonial but rather profit-orientated and a manifestation of modern urban city planning. Away from the colonial era, selectivity remains a major point for critics. “What is culture/cultural?” is a valid question as well. Who defines what is worth preserving and what is not and how and for whom it is to be preserved? Is a Mestizian memory the one to be created, or a Spanish or a Quitenian one? What of the historic center itself? Is it meant to be a museum, separated from the rest of the city for nostalgic or economic purpose (Laine Torres and Villaseñor 2012)? This monumentalist philosophy, still embraced today, is not the answer to the question of how the historic city centers can be reintegrated into the city. It does, however, lead to a new understanding of segregated sectors as a structure for urban areas – since the term “city” seems inappropriate for this model of an urban settlement. It also marginalizes the value of the historic center itself (Carriòn and Guardia 2011).

The performative approach seems to be more promising as it tries to reinstate the historic city center as a public sphere within the heart of the city and as part of everyday life. It establishes a derivate of a “space-time-concept” stating that the immaterial cultural heritage and the social construction of space – the city center in this case – are the fundamental ingredients for the historic city center and its role as part of the modern city. It also neglects the policy of intervention that leads to the exclusion of major parts of the public and does not prefer the tourists over the local residents. Rather than using cultural heritage as an instrument for maintaining hegemonic structures and fueling the marketing of the historic city center, the performative view of the historic city center redefines the functions of the city center itself by repositioning it within the center of the modern urban settlement.

Ruxandra Radulescu and Florian Reschke

Please cite as:
Radulescu, Ruxandra and Florian Reschke. 2012. “Historic City Center.” InterAmerican Wiki: Terms - Concepts - Critical Perspectives. https://uni-bielefeld.de/einrichtungen/cias/wiki/h/historic-city-center.xml.

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