| Summary: | The paper considers the basic concepts of perceiving the city, first and
foremost its polarization against the country or the village and (much later)
polarization between the old "solidary" and contemporary anomic cities. Aside
from this, the paper considers the basic premises and practice of the
application of the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural
Heritage, which are mostly based on safeguarding/protecting premodern
cultural elements and - mostly essentialist - group identities, in order to
highlight the possibilities of reworking the conceptual framework for the
application of the Convention to - heretofore unknown - urban heritages which
originated on completely different premises, as well as the issues and
dilemmas which can arise from such attempts. The paper considers the
relationship between the Convention and the Modern age, the
perception/perceptions of the city, the city as palimpsest, and, ultimately
the relationship of the Convention with the city and (potential/possible)
intangible urban heritage. Attempts to safeguard specific forms of urban
intangible heritage have, heretofore, been faced with a slew of problems,
stemming first and foremost from the insistence on "backwardness" as
authenticity (Hafstein 2013, 45), but also the insistence on exoticism: that
which is safeguarded is completely different from contemporary western
civilization, completely in line with the definition of the exotic as
aestheticization which makes pain (of contemporary poverty as opposed to
colonial conquest of yore) into spectacle, and into culture (of global
society as opposed to the former colonial empire) (Arac and Ritvo 1991, 3).
Every city ever was and always is a crossroads of cultures - in space (those
with exist simultaneously), as well as in time (past and future). Of course,
the reading of such complex heritage, which constantly changes meaning even
if it retains the same or similar appearance, is a daunting task, while its
"safeguarding", whatever that may entail in the bureaucratic sense, is almost
unfeasible. Culture, definitely cannot be copyrighted (Brown 1998), so
neither can "tradition" - not even its material remnants - it cannot stay
unchanged whatever we may try. But this does not mean that we should not
attempt and keep discovering new ways in which heritage can be built into our
everyday lives - safeguarded in spirit, however much the form may vary.
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