In This Issue

Mixing Memory and Desire: Exploring Utopian Currents in Heritage

Elizabeth Stainforth

There is some precedent for utopian thinking around cultural heritage, and a number of writers have commented on the utopian ideal of museums to house and preserve intact cultural memory. However, this article focuses on another, distinct utopian strain relevant to cultural heritage that can be traced through the influence of William Morris on the formation of conservation methods in the nineteenth century. While figures such as Morris have been linked to the critique of "monumental heritage" in recent years, a central message in Morris's writings was that the guiding principle for conservation should not be stasis but change. Equally, for him, knowledge of the past was important for recovering the hopes of former generations, a theme he explored in his utopian fiction. Morris's utopianism presents a challenge to the logic of inheritance, whereby the past is figured as a legacy to be maintained and the future, in turn, is extracted confidently from the present. Instead, Morris's utopianism involves a mixture of memory and desire that signals a way into thinking about alternative experiences and expectations. Here, I discuss how the utopian currents in Morris's work shed light on contemporary heritage debates and the different kinds of futures implicit in heritage-making.

Quotidian Utopia: Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence and the Heritage of Love

Tracy Ireland

Orhan Pamuk's 2008 novel, The Museum of Innocence, narrates a love story exploring themes of unstable identities, affective objects, and obsessive collecting set against the background of social change in Turkey and its manifestation in the urban landscape of Istanbul. In his museum of the same name, which opened in 2012, and its catalog, The Innocence of Objects, Pamuk articulates a clear political agenda through his "Modest Manifesto for Museums," which expresses deep suspicion of the relationship between the narratives of the past told through grand museums and the power of the state. Pamuk's valuing of the everyday—the quotidian materiality of ordinary human lives—can be read as a critique of the concept of heritage significance and a reimagining of the field of heritage and museums where the material traces of the past are not uprooted from their neighborhoods but cared for at home and curated with love. I suggest that Pamuk's Museum of Innocence imagines a utopian future for heritage and museums that is centered on the constitution of empathic, materially mediated experiences of the everyday, particularly of joy, love, and happiness, emotions rarely encompassed or made visible through the frame of heritage. Pamuk's concern with experience and emotion, rather than representation, and with the vibrant materiality of objects, rather than representative collections, links to the scholarly shift in interest from what heritage might mean to what it might do.

An Urban Dream for the Preservation of the Atatürk Forest Farm

Elif Mıhçıoğlu Bilgi

The Atatürk Forest Farm (AFF), known as Atatürk Orman Çiftliği (AOC) in Turkish, is located in Turkey's capital city, Ankara. This important symbolic space of Turkey's early republican period was a popular recreational area that included a zoo, small agricultural farms, greenhouses, restaurants, a dairy farm, and a brewery. However, as a result of the continuing degradation of vast areas of the AFF, there is a need for new policies for its improvement and ongoing management. This article is based on a project proposal entitled "Urban Dreams 9: Atatürk Forest Farm Areas Reclamation Project," which was prepared for a 2015 international design competition. Based on the analyses and evaluation of the AFF areas, the aim was to develop proposals at different scales with an emphasis on preservation and rehabilitation. The article argues that the preservation of the area in a multilayered state would allow the retention and adaptation of its original functions, providing the necessary integrity to the city and protecting the AFF for future generations.

Beyond History: The Aesthetics of Authenticity and the Politics of Heritage in Havana, Cuba

Gabriel Fuentes

In this article I argue that, under the assumption of "authenticity," history raises not only ethical problems of honesty...