Heritage and the Metropolis ; Heritage dynamics in the urban peripheries
Paris, Auditorium MSH Thursday and Friday 23 and 24 April 2026 Post-conference trip: Saturday, April 25
How might we study and understand metropolises and heritage as not just things, but forces for, and processes of, change? How might these two dynamics intersect with and model one another?
Metropolitan cities are well understood to be in the course of constant change: cities expand, and swallow up other ones; new connections are formed; new consciousnesses come into being. The city’s edges push ever outward into the suburbs or the hinterland.
Heritage, on the other hand, certainly in the guide of preservation is often constructed as resistance to change; and yet is not static: conceptions of what is heritage (or not) continually shift, producing new campaigns for preservation or destruction.
In no part of the metropolis is this shifting nature of both the city and heritage more evident than on their edges: the part of the city where buildings and places seem to be at their most ephemeral, in which buildings and places are produced and destroyed rapidly, and often seemingly without care, as if there was no heritage there at all.
This conference engages with these edges – of both city and heritage – in order to study them together and to understand the ways in which their dynamic and endless processes of change intersect, asking, most simply: how does metropolitan development affect heritage, and conversely, how do developing notions of heritage affect metropolitan development ?