Heritage and Economic Development: Selling the Unsellable

Heritage is not objects or sites: it is a process and a consumable experience. It is a contemporary activity in which selected aspects of the imagined past are treated as potential resources for the construction of contemporary products for current consumption and for bequest to an imagined future. Heritage is thus created to serve many contemporary uses, both individual and collective, and has become endowed with many expectations in both the private and public realms. Heritage is used as an instrument in collective policies especially for social cohesion and political legitimation. However, heritage also has economic uses. It is directly used as a resource in many commercial heritage industries, in which aspects of a commodified past are selected and packaged into heritage products for sale on various contemporary markets. It is also indirectly used in the construction of high amenity environments and externally promoted place images, in support of economic goals that are often not directly concerned with pasts. The argument here goes further than just the recognition that heritage has been endowed with economic uses alongside and possibly in competition with the cultural, social and political. It is argued here that the heritage process, for whatever reason it is attempted, has an economic dimension that is quite basic to the activity. First the terms will be defined and the many development uses of heritage outlined. Then the assumptions of a harmonious symbiosis of heritage with development will be examined, questioned, and to an extent reasserted.