Channel View Publications Industrial Heritage Tourism (Tourism and Cultural Change): 43

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Industrial Heritage TourismBy Philip Feifan XieMultilingual MattersCopyright © 2015 Philip Feifan XieAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-84541-513-6ContentsIllustrations, Acknowledgments, Preface, Introduction, 1 Approaches to Industrial Heritage Tourism, 2 A Framework for Approaching Industrial Heritage Tourism, 3 The Proposal for the Jeep Museum in Toledo, Ohio, 4 Perceptions of Attractiveness for Salt Heritage Tourism, 5 Waterfront Redevelopment and Urban Morphology, 6 La Fabrique des Lieux: The LX Factory and the Westergasfabriek, Conclusions, References, Index, CHAPTER 1Approaches to Industrial Heritage TourismTheorizing Heritage: Landscape, Memory and IdentityHeritage is a loaded word that is used in daily discourse but has a variety of different meanings (Meethan, 1996). Initially, it conveys the ostensible mission, in which the 'past', understood to be transparent, coherent and discrete, is transmitted in a more or less unchanged form to the present. However, in practice, heritage is a bona fide intellectual exercise that is not just responding to the contours of culture, but is also constructing a selective and incomplete version of the past in a way that is intelligible to present-day audiences. To some extent, heritage is a moot concept (Edson, 2004) with fuzzy semantic boundaries (Cohen & Cohen, 2012). It is generational: the attitudes, stories, moral judgments and key artifacts that presumably make up a given culture's heritage morph over time (Littler & Naidoo, 2005). It is closely associated with societal context and increasingly perceived as human development (Loulanski, 2006).Heritage is marked by communities who identify their historical and cultural resources and develop these with the intent of sharing them with others (Cass & Jahrig, 1998). Lowenthal (1999: xv) proposes that heritage consists of 'domesticating' the past so as to infuse it with present causes. Graham et al. (2000: 2) echo that heritage is 'a view from the present, either backward to a past or forward to a future'. Heritagization is a process of recontextualization in which material culture is selected, preserved and reconstructed by uniting principles, practices and processes (Misiura, 2006). From a constructionist perspective, the process of heritage-making refers to the ways in which past material artifacts, mythologies, memories and traditions become cultural, political and economic resources for the present (Graham & Howard, 2008).The discourse of heritage has long been viewed by scholars as a landscape derived from the negotiation of history by its stakeholders. In minimalist terms, a landscape is the backdrop against which archaeological remains are plotted (Ashmore & Knapp, 1999). It is an entity that exists by virtue of its being perceived, experienced and contextualized by people. Cultural geographers refer to the heritage landscape as a genre de vie (Graham, 1994), a harmony between human life and the milieu in which it was lived (Cosgrove, 1998). Duncan (1990: 17) regards the heritage landscape as 'an ordered assemblage of objects, a text [which] acts as a signifying system through which a social system is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored'. Heritage is a signifier, more than a simple idea underlying the historical unity of objects, and involves various perspectives, modes of involution, replacement and engagement. The study of heritage is always placed within a wider framework of the political economy of signs, largely because the identifications of patrimony and heritage that have become increasingly difficult to interpret as staged authenticity in one generation turn out to be authentic 'heritage' in the next (Hobsbawm, 2012). Therefore, it is hard to pin down, objectively and precisely, what heritage represents since the definition is continually altered and negotiated by various aspects of identities. Different interest groups within a culture may hav