Paper short abstract:

Sa Gerreria is the product of a contentious relationship between spaces of representation and representation of space: a planned place of memory that over-shadows other memories of the place. This heritagisation process caters to property speculation through ideals of neighbourhood and lifestyle.

Paper long abstract:

Along with the growth of tourism, building activities and real estate speculation have developed in the form of generalised re-urbanisation across the Mediterranean. Heritage plays a key role in this process: it aims for quality in the tourism industry through the production of places.

Research carried out in Ciutat de Mallorca (Spain) within the Mediterranean Voices project, unveils this use of heritage by looking at how it puts into the market renewed neighbourhoods and their everyday life, often hiding their conflicting memories.

Indeed, neighbourhoods and their everyday life do not exist per se, nor do the relations and values to be found at their core. They are the result of a process that becomes more apparent in those neighbourhoods that stand within the so-called "historic" areas because of their strata of memory, their "heritagised" and "heritageable" geographies and their economic and political centrality.

Sa Gerreria [The Pottery] stands within the Historic Centre of Ciutat de Mallorca. It is a neighbourhood in the making that embraces the area where Es Barri Xino [red-light district] once stood. The making of Sa Gerreria radically differs from other similar processes recently carried out: Its name, its unity, its limits and its social fabric are imprecise; the magnitude of the area and the timescale for reform surpass those of the previous cases; it is the outcome of different overlapping reform planning schemes led by different agencies; and the voices contesting these reforms have been, and are, either simply absent, too low, silent or silenced.

This paper deals with the appealing side of neighbourhood and of its everyday life, as well as with the narratives of public heritage and private patrimony that are involved. It does so by focusing on the political agendas and spatial tactics that shape this space as well as on the use of its collective memory and the politics and economics of place this use masks.