What is History? That is a question, what is have to be asked, if we are talking about historical city-cores. History is a thing, to be remembered, and to be told to our children. We must never forget that the thing present doesn’t exists. It’s only a point on the infinitive line of time, which runs from the Past to the Future. Today, we are the future, but tomorrow we will be history too.
Art is a very hard thing to explain. This is not an art-theoretical essay, so please, forgive us, that we will not problemise this subject, and only declaring the sentence: Art is one piece of history, and we must preserve as much of it to our children, as we can. The real problem, we have to discuss, is the term “preservation”, if the object of this action is a city. We can simply ask: preservation of a city is equal to the preservation of the buildings? (In this case, under the term buildings, we mean not just the buildings, but the road-system, and the view of the city.) The empirical preservation is enough? In a very rigid way, we can say yes, that is the maximum we can do. (Here, we find ourselves near the borders of the so-called positivism of the XIX. century.)
But, if we think forward, we must ask the next question: what is a city? It’s a paradigmatical question, how we define that word. After the great scholars of the XIX. century, our view of the whole culture had changed. Now, we must count with the consequences of the new cultural studies, and must admit, that a city is (and was) much more than a group of buildings. It’s a cultural net, operated by the inhabitants.
The culture is changing: banality, but true. If we accept that, we must re-think the word preservation, under the cultural net paradigm. How could we secure the unchangeability of the empirical city, if the core of the human relations, the culture is changing? It’s an anomaly, we can not dissolve.
If we declarem that, this cultural net is the most important, we will see, how our common days destroy the historical pieces. (In history, there are a lot of examples, just see Rome in the middle ages.) If we choose the empirical preservation, we can save the pieces of art, but on the other hand, history will kill the normal life in the city, and sooner or later, the city will be a big museum, without any real life, only tourism.

It’s not this essay’s job, to answer these questions. But the first step is done: we have realised the problem, and now, we can think about the solution.




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