Ordinary heritage: a case of Boro Bazaar, Khulna

Abstract

The motives behind the selection of heritage buildings for conservation are conventionally founded on an elitist sense of historicity and romantic nostalgia of the past. This paper argues that such an approach has a tendency to be temporally rigid, object focused and exoticism biased. Often many of the buildings selected as heritage are those built by extensive labour, expensive materials and wealthy patrons. Little, however, has been explored on the relation between heritage and aspects of ordinary life, where, in many cases, the latter continue to infuse meaning into the former’s present heritage status. This paper uses a non-participant observational lens to examine an old market tissue in Khulna, an ex-colonial city in Bangladesh and proposes a new notion called ‘ordinary heritage’. Ordinary heritage, as this paper argues, relies on historically persistent socio-economic transactions of the common and the ordinary in their everyday and occasional pursuit for livelihood. These transactions of ordinary people, which are also temporally non-static and evolving, take place within and around the architecture of the built environment, making the production of architecture to be fluid, dynamic and most importantly temporary. It forces architecture to constantly evolve, while negotiating the aspiration, need, aesthetic and reasoning of ordinary subjects. Ordinary heritage thus manifest as a socio-spatial-temporal assemblage innate to an urban tissue that runs as a single organism.