The concept of ‘gentrification’ has evolved rapidly during the past decades, breaking through the limits of academic discourse into popular parlance and expanding up to the point of endangering its own idiomatic existence (Bondi 1999). Since the phenomenon is usually characterized as “the leading edge of neoliberal urbanism” (Lees, Slater and Wyly 2008: xvii), it has developed alongside other phenomena related to the new economic and social practices of the globalizing neoliberal order, such as the rise of Global Heritage and its “hegemonic discourse” (Smith L. 2006). Although the interrelation of the two has been generally disregarded by researchers (de Pieri 2010:381), the expansion of both processes resulted in the intensification of their concurrences in different geographical locations, thus capturing the attention of scholars (cf. Herzfeld 2010). Present thesis explores a specific case of such concurrence in the old Moorish neighborhood of the Andalusian town of Granada, the Albayzín.
With each new empirical case that has been explored, gentrification became a broader and broader term, and the case explored in my thesis will necessarily have the same effect. Likewise, ‘heritage’ is a concept bearing multiple meanings, powerful enough to affect the urban constitution of the neighborhood and direct gentrification, the same way as latter process can shape the heritage discourse of the inhabitants.
The main question of my research is whether there is a tension between the institutional discourse on heritage and the local populations’ interpretation of “their inherited” physical and cultural space, and if so, how does this influence urban processes? Others have already examined “the use of historic conservation to justify gentrification” (Herzfeld 2010:s259), and my aim is to disclose how ‘heritage’ shapes and is being shaped by the process of gentrification.