ABSTRACT
Our starting point for this book was genuine accessibility as a premise and prerequisite of urban heritage. We understand urban heritage sites as symbolic places in dense and heterogeneous environments. In the last decade, public urban space has acquired a renewed urgency for the practice and performance of contemporary politics, including securitization of urban public spaces and heritage sites, but this phenomenon raises difficult questions, especially concerning access. The understanding of security, securing, and securitization as a ‘regime’ that is oppressing and limiting the diversity of the city is already a well-researched assumption in urban studies. As we have introduced, in heritage studies the expression to secure is more connected to the physical protection of artefacts, sites, and landscapes with a temporal dimension of ‘securing things for the future’. However, this book goes further, providing a closer examination of these relationships and opening up new understandings of securitization and security and the process of securing. By doing so, we elaborate on the diverse challenges that securitization presents, both for access and urban heritage, including practices to secure heritage, and also through transforming understandings of securitization and security in relation to access and heritage. As a result, we suggest that securitization can be understood as a multifaceted process of regulation for the long-term securing of urban heritage including a multiplicity of different agents, forms of access, and uses of sites.
