Urban authenticity

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Authenticity as the purportedly original, pure, or true character of persons, objects or practices has become a major public discourse, a powerful driver of heritage debates and cultural change and a key research issue in the humanities. From theatre and museums studies to heritage conservation and the historical sciences scholars dispute the ways in which authenticity indicates and triggers cultural change in modern societies. While there is a broad consensus among constructivist approaches that historical authenticity was and is always socially and culturally produced, and that there is no such thing as the pure or the original in terms of materiality, the case of built heritage seems to challenge this approach.

Here strong academic and public controversies have emerged on the role and impact of materiality for authenticity. We also see serious political conflicts in European urban societies over the reconstruction of buildings and urban areas, from Dresden to Berlin and from Potsdam to Frankfurt, as well as in European cities such as Mostar, Riga, Sarajevo, and Vilnius. Citizens groups, municipal boards and experts are heatedly debating the projects for the reconstruction of historical buildings and urban areas. This project is the first to systematically analyse patterns of such discourses in a transnational historiographical perspective.

The study focuses on public debates and practices of citizens initiatives, city councils and other actors in the area of tension between building policy, tourism, migration since the 1970s in cities of the Federal Republic of Germany, the GDR, Poland and France: Nuremberg, Potsdam, Szczecin and Marseille.
Visual sources are especially important as a question of the significance of visual memory for the authentication of the built heritage. About 200 visual sources (photographs, paintings, brochures) of the Berlin-Brandenburg region will therefore be presented on a separate website and will be related to selected visual sources of the four subprojects in a European context.

Freely available

Formal type Online

Publisher

freely available

Access Type
Access link	https://urban-authenticity.eu/

If you have any questions about the database or licensing, please contact e-medien.ub@uni-mannheim.de

Resource id

105522

Subjects

Architecture, Civil Engineering Geography History

Database types

Portal

Keywords

Berlin Brandenburg Marseille Nuremberg Szczecin Urban development Urban renewal Urban design architecture authenticity Cultural Heritage debate History 1945 - Website

Notes

Not specified

Instructions

Not specified

Further information

Editors	Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Pots... Institut für Zeitgeschichte München-Berlin (IfZ) Leibniz-Institut für Raumbezogene Sozialforschung ... Herder-Institut für Historische Ostmitteleuropafor... Museumsverband des Landes Brandenburg
Countries	Brandenburg Deutschland Frankreich Polen

External identifiers

ZDB	3163558-1

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