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A. Aigner:
"What heritage does to residents. Case study Vienna Werkbund estate";
Talk: Local Imapct of Heritage-Making; 4th Meeting of the SIEF´s Working Group on Cultural Heritage and Property, University of Barcelona (invited); 2012-09-13 - 2012-09-14.

This paper reports on a modernist housing estate built in 1931/32 in the outskirts of Vienna and is now under (national) monumental protection since 1978. It addresses the question of how the process of becoming a monument affects the residents´ perception and practices: What does it mean to live in a `jewel´ of modernist architecture? How do the residents deal with the restrictions of monument preservation? How are their lives affected by architecture tourism? How do owners/tenants adopt and reproduce the idea of their dwellings as `cultural heritage´? Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, the cultural process of preservation is read as a cultural struggle, in which the enforcement of the norms of taste of experts leads to elimination of personal adaptations and exclusion of `inadequate´ appropriation. The enforcement of dominant values and aesthetics is, of course, implemented through institutional authority. However this has also and more been achieved through (in Bourdieu´s words) `symbolic force´: through unconditional acceptance of the dominating view. Therefore the making of heritage not only causes resistance, social conflicts, new forms of surveillance and effects of social exclusion, but also brings identification with the houses as much-valued cultural objects and practices, in which the residents confirm and renew the heritage-status of their estate. Based on in-depth interviews with residents these heritage-upholding activities - which also show, that `heritage´ sometimes becomes a resource of power for the subordinated - will be discussed in more detail.

modernist architecture, monument protection, social conflicts, heritage practices, symbolic force, Pierre Bourdieu, heritage studies