Heritage in European cities: preserving or reinventing?

What makes up the heritage of European cities?

European cities have a common identity, which is obvious when you travel: you’ll find the main square, the market, the town hall, medieval, Renaissance and contemporary districts…

But attitudes to heritage are not always the same. In the UK, for example, it’s easier to add contemporary elements to a historic building without causing offence – although things are changing, this flexibility is less common in France.

The Germans were the first to convert their industrial heritage in the late 1980s, as demonstrated by the transformation of Emscher Park^[1] in the Ruhr. Conversely, in the spectacular renaissance of Bilbao, which I have studied extensively, all that remains is a building that bears witness to the industrial era, and I think that’s a shame.

For a long time, heritage was summed up as “old stones” and then as remarkable buildings. The notion was then extended to include quality urban ensembles, even if each one taken individually was not exceptional. Little-valued periods have also become part of heritage: XIX^th century buildings were slow to be protected, as were industrial heritage, suburbs and now large housing estates.

To my mind, heritage is our history, constitutes our attachment to places. It includes landscapes, the environment, ways of life…

You co-wrote the book “La ville pas chiante, alternatives à la ville générique”. Are European cities in danger of becoming boring?

Many of them are becoming boring for many reasons: urban extensions are often designed in a generic way, or according to the fashion of the moment, without preserving any evidence of the past, even if it’s banal, and I fear the worst if we entrust this to AI.

Historic town centres have been trivialised by commerce. You find the same signs everywhere, at the risk of no longer knowing where you are. How can we avoid this? I’m thinking of the town of Carouge, in Switzerland. It has a XIX^th century heritage, masterfully designed when it became part of Piedmont-Sardinia, like Nice and Turin by the Duke of Savoy. Its strong identity has been modernised by extensive pedestrianisation promoting the art of living well in the city. And no chain shops!  

Imagine people who are all the same age living together: this is often the built identity of new districts, and it’s ageing at the same time. Preserving witnesses to the past has ecological and memorial value, and diversifies the urban fabric. It is this mix of ages that makes up our cities, introducing surprise and wonder. Tomorrow’s heritage is the art of offering the pleasure of the city.

The challenge is to increase density and make people want to get out of their homes. We need to make ground floors transparent to the street, and rent them out, for example to artists, as recommended by the English, who say that profits are made on the upper floors and that the role of the ground floor is to enhance the neighbourhood.

How can we protect historic buildings without limiting the city’s dynamism?

I was recently in Milan. There has been a real embellishment of the city, under the impetus of Mayor Giuseppe Sala, who has given much more space to pedestrians. Industrial sites have been converted into cultural and design centres. Despite this, gentrification is undoubtedly underway, as in cities such as Barcelona and Lisbon, but also Bordeaux and Nantes. This is making these cities less mixed and less accessible to the middle classes, who have to move to the outskirts… A city can die of its own success: heritage means preserving what already exists, diversifying it, offering a multiplicity of styles, but also a multiplicity of people.

Why not take more freedom in the way you convert?  In small towns and villages, why not convert churches into public facilities or even housing, as the Canadians are doing? Take Breda in the Netherlands: it’s a city of just under 200,000 inhabitants, considered to be one of the most sustainable in the country. The cathedral is located in the city centre, and only a small part of it is dedicated to worship. The rest is a cultural and entertainment centre, and the monastery has become a casino!

Sometimes you have to touch on heritage if you want it to survive, which means de-densifying and demolishing to ensure it can be lived in. In Barcelona’s Barrio Chino, some streets were less than two metres wide. By destroying entire blocks and creating squares, we enabled the inhabitants to live in good conditions. Or Bayonne, a magnificent city, where the buildings in the old town were too tightly packed. Heritage architect Alexandre Melissonos grouped buildings together to create habitable flats, which was criticised, but the result is that the old town is now inhabited.

I think that if you’re not optimistic, you won’t become an urban planner! Our role is to detect the potential, even the hidden potential, of an area, whatever it may be, and to imagine how to make the most of it. We have to take a friendly look at the legacy of history, without excessive taboos, and be very open to the functions of tomorrow, which are often invented by civil society. If we don’t, we will paralyse the creativity needed to make the city vibrant, beautiful and desirable.

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^[1] Economic, ecological and cultural conversion programme in the Emscher valley, a former mining and steel-making region in Germany. The IBA Emscher Park has contributed to the renaissance of the Ruhr, a region devastated by coal mining and industry which, at the end of the 1980s, was hit by the closure of mines and the decline of the steel industry.