From heritage to Feritage: How economic path dependencies in the Caribbean cruise destinations are distorting the uses of heritage architecture and urban form

Abstract

While the impact of cruise shipping is largely mitigated by the consolidated and diverse economies of port cities, such as Hamburg, Tokyo, and Seattle, it is a key issue in the current transformation of the Caribbean cruise destinations that increasingly depend on tourism. This chapter illustrates how cruise tourism has triggered spatial and sociocultural changes in urban form and architectural heritage in the Caribbean region. It argues that those transformations fall into a path dependency thread, and that we are at a critical juncture whose stakes include the risk that cruise lines might soon just leave heritage sites altogether. The chapter also gives a broader reading of the contemporary modes of cruise tourism exploitation. The “Introduction” describes how previous economic dependencies shaped and conditioned the built heritage (urban form, urban function, and heritage architecture) of Caribbean port cities and how spatial relationships of port, city, and hinterland ultimately followed the spatial logics of colonial exploitation. It describes how this historically established (hence path-dependent) economical patterns are still visible in the current operating modes of cruise tourism in the region. The section “How Historical Political and Socio-economic Dependencies Shaped Both Caribbean Port City Heritage and Current OperatingModes of Cruise Tourism” describes the role of heritage architecture of port cities, in the context of cruise lines’ economic interests. The section “Heritage Architecture of Caribbean Cities and Cruise Lines’ Economic Interests” looks more specifically at how the cruise lines’ original interest in heritage preceded their actual disinterest. If the cruise lines were the first actors to add economic value to Caribbean heritage, the Caribbean cruise experience now sidesteps—if not actually fakes—local culture, cities, and economy.