Urban Heritage: where does your safeguard and rehabilitation pass? A short visit to Mouraria

Abstract

With regard to intervention in urban heritage, ideas or perspectives that defend the importance of rehabilitating or revitalizing certain socio-cultural values deemed traditional are often presented, but they do not reflect deeply on the articulation between these orientations and the socio-spatial dynamics of territories. An anthropological study developed in a typical and popular neighbourhood of Lisbon - Mouraria - is taken as reference to reflect on how in the process of production and social construction of space, the idealization and overvaluation of certain traditions that seek to rely on a past thought as historical - but which are socially invented and constantly reinvented - can both promote sociocultural dynamism and, indirectly, increase the risk of producing segregated urban spaces.