In the last decades of the 20th century social, economic, and cultural changes accelerated in the Mena region at rapid rates that made previous historical periods appear as if they were static. The differential of the speed of change between past and present began to impose a dichotomy between heritage and modernity. Heritage emerged as a fixed and stagnant ideal when in fact it was always in a state of flux and development, albeit at a slow pace. Moreover, much of what we consider today as heritage is the result of relatively recent innovations that were imbued with an aura of legitimacy by assuming the form of historic symbolic references. The starting point of this refelction is that the dual polarity between heritage and modernity is a fundamentally a false paradigm.

The second point is that social and economic changes are the result of institutional, economic, and ideological drivers that are often neglected in the discourse of preserving the legacy of the past. The discourse of heritage preservation today is divorced from day-to-day living realities. Its formulation is often based on aesthetic and idealist moral considerations, disconnected from the real trajectory of how the heritage phenomena came to be today. This left the discourse of heritage preservation today oscillating between an elitist discourse on the one hand, and a populist discourse that reduces heritage to aesthetic/ideological verbal constructions that are not lived by the masses but are manipulated and presented to them for political purposes.

As a result, we find that most heritage preservation operations have focused on two basic outcomes. On the one hand, there is a constructivist focus on producing sophisticated models of restoration that are invariably non-replicable and non-scalable because they are not linked to sustainable societal institutional frameworks. On the other hand, there is a restrictive approach established through legal formulas that reduce the definition of heritage and provide negative protection through ordinances that prohibit removal and destruction of heritage assets but provide little resources to preserve and develop these assets. Both approaches take heritage out of the lived experience of societies and place it within a museology framework that supersede the societal use and ownership of this patrimony. In essence, heritage becomes a tool of the transcendent power of the State and the political elite, who use heritage as a means of legitimizing the political order to defer the State’s social responsibilities.

In contrast to the transcendent discourse of heritage, societies produced divergent discourses of resistance represented by the rejection of heritage as an antithesis to the values of society. These discourses, in turn, refuse to see heritage as a process of renewal and development. They deny heritage its creative role under the rubric of heritage as a heresy against imagined pure primordial histories. Thus, the mechanism for dealing with heritage is dichotomized between two currents, each of which has its own discourse, symbols, institutions, and sources of funding. The first is an official discourse that reduces heritage to rigid stereotypes and allocates official and governmental resources to preserve some historical forms emptied of their social and economic content and therefore unsustainable without continuous care and support. Forms that are static and not capable of expansion and scalability due to limited official resources. The alternative discourse is motivating a movement of fundamentalist thought that considers heritage preservation as a heresy against the idealized values of early Islam. This latter discourse opposes the official authority of heritage institutions and mobilizes societal energies against them capitalizing on the immediate interests of private financial actors. Funding for undermining heritage preservation under the pretext of fighting heresies is justified under purely utilitarian uses of built space.

Both trends are forceful and have their tools, and both view the societal order from a superior perspective that rejects existing communities to establish its own ideological vision of society. Both lines of thinking are populist in nature. These discourses, divergent as they may be, both address communities under the reified notion of the “people” to gain legitimacy from them, while at the same time excluding them as real stakeholders in deciding how they want to live in their environment.

The secret in any process to preserving urban heritage begins with identifying how communities deals with their heritage and stimulating the continued development of that relationship within a natural process created by the daily use of this heritage within a deep-rooted but renewed culture. This is done by transferring funding for conservation operations from supporting the supply of restoration resources to supporting demand, that is, by supporting the mechanisms that people use in their daily lives around the heritage assets and not financing the “restoration” of these assets. If the interests of the users of heritage are consistent with the goals of conservation, a full cycle of sustainability will be achieved because people will begin to use their resources to continue their lives around heritage sites. But this requires first that we do not assume an elitist knowledge of heritage, but rather an understanding of people’s and communities’ livelihood needs. This requires abandoning the formalities of restoration operations driven by an aura of scientific standards, and shifting efforts to stimulating living and renewable norms that people can adopt flexibly.

The balance between legal frameworks for preserving heritage and protecting it from distortion and destruction on the one hand, and society’s priorities and need for renewal on the other, cannot be imposed through rigid deterrent laws, but by providing incentives that break the economic futility of the restoration and preservation process in exchange for creating economic multipliers that make it in the community’s best interest to preserve its heritage. There needs to be a flexible framework for renewal of heritage forms while preserving its genius as the vessel for social values and living culture. Heritage is essentially a process that is constantly learning and renewing. Keeping heritage assets mummified in open air museums and academia will not give them a chance to survive as repositories of social value and generators of the true resources needed to sustain their preservation.