Dwelling in a “living museum of old Beijing”: a study of the cultural heritage discourse in residential everyday life

Abstract

This study explores the relationship between cultural heritage discourse and the people who inhabit heritage spaces, through research conducted in an urban residential neighbourhood of conservation importance in Beijing, China. With the aim of improving the implementation of heritage conservation, which has been an established discourse of preserving community culture and history and gets popular based on values attached to old buildings, the study departs from the conventional heritage-centred perspective and foregrounds an everyday perspective, to demonstrate the way that heritage conservation is integrated into the inhabitants’ social lives and personal histories. The thesis is organised into two empirical parts: Firstly, it examines how heritage is discursively constituted and how heritage conservation has become the mainstream approach to preserving and representing local culture in Beijing. Secondly, it describes and examines inhabitants' attitudes, understandings of heritage discourse, and their practices of everyday life in these spaces based on data collected from ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing on these two aspects, the study argues that the cultural heritage discourse and corresponding framings of local culture in urban China form a type of social knowledge that is constantly reproduced in social practices and has been legitimized and popularized among citizens. As a result, the urban space is defined by the hegemonic social knowledge with limited public doubts, while other spatial practices are marginalized. Inhabitants of conservation spaces navigate this situation by using the knowledge in various ways to their everyday lives according to their individual needs for a better life. However, this common yet individualized approach does not change their marginalized positions in defining and using the urban space that was their home before the heritage discourse arrived. By identifying the practical issues arising from the implementation of heritage conservation, this study offers an alternative perspective for understanding the social impacts of cultural heritage conservation and inspires further ideas for possible solutions.