Keynote 1 - Nezar AlSayyad - "Consuming Tradition / Manufacturing Heritage"

From the “Delivering for Diversity in the 21st Century City” (June 2015) symposium hosted by the UNSW Built Environment | People & Place Research Cluster Workshop

Session 1
Professor Nezar AlSayyad
TITLE: Consuming Tradition/Manufacturing Heritage: Diversity and Change from Vernacularism to Globalisation
The changes that the world has undergone over the past two decades have created a dramatically altered global order which requires a new understanding of the role of traditional settlements in the reconstruction of history. Using a model which is based on recognising the historic inevitability of dominant relationships between the so-called First and Third Worlds, this talk will review the different historic phases relevant to the study of such traditional settlements: the insular period, the colonial period, the era of independence and nation building, and the present era of globalisation. Four accompanying settlement forms – the indigenous vernacular, the hybrid, the modern or pseudo-modern, and the postmodern – are identified and analysed in relationship to their historic contexts. The talk also examines the evolution of the concept of national identity and its use in understanding the changes that traditional settlements have undergone. It suggests that the condition of hybridity introduced during the colonial period have reconfigured indigenous forms. It also suggests that the influences of modernity that accompanying nation-building and independence movements have resulted in the reinvention of various traditions. Principally explored will be the notions of the manufacture of heritage, the consumption of culture and the end of end of tradition, all of which are important ideas that have structured the debate about vernacular practices around the start of the millennium.

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