Authenti-city (or the Unesco Paradox)

Founded 2750 years ago, the city of Syracuse (Siracusa) with its historic center - the island of Ortigia - is a “Tabula Plena”. Since 2005, the city, incredibly rich in layers of history, has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. After 10 years, like most listed places, the old city is faced/blessed with an exponentially increasing number of tourists, but at the same time has lost its informality, authenticity, and most of its residents, gradually morphing into a theme park/resort.

In the era of neoliberalism, nostalgic attention to the past is potentially devastating.

Overly rigid protective norms and blind bureaucracy force new urbanistic and architectural interventions to look like a frozen and fake pre-WWII image of the city, generating an undefined pastiche of “Non-authenti-city”.

The obsession with preserving image ignores substance, content, and structure. The museification of buildings and places does not solve the real issue of maintaining and preserving living urban spaces, but instead transforms their authentic and original diversity into homogenous speculative real estate.

The 8 days of workshops and lectures are conceived as a platform for discussion of the future of cultural heritage from both an architecture and design perspective.

Is the transformation of heritage sites into diffuse hotels and ersatz tourist attractions inevitable?

How can we devise an alternative preservation strategy that limits the loss of informality and authenticity?

How to prevent the homogenization (anglosaxonization) of tourist attractions?