Cities, the Built Environment and Difficult Heritage: the case of former prisons.

Urban built environment, especially in European cities, is inherently layered and complex; a “palimpsest”, as it has been defined (Huyssen, 2000), of historical traces and memories some of which are manifest some other hidden, forgotten and barely visible. Our cities abound with contentious heritages that are indeed often neglected and abandoned also because of their awkwardness and despite the rich “cultural work” they might do in the present. European landscapes and cities are studded with large buildings and wide infrastructures, left behind often by recent traumatic events, and which recall a past deemed to be forgotten, and as such ignored in order to remove it, at least metaphorically, whenever preservation laws, economical consideration or architectural and urban context do not permit this physically. Traces of recent conflicts are the one that most immediately come to our mind, but there are many others. Minor and major buildings embedded in urban fabric, which stand still despite forgetting practices and that constitute elements of urban landscape and collective memory somehow against their difficult past. Former prisons are among these. The article proposes a synthetic reflection on the difficulty of dealing with these architectural complexes which is evident once they are closed. Many of them remain where they were, as unsettling traces of a past deemed to be forgotten. A quick review of recent reuse projects could firstly raise concerns pertaining the commodification of difficult memories and places and dark tourism, but at a closer look at the same time, it would to point out possible promising opportunities inherent in the reuse of these difficult architectures for developing discourse on social justice, freedom and human rights.