Cultural heritage and tourism: contemporary tensions

Abstract

This article aims to reflect on the social tensions involved in the approximation between cultural heritage and tourism, focusing on recent events in the city of Barcelona. Based on a collection of sources concerning to two important tourist regions of that city (the monumental areas of the Parc Güell and the Old City), we try to problematize the ways and means by which the heritage has served as a support for contestations and reactions to the expansion of tourism in these regions. The article is divided into three parts. At first part, we present a theoretical discussion about the concepts and notions that we have mobilized in our recent researches and that help us in the debate about the disputes and tensions emerging from the tourist uses of places and heritages. At second, we seek to make an historical about the policies that guided the Barcelona urban changes and that implied in the patrimonialization and touristification of urban goods and places, as well as the ways in which they were appropriated to contest and interrogating their functions in the contemporaneousness of the city. In the last part, more than conclusions, we try to present some hypotheses that can subsidize new investigations on uses of the past and patrimonialization processes.