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Paper short abstract:

How do Japanese cities assetise historical iconicity and reconstructed heritage? This paper discusses two large reconstruction projects (the Heijō Palace in Nara and Dejima in Nagasaki), analysing the reconstructions as strategic mobilisations of past iconicity to boost city attraction values.

Paper long abstract:

In light of today’s global boom in landmark architecture, urban megaprojects, and reconstructions of cultural heritage buildings, this paper analyses two large-scale reconstruction projects at iconic historical locations in Japan: the Heijō Palace in Nara and Dejima in Nagasaki. Since the 1990s, the two projects have recreated long-lost built environments, gradually transforming and musealising the sites and giving rise to thorough reform and transformation of the surrounding urban fabric. The paper traces involved agents’ motivations to reconstruct from early-phase experimental efforts to legitimise the sites’ protected status to present-day politico-economic mobilisations of past iconicity to boost city attraction values. Doing so, it links the two unfolding projects to issues of urban boosterism, heritage production, and the facilitation and commodification of tourist experiences of past realities. Approaching the reconstructions as contemporary heritage in traditional guise, the paper argues that both sites revolve materially, spatially, and thematically around the master-metaphors of flow, growth and intercultural connectivity that characterise the present age. Elucidating processes of authentication and intersections of ideological and economic interests in and around the two sites, the paper asks in what ways Japanese cities assetise historical iconicity and reconstructed heritage under post-industrial conditions marked by globalisation and intense culture-economic competition.