The Ambiguity of Authenticity Rises Again
The Word that Keeps on Giving
While snowed-in just north of Santa Fe the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about the dilemma I’ve already become entangled in here: How much of my (or any transplant’s) intrigue with the New Mexico vernacular—or Santa Fe-style—is a new version of my long-time (and more academic) fascination with the notion of authenticity?
In other words, when we travel or relocate, are we just prone to seeing places as we wish they were? I’ve long believed—based on social media-boasting friends and ex-pats who use that “a-word”—that it means close to nothing, and it is a romantic reference point that, without more, is not a helpful term.
As a dislocated sort, only recently able to string together such ruminations, I have realized I’m the same person who asked the same question about other places while a “visiting scholar” in Sweden over the years just before the pandemic. I researched this in-depth, with the good graces of my colleague Professor Tigran Haas, and related it in more scholarly form in a book completed in 2020. Go figure.
So, I decided to revisit a short passage from Sustaining a City’s Culture and Character and restate it below in a slightly different language four years later.
The Confusion of Authenticity
The challenge surrounding the use (and resolution) of what is authentic is not limited to urbanists or urban planning academics.
Situations as broad as movie locales and lodging choices while traveling (the original Airbnb notion of experiencing a place as if a resident) come to mind. Several lifestyle retreat businesses in and around Santa Fe—and their heavy promotional strategies—have recently reminded me how “authentic experiences” are an essential facet of today’s tourist and self-improvement industries.
When I allow my mind to travel back and revisit past research, I’m reminded how Jane Lovell and Chris Bull devoted an entire, highly theoretical volume to the role of authenticity (or lack thereof) in tourism and placemaking relationships across a vast array of place or environment types and relationships to particular cultures (e.g., cities, seaside towns, rural settings, and wilderness).
As they note:
The degree to which places that tourists visit are perceived as authentic or inauthentic and the extent to which places are modified, artificially constructed, or marketed as “real” are essential ingredients of both the tourist and local experience and the places themselves.
In examining tourists’ perceptions of changing environments, they also focus on how tourism represents a search for authenticity. They recount other academic attention to staged authenticity and explore intriguing concepts such as “real-real,” “fake-real,” or “real-fake.”
Lovell and Bull focus on fifteen historic English towns, analyzing “staged authenticity” approaches and associated motivations (such as “museumification,” providing a contrast to modernist architecture), relationships to commercial areas, reconnecting with origins, and other tendencies.
Perhaps their greatest revelation is that “places are always evolving” and that any idea of static originality is illusory. Places change, and with that premise, they note the potential consequences of overprioritizing authenticity as a development goal:
Authenticity is not simply about place; it is closely aligned to our concept of time, which is anchored by the built environment. Pastiche architecture, historaunts, histopubs, and histo-shopping can create hipstorical places … suggesting that the enjoyment of mechanistic authentication by tourists may be blunted because they are unsure what is real. The weight of anachronism may eventually lead to gentrified areas becoming indeterminate places, losing the resonance, sense of origin and perennial backstories which attract the hipsters, flaneurs, and creative class. Entropy may eventually lead to a post-gentrified world, where today’s pastiche becomes tomorrow’s vintage heritage aesthetic and the artists return.
The Developer’s Dilemma
Increasingly, those within the real estate community attempt to understand “authenticity” for reasons that may be related to “project success” rather than purely monetary gain. It is not uncommon to see a real estate developer’s goals include community benefit and integration, casting authenticity as “more than a buzzword to boost returns.”
One benefit of living in diverse places over the past several years has been seeing that consultation in new developments is increasingly necessary. Conference panels readily acknowledge that reference to local preference and creativity is essential—pop-up dining, murals, and food trucks have been commonplace and continue to promote the integration of community life.
Urban Land Institute sessions and articles—among others—regularly embrace Danish hero-architect Jan Gehl’s message of people-oriented urban redevelopment, creative placemaking leaders from the philanthropic sector, and developer appeals such as: “When something is authentic in a place, you can feel the people and the soul of the place … it can be food, dance, design—it doesn’t have to be murals.”
A real estate branding and marketing adviser recently outlined a wide range of buzzword-based takeaways gleaned from his career, emphasizing projects that highlight natural environmental features and plantings, local traditions and myth, art and music, storytelling and shared experiences, cocreation, immersion-based design, and small-scale approaches—all attributes that add “place value.”
In this case, the adviser focused on creators and end users of new projects rather than more thoughtfully working with existing residents to sustain a particular place context. Thus, a phrase such as “authenticity is a win/win for everyone—the owners, the lenders, the guests—and the peacemakers” may, in the end, be incomplete in describing the full range of stakeholders and issues involved.
The Blending at a Smaller Scale
However, some smaller-scale developers focus more on function and lifestyle and see terms such as “authenticity” and “character” as a counter to using diverse building materials and creating more exciting streetscapes resistant to height variations and design-led features.
I recall my interview and podcast discussions with London’s Nicole Bremner, whose two property development companies contributed to the Hackney Renaissance before the pandemic. The development of new terrace housing—with refreshing architecture and without traditional London brick—consistently sustained Hackney’s culture and character.
She advocated for housing diversity, needed new units, and diversity of streetscapes. To Bremner, these fallback words—authenticity and character—are mere tools of development opponents, synonymous with individual taste and an unrealistic insistence on replication.
At the time, I was impressed by her approach to context, which was similarly no-nonsense. She relied on a diverse design team that focused on the holistic fit of a project to its surroundings, led by a minority architect sensitive to multicultural issues. While using high-end materials, she also advocated for modular approaches that can reduce prices.
I live in a new place amid the City’s Different legacy and the historico-touristic Santa Fe style. The negotiations around the latest redevelopment plans for the old College of Santa Fe site as a “win-win” production studio, mixed-use retail, and housing sound suspiciously familiar.
I see the issues I researched before haunting me yet again.
Portions adapted from Wolfe, Charles R. with Tigran Haas, Sustaining a City’s Culture and Character: Principles and Best Practices (pp. 79-81). Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.