Heritage preservation and neighborhood improvement : constructing Macao as a heterotopia

Cultural heritage preservation is being threatened by the continually accelerating urbanization and economical-cultural globalization in modern China. The preserving problems caused by urban expansion, spatial distribution and the cultural invasion in heritage sites have gone beyond the binary opposites: preservation or development. Instead they have become cross-disciplinary issues. And it is noticed unavoidably that these problems has resulted in not only the spatial isolation of heritage sites in urban context, especially the historic areas in the modern cities, but also the loss of local cultural identity and the breakdown of social network. Under such prerequisite, I chose Macao world heritage site as a study case to examine the difficulties in Macao’s heritage preservation. Its complex history as a preservation project, its high-pressure urban development, and the dilemma being a post-colonial state in building its own cultural identity, the preservation practices and protocols, as well as various discourses together construct Macao world heritage site into a heterotopia. Through the studying of the Heterotopia space concept raised by Foucault as a theoretical framework, and the interpretation of the preservation movements in Macao as a heterotopia, chapter 2 engages how world heritage program’s international place-making transformed an every day life place into a world site and how local preserving practices responded to it as communities of living memory. Heritage preservation is not only the cultural tool of modern nation-states as building the national identity, as well the method for local societies and communities of rebuilding their sense of belonging, and also a strategy of developing local cultural tourism. From the ground level, I view the problems bottom-up in Macao’s heritage tourism and analyze the travel experiences from the first person point of viewin the chapter 3. Some problems are obvious: the lack of promotion as a heritage site, the unbalance of protection between different monuments, and the failure on building a continual experience along the lineal heritage sites. Yet the local place making and memory work offers a different understanding on how heritage is preserved and produced, and there is quite a chance to improve the preservation work by involving the local communities.