Urban authenticity at stake: A new framework for its definition from the perspective of heritage at the Shanghai Music Valley

The field of urban heritage conservation calls for a new understanding of authenticity, given the influence of the tourism industries and the creative city ideal in the contemporary renovation of heritage areas. This has become a relevant issue after the 2011 UNESCO Historic Urban Landscape Recommendation withdrew its call for authenticity from the forefront of urban heritage conservation. This paper will develop a framework for a value-based assessment of urban heritage authenticity beginning with a review of heritage conservation theory confronting it to a study of this concept in the fields of tourism and the creative city. The proposed value-based approach to urban heritage authenticity will determine two series of attributes: the first comes from the specific field of heritage, and the second relates heritage with tourism and the creative city ideal. This framework will be used to evaluate heritage authenticity in the ongoing development of the Shanghai Music Valley (SMV) initiative in Shanghai's Hongkou district. This evaluation, from an architectural and urban point of view, will point to the inconsistencies that result when authenticity criteria based on the interests of tourism and the creative city are used for heritage conservation, especially, when it appears as a consequence of the atomization of heritage management among an unbalanced landscape of stakeholders.