ABSTRACT
The twentieth century may have been the first century to ever witness the rise of environments that are wholly devoted to the “other”. In it, many nations and communities have resorted to heritage preservation, the invention of tradition, and the rewriting of history as forms of self-definition. In this paper, and in an attempt to understand the impact of globalization on the built environment, I expand upon my earlier typology of manufactured heritage environments elaborated on in my earlier book Consuming Tradition/Manufacturing Heritage (AlSayyad 2000), which was concerned with understanding the changing role of tradition under contemporary conditions of increasing global consumption and intensifying global flows. In that book, I employed the lens of tourism in this new global order to problematize many of the assumptions regarding heritage and tradition, in an attempt to understand how built environments are often packaged and sold in an increasingly global economy of image consumption. In this paper, I drew upon new theoretical developments regarding the notion of endings. I argued that as human beings, we have always been fascinated by endings; the end of the world, the end of our lives, the end of our youth,
and so on. I will argue that we have reached the end of tradition too. By this I do not mean the death of tradition, but instead I imply the end of our conception of tradition in the disciplines of architecture and urban history as a repository of authentic and hence valuable ideas that have been handed down from one generation to another.
