Preservation and Globalization

Across disciplines, the consensus opinion is that the twenty-first century will be defined by globalization. To prepare the professionals of tomorrow, universities are launching initiatives of various sorts and ambition to rethink the form and content of pedagogy.¹ Yet, in most of these enterprises it is presumed that we all share a common understanding and experience of globalization, that we all know what are its characteristics and its future. This issue of Future Anterior looks at ways in which problems of preservation help us pause and reexamine what we understand by the term "globalization" and conversely how different ways of thinking about globalization press us to rethink the practices of preservation itself.

Recent scholarship has focused mainly on the role that international heritage institutions have played in advancing globalization. UNESCO's towering position among government-sponsored institutions has made the history of its international preservation campaigns, and its more recent "World Heritage Convention," the subject of important critical scrutiny.² Another significant branch of scholarship has focused on the role that heritage institutions play in the commodification of heritage, alongside other private agents (e.g., the global tourism industry) and on the way that development discourse inscribes preservation within a global logic of finance even when it is carried out under the banner of "local" involvement.³ While in dialogue with this institutionally oriented scholarship, the essays in this issue approach the study of preservation and globalization through different lenses. By shifting away from institutional critique, they discover preservation in unsuspected places, where various understandings and experiences of globalization are in formation and in contention.

Manish Chalana sees preservation emerging in the friction between conflicting class interests. He shows how preservation served as a framework for articulating class-bound notions of the public interest in architecture. The saying that preservation protects the public interest in architecture always refers to a singular public. But Chalana shows there to be multiple conflicting publics in the struggle between the working-class inhabitants of Girangaon, an old industrial district of Mumbai, and new upper-class residents. Architectural preservation has tended to shy away from such debates about gentrification, opting instead to stay narrowly focused on stylistic significance, as a way to steer clear of accusations of social engineering. Yet in this case, preservation emerges precisely out of the conflict and out of the desire of working-class residents to shield themselves against the power of newcomers to leverage global capital and to develop what were de facto public parks. Quin Shao also sees preservation as providing a system for expressing the social tensions and differences that arise within competing ideas of globalization. But her study of the Lincoln Lane neighborhood in Shanghai also shows that such celebrations can sometimes be hypocritical, as when so-called preservation experts first defend community preservation plans then turn around and advocate the demolition of those same historic buildings. The presence of tensions between amateurs and professionals is not new, nor is it the exclusive province of preservation,⁴ but what is new is the leverage of preservation amateurs in the age of digital social networking and broadcasting. William J. Glover shows how the conflict of values between amateurs and professionals involved in the restoration of Sikh Gurdwaras is not easily resolved, as both make equal claims to represent the interests of global communities whose preservation values are in many ways mutually exclusive. The very nature of the conflict in values makes it nearly impossible to resolve by attempting to incorporate the views of amateurs, who often represent themselves as the community, into internationally sanctioned professional preservation practices. This conclusion comes in striking contrast to Paola Demattè's demonstration of the willingness of professional preservationists to reconsider their deontological values in order to accommodate development, especially when it is perceived as inevitable, as in the case of the Three Gorges Dam.

If preservation serves indeed as a system for articulating various experiences of globalization, then the matter of expression, and indeed of preservation's aesthetics, is of central importance. Janike Kampevold Larsen's study of Norway's Tourist Route Project provides a fascinating exploration of...