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Abstract
Discourses about authenticity of place have gained relevance in recent years and are of increasing importance for urban designers. The paper discusses notions and experiences of authenticity of place in relation to the urban built environment and analyzes concepts of ‘experiential’ authenticity in the form of three key dimensions: the experience of origins, the experience of continuity, and the experience of potentiality and actuality. Drawing on qualitative informant interviews in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham (UK), the paper examines how business representatives experienced authenticity of place in relation to architecture and urban design, with a particular focus on individual identity constructions.
Notes
1. The original four criteria were revisited at the 1994 Conference on Authenticity in response to concerns that particular cultural heritage sites would not pass the test of authenticity due to culturally embedded conservation practices based not on the survival of original material but on the “continuity of form and process” (Lowenthal Citation2008, 7). The conference document argued that the assessment of authenticity required a larger and more flexible set of criteria that “may include form and design, materials and substance, use and function, traditions and techniques, location and setting, and spirit and feeling, and other internal and external factors” (ICOMOS Citation1994, art.13). In response to the Nara conference, UNESCO revised definition and assessment criteria for authenticity.
2. Interviewees’ names are pseudonyms to assure anonymity.