31 Heritage management

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Here I am introducing the notion of “heritage management” for two reasons: the first is that this process informs the city sponsored spectacles that claim to represent local cultural practices; and the second is that it also describes the field where cultural production, anthropology, and urban planning intersect—here is where local cultural practices, and theories of urban planning are reflexively commodified (usually by city/civic (chamber of commerce) for sale to tourists and residents.

“The generalizing tendency is inscribed in the very principle of the disposition to recognize legitimate works, a propensity and capacity to recognize their legitimacy and perceive them as worthy of admiration in themselves, which is inseparable from the capacity to recognize in them something already known, i.e., the stylistic traits appropriate to characterize them in their singularity (‘It’s a Rembrandt’ or even
‘It’s the Helmeted Man’) or as members of a class of works (‘It’s Impressionist’).”
(Bourdieu 1984, 25-26)

All of the issues surrounding the management of urban cultural authority, legitimacy, and taste are born in this process, and in the longer term, people’s life-styles and their bodies (habitus) are also managed. The appropriation of the work of artists and artisans leads to the formation of schools of art, and the exclusion of the works of those not admitted into such schools. And in Kyoto there are various city, county, and civic art associations for every genre of artistic production, and each has its own exhibits and its own gate that can open up to the “right” person, and can shut out the rest. The creation of positions within the field of artistic production informs dispositions that are never fully discursified. But the institutional stakes within the market for authenticated tastes (and here, for “real-Kyoto” arts and artifacts) are visible and quantifiable—for example, one can easily look at what is put into cultural museums.

I want to argue that there are alternatives to this style of cultural management, alternatives that are advantageous to the continuing production of cultural works in a city, and that also create openings for novel and counter-productions. When heritage (patrimoine) includes the ongoing “work” of art in the city; and when management engages the need to protect and enliven the plurality of urban cultural forms—then the city itself becomes a cultural work, a factory of local production that requires little management, and that creates and critiques its own tastes,

I will focus here on Kyoto, as the processes of heritage management were quite openly on display there during the time of my fieldwork¹ (1992-1994).

playing to the tourists

It is impossible to discuss Kyoto’s history and present circumstances without first addressing the realities of Kyoto’s tourist industry, and the effect that this has upon the city, its administration, and, most of all, its general economic future. In some ways, Kyoto has always been selling itself. For centuries the capital city, Kyoto was the locus of social and religious pilgrimages, and it sold its wares and pleasures to secular and sacerdotal aristocrats. Their patronage made Kyoto the center of a long and often remarkable cultural efflorescence.

In what follows, I do not want to even appear to belittle the artistic heritage of this city. But, the fortunes of Kyoto, which were not entirely good during the occupancy of the various emperors (the city was burned to the ground more than once) became much more problematic after the emperor Meiji moved to Tokyo.

In actual and symbolic terms, the creation of “Tokyo”—arguably the world’s most dynamic metropolitan center—has come at Kyoto’s direct expense. It was in adjusting to its reduced circumstances that Kyoto has made its share of planning mistakes. I do not intend to dwell on these mistakes, but will attempt, instead, bring certain social-scientific and urban-planning notions to the problems faced by Kyoto today.

Kyoto is a tourist town. By the city’s own count, about forty million tourists visit Kyoto every year, although this figure includes the annual tsunami (deluge) of school groups that peaks in the spring. To attract such hordes, Kyoto trades quite lucratively, if somewhat brazenly, on the longevity of its habitation.

Much of Kyoto’s early history has been rather recently reinvented (along with histories to be forgotten) to support the city’s contention that nothing essential here has changed. It takes, however, only a brief stay and a bit of looking around for even the most devout tourist—who, after all, has paid good money to revel in Kyoto’s antiquity—to arrive at just the opposite conclusion: here is a town where almost nothing is like it was before.

Valorizing the old capital

Kyoto sells itself as a kind of Rome on the Kamo river: a place where ancient dynasties flourished and fought (and fornicated), and, in the process, forged that rare “alloy” known as “elite culture.” Ever dwindling stocks of this stuff make up the mother-lode of Kyoto’s tourist drawing power. Kyoto spins less and less new “alloy” every year, and meanwhile, consumes itself in the process of pandering its historical image².

Out on the streets, the cultural vending machines (the tourist traps outside all of the historic sites) are all in place, but today “authentic” Kyoto-esque merchandise, old or new, are far too dear for the tourist trade. Only those arts that, in former eras, were refined to meet aristocratic appetites for glamour and style, are today touted as uniquely Kyoto-esque.

Kyoto’s famous goods: Kiyomizu pottery, Nishijin silk weaving, and hand-painted (yuzen) kimono—are all now fantastically expensive. Upholding the standards, and the prices (and control over production and style) of these “aristocratic” artistic traditions also locks out novel and creative inputs. The local artistic community is trapped by the effects of ten centuries of this cultural “gentrification.” Meanwhile, the sightseer is offered mass-produced trinkets—the same James Dean towel and “Hello Kitty” coffee cups they could buy anywhere in Japan—as remembrances of their visit to “historic” Kyoto.

This sort of reverse bait-and-switch marketing (show them the good stuff and then sell them kitsch) actually proves the deepest anxiety of the Kyoto tourist industry: the fear that authenticity—real places, real history, real pottery—might now longer matter to the tourist. When tradition becomes only a come-on for the hotel trade, then Kyoto is forced to compete with every other tourist destination in Japan on something like equal terms. The irony here is that Kyoto is also guilty of sacrificing “tradition” for image. As David Harvey noted, the substitution of a city’s image for actual historical continuity places cities, like Kyoto, in the same business as theme parks.

“...The irony is that tradition is now often preserved by being commodified and marketed as such. The search for roots ends up at worst being produced and marketed as an image, as a simulacrum or pastiche (imitation communities constructed to evoke images of some folksy past, the fabric of traditional working-class communities being taken over by an urban gentry)....At best, historical tradition is reorganized as a museum culture, not necessarily of high modernist art, but of local history, of local production, of how things once upon a time were made, sold, consumed, and integrated into a long-lost and often romanticized daily life (one from which all trace of oppressive social relations may be expunged). Through the presentation of a partially illusory past it becomes possible to signify something of local identity and perhaps to do it profitably.”

In this decade, in Wakayama and Toba city (both within a few hours by fast train from Kyoto) new “historical” theme parks have opened their gates to the public.

Porto Europa and Shima Spain Village both offer a complete, “historical” experience, from the cobblestones underfoot, to the banners on the turrets overhead; a simulacrum of places long ago and far away, and with convenient hotels and thrill rides for the young. The latter expects to draw three million visitors a year. The “eighteenth century” Porto Europa is being built on a new island, which means that not even the land was there in the eighteenth century.

Managing the new/old Kyoto

As the home of the secretariat of the Conference of World Historical Cities, Kyoto has sponsored a network of cities with a similar problematic in front of them all: how does an “historical city” recreate its past as a project for its future? And how does it develop its own history to open up new avenues of cultural production for its city-zenry?

The most interesting input to the 4th World Conference of Historical Cities, held in 1994 in Kyoto, came from Kraków, Poland. The International Cultural Centre in Kraków has described a project now called “heritage management, ” which takes historical-city urban planning beyond the preservation and conservation of existing historical sites, to the integrative reconstruction of the urban landscape as an ongoing work of history.

The tasks involved in heritage management are multiple and complex, dealing as they do with inventories of ideologically supported national cultural historical symbolism as well as valuable real estate. And nowhere are national symbols and real estate more highly valued than they are in Kyoto.

Heritage management requires that the physical and mental landscape of places and ideas be opened up to a reflexive imagination. The heritage of any city is a pluralistic one, and the future of this belongs to all of residents of the city. So it is important that heritage management is done transparently, in a democratically determined arena where conflicting ideas are available and where the outcome remembers this conflict.

Whether or not there is the political will and the public financing necessary to accomplish the physical tasks of heritage management is a large question.

As a recent issue of Kenchiku Bunka [Modern Culture] (February 1994) reveals, there is no lack of informed concern and design skills available locally to accomplish the physical/design end of the project. It is on the other end of the task, on the cultural/symbolic side of heritage management, where there is need for new approaches if Kyoto is going to escape becoming a mere simulacrum of itself. There is, for example, a real issue in determining just how much “historicity” is good for the present.

What is historicity? To begin with, it is the living continuity of practices through time.

What is historicity? To begin with, it is the living continuity of practices through time. Historicity resides only thinly in the stones of the streets, the tiled temple roofs, and the screened windows of the remaining old houses in Kyoto. It dwells more deeply, and precariously, in the chorus of the feet that walk these streets, in the hands that build the screens, and the mouths that chant beneath these tiled roofs. If we use “historicity” in this sense of practices or places with continuity³ to the present, we can leave other types of urban history to paleontologists and curators.

Any city desiring to preserve its historicity must find some mode of dealing with its various histories.

Any city desiring to preserve its historicity must find some mode of dealing with its various histories. The problem is to bring a healthy coherence to this deal. As Michel de Certeau, surveying Manhattan from the top a skyscraper noted;

“Unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding.” (1984, 91)

For de Certeau, Rome is a city content to built upon its own history, while New York represents not only the modern impulse to build, but the modernist impulse to dismantle its past in the process.

de Certeau’s comment about the difference between New York and Rome applies internally and paradoxically to Kyoto, a city in the process of dismantling itself in the name of tradition. The outcome of this irreconcilable conflict in civic intention is that Kyoto is neither Rome nor New York, nor, eventually even Kyoto, as what it dismantles is not replaced by a conscious will to build. Kyoto is rapidly becoming simply another suburb of Osaka, a place that will, if conditions continue, be known mainly for its proximity to Nara⁴.

Kyoto, as much as other historical cities, should know that simple age⁵ does not make for historical interest. It is the living continuity of the past in the present which gives the present its tenuous hold on the long beard of history. So too, it is the grasping of the present for the future that determines the arena of cultural fashion.

But Kyoto seems confounded by the conflicting desire to be both completely traditional and also au courant. Or rather, one notices a concern that “tradition” and “fashion” (or innovation) have become mutually exclusive markets, and that all of Kyoto’s cultural eggs are most precariously perched in only one of these baskets. Precarious, because tradition itself is no longer treated with the measure of “traditional” respect that Kyoto had grown to enjoy.

In Kyoto the present and the past are never on very good terms. We have to consider that a major problem for Kyoto’s desire to maintain its historicity is directly due to the modernist impulse to reject history and tradition as the primary warrants for the value of practices and places in general. And so, for Kyoto to preserve the heritage of its past, it must first come to some decision about the nature of its present.

The supermarket of the present

The present found at any place is an outcome of that place’s past, and so these are all singularly different. The existence of local varieties of “the present” once provided the charms of travel (and thus, tourism) and the central project of anthropology: to explore—and commodify—this plurality⁶.

Where formerly “a present” held its geographical singularity on a basically local scale (much the same way that “local time” once ruled the clocks), there is now “the present,” a new place/time available on a much more distanciated scale. This is the present of CNN and MTV, and of currency markets, the great urban metropolises (now linked by digital information nets and standardized construction codes), and globalized consumer commodity desires.

As Gavatri Spivak once noted, there are still places and peoples on the margins, and sometimes increasingly so, of this global cosmopolitan network. In Kyoto the desire to belong to a globally validated life-style is very strong. And the more this desire grows, the more it preempts locally validated cultural production. Buying in to the global present requires opting out of purely local cultural critiques.

The point here is that heritage management is extremely problematic in the context of a modernizing global present. To preserve historicity one must protect the value of local historic practices for people today. But you also have to accept that antiquity has precious little exchange value in the global supermarket of our common present. And so, if the task of preserving history is not simply to be handed over to those who would profit from establishing a market for local antique wares (i.e., to the museums and collectors) then we need to find some other reason to value the past as a local property.

Historical legitimacy and cultural value

Additionally, the wider historical problem we are faced with is actually quite the reverse of what we have proposed; it asks us to following: how do we escape those histories that seem to plague us? Histories of totalitarianism, of intolerant nationalism, of official cruelty, of war and genocide; and the smaller histories of families which holds their own violences. How can we expunge these from the present in a manner that does not invite their eventual resurrection in the future (even if, as Marx noted, this comes as farce)? How can the present strengthen its grip on the beard of the past while loosening history’s fingers from its own hair?

The desire to simply forget, when history makes us uncomfortable, is a desire to avoid justice, to skip out when the bill comes due (it is the desire that someone else will forget). It was Henri Lefevbre who noted, “silence is not the same thing as quietus.” Keeping quiet about this has never once resolved a history of oppression. For this history, as Connerton (1989) [after Foucault and Bourdieu] reminds us, is inscribed in language and space, and embodied in flesh and stone.

In short, there are plenty of “traditions” around us that we might not want to preserve, and we have to have a way of disentangling these from those we do. The modern distrust of “tradition” as a blanket warrant for the value of practices makes all histories (including its own) subject to devaluation. This opens up an arena for the discussion of historical legitimacy and innovative intervention. It reminds us that the mere continuity of any practice does not signify its legitimacy. Finally, the main advantage of heritage management as a practice is lost if we are simply, and without recourse to critical intervention, stuck with all the history we’ve inherited. If that were so, I would be the first to say bring in the bulldozers.

To create the kind of historicity that the future might want as its past, we have to dance on the grave of injustice. And for this we have to re-place the sites of oppression. Such sites are not always memorialized on the ground somewhere (not even by their forgetting). This is because oppression also is carried in the body, the person: i.e., its subject. Preserving the heritage of Kyoto’s historicity matters little if this does not create a new personal heritage for all of Kyoto’s city-zens. In fact, heritage preservation, at its best, offers a space of therapy, of person-place identity, of continuity, of selfhood.

Spaces that work

One could, of course, assert that every Kyoto institution, practice, and object has its own history, and that these are intertwined into larger flows with durative episodes and also ruptures, and, finally that some even larger matrix contains the sum of what we could call Kyoto’s “history.” However, when the time comes to consider heritage management, it does not help us much to note that everything is, in this way, historical and connected to everything else. Kyoto's city-zens need a much firmer grasp on history. In fact, we require a grip somewhat stronger than the one history has on us, if we are going to begin to manage Kyoto’s heritage.

Heritage management must sort out what to manage and what to leave to its own future. For this, it uses historicity as a theoretic-practical lever to pull from the historical field those practices and institutions that have (or that we want to have) cultural/economic value in the present, and to examine the reasons why value exists or, conversely, why practices that once had value have lost this.

Adding value

This use of historicity engages heritage management in the larger power arena of cultural production, valuation, and consumption. Here is where heritage management decisions will ultimately succeed or fail. Heritage management proposes to add value to the cultural assets of a city. It can do this in either (or both) of two ways: by legitimating the antique value of the thing being managed, or by adding value its current manufacture. The former, antiquarian, impulse—the desire to produce monuments, historical parks, and museums—is generally (mis)taken as the main strategy for heritage management. And in Japan, where new building construction is viewed as a type of urban panacea, this impulse is particularly attractive to city leaders.

Rather, I want to suggest here that heritage management should look first to support practices which unify the place and its past with its everyday life in the present. This unity signals the active resonance a place has with its history.

As Henri Lefevbre noted, nowhere is this unity more evident than in Venice, Italy:

“Venice, more than any other place, bears witness to the existence, from the sixteenth century on, of a unitary code or common language of the city. This unity goes deeper, and in a sense higher, than the spectacle Venice offers the tourist. It combines the city's reality with its ideality, embracing the practical, the symbolic and the imaginary....Here everyday life and its functions are coextensive with, and utterly transformed by, a theatricality as sophisticated as it is unsought, a sort of involuntary mise-en-scène. There is even a touch of madness added for good measure (1991, 73-74).”

The space of Venice is still being reworked as a vital cultural matrix for the lives of its inhabitants; Venice is a live performance where the curtain never comes down. Lefevbre is setting up Venice in contrast to other cities where, regrettably, the show has already closed for the season.

Lefevbre’s radical critique of modern notions of “space” is useful in determining the proper arena for heritage management. For Lefevbre, a space is either the result of production or the result of work. “Production” refers to a process of marshaling labour and other resources, and the making of a “product.” Products (from VCRs to skyscrapers) share a common history as they are all outcomes of this production process.

making products instead of works

The scope of production has greatly enlarged in the last two hundred years to include not only household appliances and vehicles but streets, houses, office and municipal buildings and their sitings. Entire cities are now produced (e.g., Chandigar or Brazilia). And spatial production extends across the landscape in the form of highways and railways.

In a city, there are two possible types of spaces: the space-as-product⁷ and the space-as-work. A space-as-product dominates the imagination. It announces itself completely. A space-as-product is not lived, but only used—and used in ways determined solely by the product. Museums and historical monuments transform all of their visitors into tourists. And cities that manage their own urban spaces as historical sites turn their own residents into tourists, who, like the residents of Kyoto (and Japan—although not foreign tourists) wishing to visit to Old Kyoto Imperial Palace, who must wait for that one day a year when the gates open and the guards are ready to make sure that nobody gets too close to the woodwork.

Lives and Works

For Lefevbre, “work” maintains its singularity, and its outcomes, such as “works of art,” are never actually finished. An artist (or a worker, in Lefevbre's sense) always has the right to redo a work and change this. However, works also become products, individually when they are sold, and as an opus, on the day their worker/artist dies. If these products maintain their market, they will gain value as antiques.

A space-as-work is a site of ongoing creations, interventions and appropriations. It is an affirmatively anti-antique space, full of surprises and open to change. The “village square” in many different societies is (or, too often, was) such a space-as-work. Through it flows a panoply of festivals, markets, executions, rallies, and games.

A space-as-work is the outcome of a spatial logic that refuses to be reduced to a single dominant use. A space-as-work is not definable as the square, or the street, or the building itself, but rather it includes the daily life of these. A space-as-work opens itself up to the imaginations of individuals who enter this. This effect, of course, requires some careful upfront design-work.

From Bauhaus to Maihômu

Modernist architects in the beginning of the century attempted to release the imaginations of those who live or work in their buildings by freeing their designs from static canons of ornamentation, scale, and construction. However, the proliferation of modern architectural products—those countless buildings in every city in the world (including Kyoto) that were constructed without serious architectural intent—heralded the failure of modern architecture (at least in its “international style” mode). Whether this was a failure to adequately articulate its own logic of design, or a more radical defect in this logic, is still being debated.

Instead of “less is more,” (a modernist credo) the world has discovered that “less” regularly means exactly that. And cities that settled for less are now saddled with it: hulking drab cubes with vacuous open floor plans and façades worth not even a first glance. These spaces-as-products, excreted from the same modernist design process, make up the great majority of post-war construction in Kyoto. By their graceless presence, and their lack of historicity, they are destroying the living unity of Kyoto.

The design task of heritage management is to utilize local spatial logics and vernacular construction skills to repair or rebuild buildings-, streets-, neighborhoods-, and cities-as-works that are lived, that are theatrical and festive. A city where people want will want to live, work and play. A place, in fact, much too good for tourists (which makes it that much more attractive to them).

The limits of cultural planning

Before getting to more specific ideas about heritage management in Kyoto, there is one caveat that needs to be aired. A central predicament of urban planning is as follows: planning, because it is “product oriented,” produces cities that are products rather than “works.” The more that planners attempt to create a total environment, the more that their plans become totalizing: closed to further creative appropriation of the spaces so planned—and the more the city becomes a product, which is similar to other products, to other cities. In terms of historicity, this means the more a space is planned, the more it acquires the history of the planners and less it can maintain any sui generis local historicity. This limit to planning will become much clearer when we talk about festivals, but it applies just as well to buildings and parks as to parades (See also: Imagine the festival as a building.).

Good urban planning is intentionally partial. It provides the seed that starts the life of a city-as-work. This germinal effort must plan-in a load of complexity, ambiguity and, perhaps, even a little madness, as surprises for those who will live with these spaces throughout their lives. After all, any culture that does not delight its owners is better off forgotten. And so, heritage management must relinquish the desire to create a turn-key heritage landscape.

Festivity — laissez les bons temps rouler!

Here we have the final challenge for heritage management: how to conserve the performances of a local culture. Again, the tendency (in Kyoto and other “historic cities”) has been to treat all cultural performances as ritual dramas, and to repeat these, as much as possible, precisely as they were done the time before. In this way, performance becomes a product, separated from its initial creative inception, and its space-as-product is but a dark, cold sarcophagus.

Every year in Kyoto, this sarcophagus is opened and the corpse of some former cultural work (now a helpless antique) is made to dance the very same ritual dance it has staged for far too many years. They call this event “Jidai Matsuri” or “Aoi Matsuri” (the two are, at times, as indistinguishable as they are undistinguished). Then the costumed body is sealed back up for another year. The tourists are sold on the authentic antiquity of what they are shown, which only serves to make them embarrassed by their own yawns.

The boredom of onlookers who wait through traffic interruptions and other delays to watch the spectacle of Kyoto’s biggest festival, Gion Matsuri, is a sad commentary on an event with a history of active festivity. Depictions of this event in prior times (the Edo period) show clowns and dancers engaging the onlookers who are themselves in danger of being in the path of the giant yamaboko floats.
photo by author

The festival-as-product can never improve on itself, it can only fail (a horse throws its rider, a costume is worn backwards, someone forgets to light the sacred fire).

Today, many of the participants of the Gion Matsuri perform their stylized roles with barely concealed boredom.
Photo by author

Instead of laughter, such an event comes loaded with excuses (it was raining, the sound tape broke, they don’t make’ em like they used to). But then, a festival-as-product is not actually a festival. A festival-as-product begs the question: “Are we having fun yet?” The answer, as you already know, is this: “Not if you have to ask.”

Vital signs

As I noted in relation to its repertoire of neighborhood festivals above, overall, the civic festivals in Kyoto suffer from what might not inaccurately (if perhaps too glibly) be called “cultural sclerosis,” caused by a hardening of the artistry which once created the events. The major civic historical festivals of Kyoto (the Aoi Matsuri in May, the Gion Matsuri in July, and the Jidai Matsuri in October) are mostly well supported and competently managed, in the sense that they begin and end on time and look nearly the same as the did last year. And with some more careful looking the amount of artistry that went into an earlier construction of these events becomes evident in their costumes and appurtenances.

Indeed, with all of this activity and splendor it is even more curious, and rather sad, to note how completely many of these historical festivals fail to exhibit either historicity or festivity. Given the resources currently made available for festivity in Kyoto, there is little reason to be pessimistic about the potential for Kyoto to reinvigorate its festival production. All this would take is some new creative imagination.

All production and no play

What Kyoto’s planners lack (and this lack is widely shared among urban and civic planners in other cities around the world) is an adequate grasp of some rather fundamental predicaments of historicity and festivity. The concept of “historicity” is far too often confused with “antique value,” even though these are roughly antithetical. So to, the notion of “festivity” is often confused with its “spectacular” appearance. As if looking festive was enough.

These two mistakes are often combined into events called “historical festivals,” but which are, actually, “antiquarian spectacles:” pageants-as-products. I would suggest that festivity is related to its spectacle component much as a good meal is to its written recipe. There is an undeniable connection between the two, but which would you rather find on your plate?

In precisely the same way that a good cook and a great recipe work together to produce something awfully tasty, the city space and its community need to work in concert to make a festival “festive.” It is the transformation of physical and social space during this work that gives festivity something to do. That makes festivity worth the attempt. Later in Part Two I will be focusing on festivity itself, here I will simply mark out some performative parameters that define “festivity.” From these, we can begin to notice where this does not occur, might occur, should occur (but doesn’t), and, most of all, probably will occur any time now. We can, within certain limits, begin to plan for festivity.

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald noticed that, during a party (any good one) there is a special moment when the party actually begins, despite the minutes or hours before this moment when people were also dancing, drinking, and laughing. At that moment a transformation occurs, a boundary is crossed. Gatsby’s town is, of course, Hollywood:

“The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.

Suddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the Follies. The party has begun.”

Erving Goffman in his book Frame Analysis (1974, 262) used this quote to note how events such as parties (and here I would certainly include festivals) are planable only to a certain level, after which the organizers can only hope that their event, like an inspired infant, takes it to mind to stand up on its own and begin to boogie.

New suggestions for heritage management

In a special “1200th Anniversary” edition of the Kyoto Journal, I suggested the briefest of outlines of a basic plan for city-wide heritage management in Kyoto. I also convinced the Kyoto Journal to allow me to approach the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, to ask its students to participate in a design project centered on a reexamination of the Kyoto Gosho—the site of the Imperial Palace before the Emperor moved to Tokyo. Here is the outline I suggested in 1994:

At the physical end of the task, heritage management must come down to the street level, to those remaining buildings and sites of any antiquity in Kyoto. The following plan represents the least intervention sufficient to reconstruct an historic living urban physical landscape for Kyoto.

As with any preservation scenario, this one starts with a moratorium on the destruction of buildings older than, say, seventy years in Kyoto’s downtown wards (Kamigyo, Nakagyo, and Shimogyo) and the conservation of these structures. But the more interesting task comes in the re-imagining and realization of the Kyoto streetscape itself as an historical site. Architectural review using a vocabulary of historically grounded design parameters needs to be instituted for all new construction. Finally the reconstruction of a contiguous street façade based upon some agreed upon historical period will require the condemning and demolition of some modern buildings.

Historicity Pathways

Kyoto deserves to be strolled through; to retell its own stories in the echoing footsteps of the casual pedestrian. This is its true scale and rightful future. The major emphasis for heritage management should be the creation of pathways through the city. A selection should first be made of certain avenues that will serve as historically conserved pathways connecting cultural, retail, and commercial nodes. Along these historicity-pathways actual period (wooden construction) buildings could be assembled, having been moved from their current sites in and out of the city. Fortunately, the typical Edo-period city-house (machiya) is relatively easy to move and reassemble. The control of auto traffic and other measures designed to enhance the experience of these pathways, including the retail mix, will need to be determined in consultation with the people who will live on these streets.

The historicity-pathways should be managed as social and cultural residential/retail cooperatives, and used to attract a variety of artists into the city. This will help stimulate a creative mixture of art forms that have long local traditions, together with others that might inform new traditions. Some of these houses should also be made available to those city-zens of Kyoto who are now living in areas of the town that are subject to Japan’s unique form of residential racism. To reduce the effects of gentrification, these properties should be held as a public trust, with managed rents and careful attention to their conservation.

Still other sites need to be looked at to provide civic spaces for recreation and cultural production in addition to their value as historical places. And there is a need for hundreds of small-scale projects each aimed at enhancing a corner here, a building there, or a river course, in order to articulate the pluralistic desires and histories of individual neighborhoods. There it is, at its most programmatic level: a basic plan to jumpstart Kyoto's heritage management effort. But where to actually begin?

Central Park Kyoto

In Kyoto, the central space that most needs rethinking is the Gosho, the grounds of the Old Kyoto Imperial Palace, which is geographically and culturally the central place of the city, and should be opened up for multiple uses by the local residents. The Kyoto Journal is proposing a redesign project for the site of the Old Kyoto Imperial Palace (the Kyoto Gosho). This project, called “Central Park Kyoto,” will improve the economic and cultural value of the site in several ways, while returning this (or much of it) to all the city-zens of Kyoto.

The current Kyoto Gosho buildings and grounds are neither very old (by Kyoto’s standards), nor very interesting in terms of their political history. This palace was mainly occupied during the time of political rule by various Shoguns. Japan’s real “capital” during this period was Niji Castle and later Edo Castle. At the time of the Meiji Restoration, the Kyoto Gosho was hastily abandoned in favor of the Edo (Tokyo) palace. The various existing buildings and their furnishings—which are absolutely worth saving—would be carefully moved and rebuilt (perhaps on the site of the Tokyo Palace or on the grounds of Nijo Castle). One might note that Kyoto also has a long history of such re-sitings.

The current realities of the absence of the Emperor from Kyoto, and the new democratic political system of Japan, have turned this cultural work into another antique—into a product of history. Without the actual august personage in residence (and with the purse to make the cultural performances roll) the palace is only another period-style building. But the Gosho site, by its scale and geography, and its connection with the history of the imperial court, lies close to Kyoto’s heart. It is a mirror of the city’s self-image. And so the Gosho will be the centerpiece for any heritage management in Kyoto.

To explore the potential for redesigning the Gosho, the Kyoto Journal enlisted the help of graduate students of the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. In its proposal, the Kyoto Journal outlined the project in this way:

“The task for your students would be to redesign the Kyoto Imperial Palace grounds to emphasize multiple uses for this site...: [1] a new residence built to accommodate members of the imperial family...; [2] a public historical monument to the imperial history of Kyoto; and [3] a “central park” for Kyoto with maximal open space, and which is connected to the surrounding residential and business districts.”

The intention is to add value to this site for use by the city and the city-zens of Kyoto.

¹In fact, 1994 was a year-long “festival” in honor of the city’s 1200th anniversary, a celebration that was marred by the recent collapse of the local economy (and also of the national economy), a circumstance that forced the city to curtail almost all of the planned events (but curiously little of the advertising). This situation highlighted the down-side of heritage management as spectacle-production: this brings with it expectations that can be quite expensive.

²The year 1994, the 1200th anniversary of the founding of the city, was particularly expensive for the city’s historical image, as every local event, from a prize-fight to new sewer construction, was touted as a tribute to Kyoto’s ancient times.

³Continuity is why the inner shrines of the Ise Jingu are legitimately the world’s oldest wooden buildings, even though they are completely rebuilt every twenty years. The architectural design, physical skill, and materials necessary to rebuild these survives intact (which is much more than can be said for many important buildings completed in the United States in the last hundred years).

⁴Nara was the site of the Imperial Palace before this was moved to Kyoto.

⁵Kyoto likes to think of itself as a city with a history of historicity. This history is also of modern invention. Kyoto has burned itself down many times and forgotten much more about itself than it now can, or cares to, recall.

⁶The notion that “the past is a foreign country” was also inverted in the nineteenth century, when notions of a single evolutionary trajectory for “culture” —a time-line arrow with its point pointed at Western Europe—allowed anthropologists to discover “pre-historic” tribes in remote (from Western Europe) places. This idea of looking for “our” past in “their” present dismisses the content and accomplishments of modernities in so-called “developing” nations.

⁷To Lefevbre’s notion of a space-as-product, I want to add one more crucial point: a product has no historicity—it does not continue its creation up to the present. The process of production excretes its products, guaranteed dead on delivery. As soon as a product is made, the history of its creation is finished. A product that acquires exchange value as an antique does so through the loss of its historicity. An artifact becomes “historical” by severing its use in the present.