Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The power of knowledge: tourism and the production of heritage in Porto's old city

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 18; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13527258.2011.598541

1470-3610

Paula Mota Santos,

Cultural Identity and Heritage

Abstract The paper analyses the relationship between the material world of heritage of a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the immaterial realm there located (the social worlds inhabiting the referred-to place) in a particular city: Porto, Portugal. It will do so by presenting a study carried out on pedestrian guided tours of Porto's Old City. The argument put forward is that these guided tours, which are run by professional historians and attended by Portuguese nationals (almost never by foreign nationals), constitute an important arena where the sense of belongingness to Porto is constructed and negotiated. It is argued that this is done via both the accessing and sharing of specialized knowledge (provided by historians) on the Old City's past and future (urban renewal projects), and the actual act of participating in the tours. Keywords: World Heritage Sitebelongingnessknowledgepowertourism Notes 1. Author's translation. Unless stated otherwise, all translations from Portuguese are the author's. 2. For a description of this area's development within academic studies, see Miller (1998 Miller, D., ed. 1998. Material cultures: why some things matter, London: UCL Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 3. Porto's old city was classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. 4. In the 1960s, the Ribeira/Barredo area had a population density of 81,213 inhabitants per square kilometre; the 1963 survey revealed that 51% of families lived in a single division or room (Meireles et al. 1983 Meireles, M., et al., 1983. A Operação de Renovação Urbana Ribeiro-Barredo. Unpublished paper, Sociology, ISCTE–Lisbon. [Google Scholar]). 5. Between 1843 and 1864, Porto registered a 46% increase in population. The flow of rural migrants grew exponentially in the following decades. In just 36 years (1864–1900), Porto doubled its population from 86,761 inhabitants to 167, 955 (Teixeira 1996 Teixeira, M. 1996. Habitação popular na cidade oitocentista - as ilhas do Porto, Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian – Junta Nacional de Investigação Científica e Tecnológica. [Google Scholar], p. 19). 6. The Porto grass-roots movement that demanded decent housing for the city's working-class inhabitants living in social housing estates ('ilhas', back-to-back houses) and in the overpopulated derelict houses of the old part took place from 1974 up to 1976 and had seven phases. For a detailed account of those phases, see Rodrigues 1999 Rodrigues, M. 1999. Pelo Direito à Cidade – O movimento de moradores no Porto (1974–76), Porto: Campo das Letras. [Google Scholar], pp. 39–40. 7. From 1975 up to the present, there were major changes in the politics and structures responsible for the urban renewal of the old city. For a detailed account of such changes, see Santos 2005a Santos, P.M., 2005a. Porto's historic centre and the materiality of belonging. Unpublished PhD thesis, Anthropology, University College London. [Google Scholar], p. 23–26). 8. 'Historic centre' is the official term referring to old Porto and it is in that capacity that is used here. 9. In one case – the Vitória tour – one particular man, already well known to the tour guide, approached her with a series of typed sheets of paper on which he had listed all dates and 'special' marks engraved on the stones of specific houses (listed by street and number). The survey had been done by him, and comprised all of Vitória's streets. 10. This was translated into commentaries and questions addressed to me directly, singling me out as someone who was not really part of the group, i.e., with purposes other than those that brought the other participants there. 11. There was a group of five individuals that lived in two other cities of northern Portugal. 12. This desire to know the city better might be related to the high number of teachers in the sample. It may be that most of the self-descibed teachers were secondary school teachers who used the tours as a resource for their own professional practice. However, such detailed knowledge of the participants' motives for attending the tours is not supplied by the data; the questionnaire did not require the respondents to be very specific about their profession. This, allied to the fact that the Portuguese word 'teacher' (professor/a) can refer to anything from primary teacher to university lecturer, makes it impossible to ascertain with more precision the role the tours might perform in this particular occupation-related context. 13. Note that the questionnaire only collected birth and present-day residence places. If the respondent lived in other Porto civil parishes throughout his or her lifetime, that would increase the length of residency in Porto. 14. See previous note. 15. The research was then not sensitive to this issue. An awareness of the importance of tourist activity as a social practice and the need to promote studies that go beyond the in-the-tourist-place experience is a result of reflection on both participant observations and analysis of the survey data. 16. Within the general concept of 'tourist gaze' as a socially organized way of looking at things (Urry 1990 Urry, J. 1990. The tourist gaze: leisure and travel in contemporary societies, London: Sage. [Google Scholar], p. 1) Urry enunciates the romantic gaze as always an individual gaze, as opposed to the collective gaze, which is related to mass tourism (1990, p. 43–44). 17. The Ribeira area, part of São Nicolau civil parish, is the main leisure area within old Porto. Endowed with one of the few wide-open spaces in the old part, the Ribeira Square, it lies open by the waterfront, dotted with restaurants and bars and, until 2001, a daily street market. A place of night entertainment since the early 1980s and now one of the main tourist areas, Ribeira also contains a number of public institutions, some of them related to urban-renewal programs. Only a few metres away is the Infante Square, where the offices of ICEP Porto (Instituto do Comércio Externo Português – Portuguese Institute for External Trade, the organisation that supervises Portugal's promotion abroad), AEP (Associação Empresarial do Porto – Porto Business Association), the Port Wine Institute and the Ferreira Borges Market exhibition centre are all located. Thus, the area's restaurants frequently cater to both tourists and local office workers. On the night of the city's biggest festivity, São João (St John's), the Ribeira area is also a popular site from which to watch the traditional display of fireworks over the river. 18. Although in co-presence, the interaction between tour participants and local inhabitants was generally tangential, ranging from the extremely loud music streaming out of a window or walking through a busy commercial street, to a near escape from some water being thrown to the street from a balcony. 19. Cultural productions analysed were novels, films, and historians' works on Porto. 20. The biographical narratives collected were those of old Porto inhabitants. 21. The photographs analysed were those taken by old Porto inhabitants and by tourists, as well as Porto illustrated postcards and the photographs in City Council tourism leaflets. 22. Note that politics in Porto are very personalised and spatialised (i.e., being from Porto), a reality translated into a 'proximity' between politicians and people, something also facilitated by the small scale of the city. A not-dissimilar 'proximity' is described by Mitchell in La Valletta, Malta (2002 Mitchell, J.P. 2002. Ambivalent Europeans – ritual, memory and the public sphere in Malta, London: Routledge. [Google Scholar], pp. 147–176). This proximity can perhaps be more clearly seen in the public discussion developed through the media (namely the written press) in the years 2000, 2001 and 2002 on Porto as 2001 European Capital of Culture and its urban-rehabilitation programme. 23. Of which these tours are actually one example. 24. Old Porto local inhabitants do not have such an understanding of their lives as 'traditional'. In fact, the fieldwork carried out with inhabitants of old Porto showed that their lives are also lives fully partaking of present-day late modernity. For a more detailed view on old Porto inhabitants lives, see Santos 2002 Santos, P.M. 2002. "A place in the city – the historic centre of Oporto and the intangible dimension of the patrimonial subject". In Porto – A dimensão Intangível na Cidade Histórica, Edited by: Campos, J. 41–62. Porto: Camara municipal da cidade do Porto. 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