The above description could be a passage from the diary of anyone visiting the neighbourhood for the first time. The Albayzín has gone through considerable transformation since becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1994, allowing for such highly romanticised and orientalised depictions as the one exemplified here. The passage, however, is allegorical in the anthropological sense that it encapsulates, through a sensory description of urban symbolism, the core politico-ideological tension inherent in the site (see Clifford, 1986). It is the aim of this article to unpack this ‘tension’, the historical roots of which stretch back to the late-15^th-century Christian-Castilian conquest of the Emirate of Granada, and which has remained an often-remarked-upon feature of the neighbourhood. As García Lorca (1898–1936), the ill-fated local bard noted a century ago, the streets of Albayzín unfold ‘a tragedy of contrasts’:

The tensions, contrasts or conflicts of the present, however, are closely related to the transformation of the human architecture—conceived as both architecture built by people, and the population itself—that has taken place in the neighbourhood over the past twenty years. The contemporary experience is somewhat a return to the early-twentieth century diversity, following decades of steady de-population and urban decay (Cabrera Medina, 2009). However, the popular characters of the Lorcan ‘tragedy’—the pious nun, the foul-mouthed goatherd, the big-eyed prostitutes and the Gitano musicians (García Lorca, 1994: 147)—as well as the characteristic personage of the 1980s, the elderly peasant, the sole surviving vestige of the town’s rural past, have mostly been replaced by the alternative youth, the new-age artist, the foreign exchange student, the North-African migrant, and the Muslim convert among others (Abend, 2008; Bahrami, 1998; Duque Calvache, 2010; Flesler, 2008; Rogozen-Soltar, 2012b; Rosón Lorente, 2008).

The various factions and frictions caused by the new diversity have received considerable scholarly attention in recent years, as did those relating to local projects of urban renovation (for the latter, see, for example, Barrios Rozúa, 2002; Cabrera Medina, 2009; Castelló Nicás, 2003; Hita Alonso, 1996). The human and urban aspects of change are intertwined through the process of gentrification, a vernacular of which has been identified and described in depth by local researchers (Duque Calvache, 2010; Duque Calvache, Susino and De Pablos, 2013; Rosón Lorente, 2010). While the process was classically discussed in terms of class conflict over urban space1—and this is certainly a significant aspect of its manifestation in the Albayzín—the Granadan neighbourhood confers upon gentrification an additional level of ideological struggle over the ownership of historical heritage and historical memory, one revolving around ethno-religious dichotomies in which discourses of Christian continuity are set against what many perceive as a ‘return of Islam’ (Rosón Lorente and Dietz, 2011). This central antagonism is evident in the very denomination of the district, having two different popular spellings: Albayzín and Albaicín. According to Duque Calvache (2010: 115) the former is used if wishing to emphasise the older days of the neighbourhood, its Moorish past and exoticism (e.g. in UNESCO documents), while the latter alludes to a more recent past of a bucolic Catholic working-class community (e.g. in local official documents). I have opted for the first spelling not in order to reinforce a romanticised vision instead of a more realistic one, but as a constant reminder of the existence of such imagery in relation to local cultural ‘heritage’.

This article examines this ideological struggle by articulating a concept of heritagification which takes its cue from a ‘critical’ understanding of heritage (see Winter, 2013), and describes the localised material and symbolic manifestations of this universal ideological principle. The concept thus allows us to see certain processes of gentrification as shaped by the universalising ideology of heritage, mediated by institutions through which unequal power relations at the local level are created and upheld, and having a direct impact on the constitution of the local population. As such, the proposed concept goes beyond that of ‘heritagisation’, which has been applied—and seems grammatically better fitted—to merely highlight the constructed nature of ‘heritage’ (see Daugstad and Kirchengast, 2013; Walsh, 1992).

In our case—as in many other contexts (see, for example, Evans, 2002; Herzfeld, 2009; Rubino, 2005; Shaw, 2005, for examples from Canada, Italy, Brazil and Australia)—the main ideology and surveillance over heritagification is provided by UNESCO through a specific ‘heritage discourse’ (Smith, 2006). Locally, the institutional structures channelling the universal ideological principles into urban practice are supported by the municipal and regional governments, as well as by private enterprise, religious institutions, and the civil sphere, and this article pays special attention to this institutional power-structure with the aim of harnessing its explanatory potential.

The starting contention in any discussion of heritagification must be that ‘heritage’—as an ideology and an institution—directly and indirectly affects processes of urban change by way of intervention in the value system of the global market and in local socio-political power relations. Reaching such a contention requires a contextualisation of ‘heritage’ as a concept, and its description as a phenomenon. The concept of heritage is itself one riddled with contradictions, and in the following section I will outline some of its foundational dichotomies, between its material and immaterial aspects, essential and constructed features, and its universalism versus particularity. The later sections of the article will turn to a description of the phenomenal manifestation of heritagification in the Albayzín, building on findings from a fieldwork carried out in April 2011, with the aim to provide an assessment of the ideological struggles reflected in the urban conflicts taking place in the World Heritage neighbourhood.2

Following an initial rejection and a decade of planning and commitment to rehabilitation, the Albayzín was finally granted World Heritage status on 17 December 1994, being included in the extension of the UNESCO designation which had been afforded to the Moorish fortress of the Alhambra and the gardens of Generalife in 1984. The decision had been long in the waiting, and was not the least surprising; as the body of experts recommending the extension made clear, the Albayzín ‘has a universal value which is complementary to and chronologically earlier than the site already on the List’ (ICOMOS, 1994: 63), alluding to the remainders of an 11th century Zirid wall. This assessment epitomises the main ideological principles underpinning the contemporary institutional conception of ‘heritage’, a critique of which is a necessary step in discussing heritagification phenomena.

The core propositions of a critical understanding of heritage are best summarised by Laurajane Smith (2006: 3–4. Emphasis in original), according to whom ‘all heritage is intangible’, ‘not inherently valuable’, and without any ‘innate meaning’; it is, fundamentally, ‘a discourse’, understood as ‘a form of social practice’. Adopting a similarly Bourdieusian vocabulary, Michael Herzfeld describes ‘heritage’ in terms of ‘a new global habitus in which dominant interpretations of history spatially reinforce current ideologies’ (2010: s259. Emphasis in original). Interestingly, in a book focusing specifically on ‘built heritage’—a very tangible matter—Françoise Choay (2001) deems the broader field of historic heritage to refer ‘at once to an institution and to a mentality’ (2001: 1). These assertions may surprise us when we consider that the standard dictionary definitions of ‘heritage’ are anchored in the historical social structures of European individualism and property rights. The term—as AlSayyad (2001: 2) points out—‘derives from the Old French eritage, meaning property which devolves by right of inheritance in a process involving a series of linked hereditary successions’; or—as Choay (2001: 1) highlights—it refers to ‘inherited property passed down in accordance with the law, from fathers and mothers to children’. Such understandings have played a crucial role in the national movements of the nineteenth century, which extended the idea of cross-generational inheritance from the familial domain to emerging national entities, a procedure reliant on a significant degree of imaginative construction—as famously argued by Anderson (1991). In the nationalist toolkit, ‘heritage’ provided the only tangible link between the struggles of the present and a future modelled on an idealised past.3 The aims of national unity had thus been promoted through an ‘authorized heritage discourse’ underpinned by technical and aesthetic expertise, and institutionalised in state administrative bodies (Smith, 2006: 11). This Eurocentric experience and historical habitus was later given universal recognition, and among the organisations whose primary role is heritage administration—what Smith (2006: 87) calls ‘authorizing institutions of heritage’—the one with the greatest authority today is UNESCO’s 1972 World Heritage Convention.4

One aspect of ‘heritage’ that plays a critical role in understanding the mechanisms of conflict in populated heritage sites—the foremost arenas of heritagification—is its relation to historical ‘memory’. In this respect, the institutionalisation of heritage has again played an important role. As Walsh (1992: 87) argues, ‘those who decide what is worthy of preservation and how it should be preserved, are basically deciding what is worth remembering’; and since historical memory rarely goes uncontested, authorising institutions and discourses also decide from whose perspective it will be remembered. Tunbridge and Ashworth (1996) accurately point out the exclusionary nature of heritage, as it can logically only belong to one group of people, and therefore ‘any creation of heritage from the past disinherits someone completely or partially, actively or potentially’ (1996: 21). It is the political function of ‘heritage’ in promoting and undermining claims to power and legitimacy which is being denounced by critical approaches.

Theorists have most often addressed the relationship between built heritage and memory by identifying opposing cognitive mechanisms at play. Choay (2001), for instance, distinguishes between ‘affective memory’ and ‘cognitive memory’, and relates them to ‘monuments’ and ‘historic monuments’ respectively. Following Alois Riegl’s (1903 [1982]) insights, she argues that while ‘monuments’ are human universals deliberately erected for commemorative and affective purposes—a function gradually erased by modernity due to the development of more effective mnemonic techniques—the ‘historical monument’ is a European invention, whose value and meaning is cognitively constituted a posteriori. Similarly, Nora (1989: 13) contrasts a lived, embodied, ‘true’ memory with a modern, ‘archival’ one, famously advocating a scholarly endeavour to salvage the former. Yet, while in this sense designated heritage sites are ‘historic monuments’ governed by ‘cognitive’ or ‘archival’ memory, the memorial function they play locally can be highly complex and contradictory. Positing the same dialectic, Herzfeld (1991) has addressed precisely this complexity when, while looking at the temporal aspects of everyday life in a Cretan town of mixed Venetian and Ottoman urban heritage, he differentiated between ‘social’ and ‘monumental’ time in the struggle over the ownership of local history. The difficult relationship between heritage and memory comes to the fore in many situations where sites are being reclaimed as group heritage by different factions, such as in the case of the Great Mosque of Cordoba or in the Albayzín of Granada (Rogozen-Soltar, 2007; Ruggles, 2010; Schildgen, 2008: Chp. 4). Essentially, heritage sites are what Nora (1989) calls lieux de memoire; such ‘places of memory’ are ‘simple and ambiguous, natural and artificial, at once immediately available in concrete sensual experience and susceptible to the most abstract elaboration. Indeed, they are lieux in three senses of the word—material, symbolic, and functional’ (1989: 17–18).

Returning to our lieux, the historical heritage of Albayzín has entertained the memory of many over the past decades, coalescing with the regional nationalist movements that emerged in the late 1970s following the death of Francisco Franco. According to Dietz (2004), classically, Andalusian nationalism has built on three sources to emphasise the region’s particularity: the ‘gitano legacy’, the ‘fiesta legacy’ and the ‘moro legacy’. The gitano legacy is centred on the art of flamenco and a romanticised vision of the ‘gypsy way of life’ which has continuously increased in popularity since the late 1950s (Dietz, 2004: 1095). The religious fiestas reflect popular Catholic traditions, and revolve around local patron saints and competing religious fraternities. The Albayzín is central to festivities such as the Holy Week processions or the Festival of the Crosses (Fiesta de las Cruces) involving the adornment of the countless stone crosses skirting the streets and squares of the neighbourhood. These deeply rooted expositions of Christian faith and popular culture starkly contrast with the urban features relying on the moro—or Moorish—legacy, the latter building chiefly on neo-Moorish decorative architecture, and more recently on the presence of North-African migrants (see Figures 1 and 2). For many regionalist groups, the Islamic Middle Ages represent the historical period when the essence of Andalusian nationhood was formed, and the memory of Al-Andalus—of Moorish Spain—still haunts Spanish society today. It is often invoked in political discourse, emphasising either the vision of a ‘clash of civilisations’ or, on the contrary, the idyllic ideal of convivencia—the assumed peaceful cohabitation of Christians, Muslims and Jews during Moorish times (Abend, 2008; Coleman, 2008; García-Sánchez, 2014; Hirschkind, 2014; Rogozen-Soltar, 2012a; 2012b; Suárez-Navaz, 2004: Chp. 7).

What the three ‘legacies’ have in common, however, is that they have all been redressed for tourist consumption; even the ‘Holy Week of Granada’ has been designated as a ‘Fiesta of International Tourist Interest’ by the State Department for Tourism in October 2009. World Heritage designation further transforms historic heritage into a ‘brand’, a ‘trademark’, by acting as an ‘authenticity stamp’, whereas it is precisely the authenticity of a place that may dilapidate in the process (Rakić, 2007: 216). While from one perspective—adopting the phraseology of UNESCO—the different ‘legacies’ are being given universal recognition, their commodification can also be seen as a ‘neoliberal hijacking of history’—in the fitting words of Herzfeld (2010).

For the Albayzín, becoming a World Heritage Site also contributed to the consolidation of its ‘myth’—propagated by orientalisations like the one we witnessed in Lorca’s prose—now institutionally proclaimed (Cabrera Medina, 2009). For UNESCO, ‘much of the significance of the Albayzín lies in the medieval town plan with its narrow streets and small squares and in the relatively modest houses in Moorish and Andalusian style that line them’ (ICOMOS, 1994: 64). The logic of heritagification further demands that the human and social ‘architecture’ of the neighbourhood enhance this universal significance, introducing a value system by which forms of population change that do not necessarily adhere to classical patterns of gentrification become economically advantageous for the global forces of ‘cultural capitalization’ (Kowalski, 2011). At the same time, the heritagified urban space morphs into a symbolic battlefield for different ‘legacies’ competing over the ownership of historical memory.

The Albayzín is a divisive neighbourhood among Granadinos. Surveys have shown that, on the one hand, it is the most rejected and disliked district among the young population, while, on the other hand, its ‘noble’ parts are where most people would like to live (Fernández Gutiérrez and Jiménez Bautista, 2000). One reason for the high levels of rejection, contend Fernández Gutiérrez and Jiménez Bautista (2000), is that the medieval urban morphology and its askew character make it hard to be approached by car, and that the youngsters especially find it difficult to orientate within the neighbourhood. Yet, as the local researchers conclude, ‘we, Granadan citizens, prefer and/or fantasize about being able to live in the “noble” parts of the idyllic neighbourhood of Albayzín’ (2000: 275).

This paradox is explained by the discrepancies in the quality of housing in different parts of the neighbourhood. The upper—noble—segments are dominated by cármenes, large closed-off estates serving mostly as weekend- or holiday residences to wealthy Granadinos.5 The lower streets, meanwhile, are characterised by older and ruinous buildings, which nevertheless are among the historically most significant. They have been the focal points of the various urban rehabilitation projects undertaken since the UNESCO World Heritage designation, and have in recent years become attractive to the Moroccan migrant community, international students and alternative youths, following a long period of abandonment and deterioration (Rosón Lorente, 2008). Older residents still recall the time when the lower parts of the neighbourhood became depopulated; Manuel, for instance, reminisces about the old days of that crowded, narrow street we first turned onto on our imaginary stroll in the opening paragraph:

The renovation of the buildings has been more or less successful, with yet much to be done. At the same time, as Hita Alonso (1996) observed, the aim of ‘rehabilitating’ a historical neighborhood has shifted in both discourse and practice toward ‘revitalization’, denoting a more dynamic process involving active social planning. The verdict is that ‘the Albayzín is a neighborhood destined to be inhabited’ (De Pablos and Cabrera Medina, 2005: 267).

The two main local institutions involved in projects of urban revitalisation at the time of the fieldwork were the Albaicín–Granada Agency—under the auspices of Granada City Council—and the Rehabilitation Office of Albaicín—belonging to a public sector company of the Government of Andalusia. In carrying out their respective duties the two institutions are also taking a stance on the future of the neighbourhood, and their opinions and objectives often conflict, not least because the local and regional governments have long been led by competing political parties.7

The Albaicín–Granada Agency was established in 1998 to manage the European funds for urban revitalization and, according to its website, ‘besides its statutory duties, as permanent observatory of Albaicín, of safeguarding the values for which it has been designated World Heritage by the UNESCO, is in charge since 2008 of managing the Tourist Plan of the city of Granada’ (Agencia Albaicín–Granada, n.d.). This dual commitment reflects the institutionalisation of the blend between heritage and tourism that describes all World Heritage sites. However, in populated sites exposed to processes of heritagification, it also determines the constitution of their inhabitants. In this respect, the Agency is more inclined towards a fluid, flexible vision for the neighbourhood, and tends to agree with the pragmatic argument shared by private investors, that ‘if we wouldn’t have the tourists and the students, Granada would disappear!’ (Angel, manager of a real-estate agency, interviewed by author, 19 April 2011). According to the managing director of the Agency, ‘we must facilitate, not impose but facilitate hotels’, with the condition that ‘a hotel should always be in an old, renovated house, keeping everything as it was’ (interviewed by author, 28 April 2011).

The Rehabilitation Office, on the other hand, has as its main objective ‘to fix the population, to stabilize it, including attracting new residents’, and is more inclined to the view shared by many residents that the neighbourhood is slowly turning into a ‘thematic park’. As its technical director expresses it, ‘I find it good to have housing for tourists, but when everything becomes that, we can no longer speak of a neighbourhood, right?’ (interviewed by author, 15 April 2011). The Office has been managing renovation works since 2002, gradually extending its mission from lower Albayzín to the entire district. Not long before my fieldwork, it had moved its headquarters from the city centre to a newly renovated building on the Calderería—a street famous for its oriental souvenir shops—this way getting physically closer to the neighbourhood. This move, according to its director, was essential in order to reinforce the institution’s image of being an organic part of the neighbourhood and sharing the aims of its inhabitants, rather than being perceived as an administrative unit belonging to the distant regional government. Instead of ‘the expulsion of residents and the creation of a building that would serve as a hotel, student accommodation, or for people who come for the weekends’—as the director deems to be happening all too often with projects led by the rival Agency—the Office sets certain requirements for those participating in their programmes: ‘when people receive our aid, they have to guarantee that for a certain period they maintain the old tenants, who will pay a low rent, a protected rent [renta protegida]’ (Technical director of the Rehabilitation Office, interviewed by author, 15 April 2011).

At the time of the fieldwork around six hundred houses had already been renovated, and the director of the Office expressed his satisfaction with the progress achieved in socially stabilizing the neighbourhood. By ‘protecting’ the rent, the government was admittedly pursuing the double aim of keeping in local residents, while encouraging a diverse and intercultural future for the neighbourhood. The first low-rent apartments in houses renovated by the Rehabilitation Office were leased in 2007 ‘to youngsters and immigrants’ (Technical director, interviewed by author, 15 April 2011), a move which, nevertheless, displeased many of the residents. As Maria put it:

While the ulterior motives behind the social planning undertaken by local authorities may be less sinister than assumed by many older residents, it nevertheless fully conforms to the values of heritagification. North-African migrants are of particular significance due to the assumed ‘authenticity’ that their visible presence can provide to the marketable Moorish imagery that earned the Albayzín ‘universal’ recognition. It is thus unsurprising that both the Rehabilitation Office and the Albaicín–Granada Agency, despite their different politics and many disagreements, agree upon the benefits of Arab-Muslim presence.

The aim of this article has been to examine the transformations in the human architecture of the Granadan neighbourhood of Albayzín following its designation as World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Various aspects of this broad topic have already received well-deserved, intense scholarly attention: projects of urban rehabilitation (Barrios Rozúa, 2002; Cabrera Medina, 2009; Castelló Nicás, 2003; Hita Alonso, 1996), processes of gentrification (Duque Calvache, 2010; Duque Calvache, Susino and De Pablos, 2013; Fernández Gutiérrez and Jiménez Bautista, 2000; Rosón Lorente, 2010), the emergence of new Muslim communities (Abend, 2008; Dietz, 2004; Flesler, 2008; Rogozen-Soltar, 2012a; 2012b), the ensuing cultural diversity and conflicts (Bahrami, 1998; Rosón Lorente, 2008; Rosón Lorente and Dietz, 2011), and the neighbourhood’s relationship with its Moorish past (Calderwood, 2014; Coleman, 2008; Hirschkind, 2014; Rogozen-Soltar, 2007) have all been explored in depth. The contribution of this article, therefore, is to articulate a concept of heritagification which connects the urban, human and symbolic aspects of change. As I have argued, urban ‘heritage’ represents not a physical reality but an ideological principle which has the power to reshape historic monuments and urban settings, and endow them with new meanings. It revives and settles disputes over the ownership of historical memory, subjecting claims, interpretations and practices to the logic of ‘universal value’. Through the process of heritagification, the ideology of heritage not only creates alternative realities for the global tourism marketplace, but also takes leadership in the neoliberal gentrification of populated heritage sites.

The main struggle in the Albayzín—as in other locations subjected to heritagification—develops around providing the neighbourhood with a future meaning, function and inhabitants. Competing perspectives are heavily influenced by different conceptions of the past, the main divide stretching between Muslim and Christian interpretations of the neighbourhood’s heritage. The ‘authorized heritage discourse’ of institutional actors interested in capitalising on the historical value of the Albayzín favours a more distant Moorish past (Smith, 2006). The urban paradox of the value system upheld by ‘heritage’ is that buildings and practices of little historical significance can become invaluable to the overall vision, as seen in the example of the Great Mosque.

The future of the Albayzín is unsettled, but it will surely remain characterised by the ‘tragedy of contrasts’ noticed by the poet García Lorca and the many travellers drawn to the neighbourhood over the course of history (see, for example, Viñes Millet, 1999). The struggle over its ‘true’ heritage will remain the main theme in this tragedy, and its ‘truth’ will probably only reveal itself in the myriad of romanticised and orientalised travel diaries yet to be written. The analysis of heritagification would suggest that a shift in the symbolic relationship between the Albayzín and the Palace of Alhambra is one possible development. While for a long period the Albayzín had mainly served to provide beautiful vistas of the Alhambra—the ultimate historic monument to Moorish Spain—through the process of heritagification the Alhambra itself may become an accessory to the Albayzín, a mere inanimate image of past glory inspiring the utopian ambitions of an organic neighbourhood.

The author declares that he has no competing interests.