ABSTRACT
The 20th century may have been the first century to witness the rise of environments wholly devoted to the ‘other.’ In it, many nations and communities resorted to heritage preservation, the invention of tradition, and the rewriting of history as forms of self-definition. This chapter, in an attempt to understand the impact of globalization on the built environment, expands on the typology of manufactured heritage environments that is elaborated in my book, Consuming Tradition/Manufacturing Heritage (AlSayyad 2000). There, I sought to understand the changing role of tradition under conditions of increasing global consumption and intensifying global flows. Specifically, the lens of tourism was employed to problematize assumptions regarding heritage and tradition to understand how built environments are packaged and sold in a global economy of image consumption. This chapter draws upon new developments regarding the notion of endings. As human beings, we have always been fascinated by endings: the end of the world, the end of our lives, and the end of our youth. I argue that we have now reached the end of tradition, too. By this, I do not mean the death of tradition as a social construct, but rather the end of our conception of place as a repository of authentic and valuable ideas handed down from one generation to another.
