Tenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Speculative fiction has always been a narrative medium focused on interrogating alternatives through extrapolations of current spatial policies, including those in architecture and urban planning. In the graphic novel Revoir Paris (respectively – 2014, 2016), François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters trace the itinerary of mass tourism and hypothesize about its impact on the eponymous city’s future infrastructure. The story revolves around two issues. First is the built heritage’s role in luring tourists, and, in turn, tourism’s disastrous impact on the same monuments through accelerated erosion. The second focal point is the gentrification of the city’s historic centre, beautified as to match ancien régime’s style, meeting touristic expectations, while forcing actual inhabitants to relocate outwards. Both, then, primarily dwell on illusion, imagination, and imagery. Not only in this fictional tale mass tourism poses a threat to communities dwelling in historical parts of the city, neglecting sustainable growth, in favour of an ‘”axidermic” preservation of the metropolis’s classicist core. What remains as genuine is a “touristic imaginary,” turning cities into heritage parks of Revoir Paris. This paper addresses heritage discourse viewed as a social imaginary composed of both the historical site, and its media representations prefabricated for tourism, projecting a vision of the past onto commodified architectural objects, namely, built or preserved ruins. Revoir Paris’s “snow globe urbanism” poses significant questions, asking whether an aestheticization of the past does indeed cause contemporary cities’ arrested development, the very opposite of Brusselization, along with its communities’ dissolution.