Light at the End of the Labyrinth? From Historic Preservation to Heritage Placemaking: New Approaches to the Interpretation of Historical Authenticity

The first draft text of the “Dubai Document on Reconstruction in the Gulf Region ” offers us all a constructive call “to challenge conventional thinking in the conservation field. ” It presents the quite extraordinary history of Dubai’s recent development and the cultural impacts that oil wealth have brought to the city and its inhabitants, not least important being demographic and socio-economic changes, as a result of which locally-born Emiratis now compose about a fifth of the total population. And of this fifth all those under—let’s say twenty years of age—have little memory whatsoever of Dubai’s traditional lifeways, except perhaps for grandparents and parents ’ tales. Yet these changes in general heritage perception, though undeniably dramatic and far-reaching, are not unique to either Dubai or the Gulf. Modernization, globalization, urbanization, and the mass movement of people from their original homelands in a search for work or pleasure are global characteristics of the age in which we live. Most relevant for the theme of this seminar are the effects that these global shifts have had on inherited cultural identities and on the character of the built environment. In what the architectural historian Nezar Alsayyad has termed the “end of tradition ” (Alsayyad 2004)-- gleaming non-places designed by superstar architects, whose occupants share