The Real Estate Logic of Heritage and (not only Cultural) Property

During the Lisbon workshop “Heritage and Power”, organized for SIEF’s  Working Group on Cultural Heritage and Property by Luis Silva from CRIA and Paula Mota Santos from the Universidade Fernando Pessoa,  anthropology doctoral candidate Tristan Loloum (EHESS, France) reported on what he termed the “real estate logics of heritage conflicts”.  In his research focused generally on real estate bubbles in Brazil, Loloum encountered the case of the Quilombo of Sibauma, a small settlement of a Maroon population descended from escaped slaves. The Sibauma have already lost a considerable amount of land to an agricultural developer who has turned ecologically valuable coastal forest into grazing land and pushed the settlement farther to the coast. Now their terrain has become the focus of a tourist and second home scheme with developers eager to purchase the land. Brazilian law “offers several legal tools for ethnic minorities to protect their ancestral territories from real estate speculation,” writes Loloum, and in principle this legislation initially intended as a means to confront the agricultural lobby can also be used against “tourist colonization.” Loloum found, however, that not all inhabitants of Sibauma are convinced of the benefits provided by the ethnically-based collective land ownership route. While they could get (not least anthropological) assistance in proving their case as a particular ethnic minority and apply for group ownership of the land in question under Brazilian law, land speculation is also one of the few resources available to them individually. Warding off tourist development might preserve more of the coastal forest (for which, in turn, there is of course also Brazilian ecological legislation) but it would leave the largely illiterate people of Sibauma up to their own devices – none of them thus far have the kind of collective management skills that might permit an alternative kind of development. With regard to questions of heritage and cultural property legislation, Loloum concluded that the real and conceptual distance remains enormous between the population affected and the institutions relevant to their case – including the complex bureaucracies of the Land Rights Office, the Cultural Ministry, the Ministry of Justice, etc. The intermediaries necessary to clarify options and assist in sustainable decision making are lacking.
During a fieldtrip to the World Heritage site Porto, workshop participants encountered another example of the real estate – heritage interface. Representatives of “Porto Vivo”, an organization devoted to the revitalization of the UNESCO certified, medieval core of this city spoke with participants, and it is evident, that this organization seeks to precisely the kind of intermediary between heritage regime and an affected population. The inhabitants of old Porto had not been asked whether they would like to have their living quarters turned into heritage, but they are now faced with the aftermath. Nearly two thousand buildings await restoration, with some of the work already accomplished. Real estate ownership and the need for resources complicate matters in Porto as much as in Sibauma, even if the historical contexts and the stakes at issue differ. A good portion of the houses in old Porto are not only privately owned, but – due to complex family histories as much as architectural twists and turns – also owned by multiple parties. Most of the owners do not live in these houses but rent them out, many of the apartments are small, some stand empty, and many are rented by aging people.  Getting world heritage status has not stopped the urban flight, and thus Porto Vivo has taken it upon itself to initiate campaigns to turn the situation around.  There is a heritage “management plan” which, however, requires participation from both owners and from the people living in old Porto to succeed. The former would have to invest considerable funds in making the houses attractive to live in while still looking on the outside the way the heritage portfolio has outlined it. The latter should, according to representatives of Porto Vivo, gain in self-esteem and be proud to live in a world heritage site instead of considering moving out.  Staff of Porto Vivo is available to individuals willing to open or reopen stores, serving as a liaison to possible investors and contractors in the building sector (a book that was not further opened during our conversation). They also patrol the streets to note and report possible “problems” (such as graffiti or garbage, we were told). Aside from self-esteem building workshops they also try to find or school story tellers who might take on narrative ownership of their city and thus fuel the sense of belonging. The conundrum of keeping poor renters in parts of a city that may eventually be renovated – with rents undoubtedly  rising  as a result – is likely not solved with self-esteem. Paula Mota Santos who has studied Old Porto as well as the tourists visiting it is convinced that the sense of belonging is present. What is lacking is money to turn medieval heritage into real estate that corresponds to the standard of living of Portuguese of the 21st century.
Life after heritigization is never the same: workshop co-organizer Luis Silva documented this himself when working with villagers in a rural Portuguese heritage. Here, the heritage regime and the debates between architects in charge of restoration, bureaucrats, and inhabitants have altered everything from what lose stones may be used for to whether or not one might plant a tomato next to one’s house.
To what extent a real estate logic is one of the strongest forces behind heritage initiatives and contests, as Tristan Loloum argued, would appear to be a worthwhile angle to pursue also in interdisciplinary terms.