Content area
Full text
Introduction
Airports have a global, national, and urban role as gateways of nation-states as well as cities. Airports are urban infrastructures and global urban systems erected in architectural form. Airport terminals are critically material in shaping contemporary urban-built environments that involve multilayered governance, politics, and economies. The process of globalization demands the growth of infrastructure, which puts pressure on existing airports and air terminals to increase their capacity by keeping up to date with technological advancements.1 Globalization is a stimulus that drives urban expansion in order to be competitive on national and urban scales and attract investors and tourists while excluding certain characters.2 On the ground, urban infrastructure is not only (re)produced by private sector actors but also carried out by public-private partnerships such that the public sector facilitates the involvement of private developers and funds.
Heritage properties are not immune to the domination of capitalist market systems and the complexity of neoliberalized redevelopment trends. Heritage has increasingly contributed to economic commodification and the consumption of experiences,3 which calls for an integral and holistic approach to heritage preservation to overcome the limitations in the existing approaches.4 Globalization has opened doors for the field of heritage to intersect with urban political economies as a mode of economic revitalization and, in turn, has clashed with heritage authenticity. While authenticity is composed of various attributes,5 use, among them, explicitly enhances the value of heritage properties.6 It turns heritage properties into political issues and a new political currency for seeking investment and intensifying tangible value.7 Heritage properties have shifted in the global political economy, joining the ranks of market mechanisms and have become a new form of capital.8 Heritage properties are called symbolic capital not only for their relationship with economic exchange but also for their production force.9
However, those who make these criticisms have neglected one important fact – authenticity, which is at the intersection of capitalist globalization, urban political-economic development, and heritage preservation. When a property is classified as heritage, it gains authenticity as an authorized representation of unique and non-replicable characters, which makes it marketable and provides a basis for monopoly rent.10 Institutional heritage designation status serves as a guarantee of unique and special characteristics;...