Making heritage perform: Negotiating museumification, performativity, and districtification in United Arab Emirates historic centres

Abstract

This article reframes heritage urbanism through performance theory. Drawing a distinction between performance (staged actions involving scripts, rehearsal, and audiences) and performativity (repeated practices that produce social realities), it argues that historic districts should be read not as vitrined artefacts but as scenes, scripts, and stages for contemporary urban life. The study asks how activation tactics, adaptive reuse strategies, and exhibitionary practices transform historical environments into platforms for ongoing cultural production. In place of museumification’s static display logic, the paper proposes performative revitalisation: designing spatial stages, choreographies of use, and “role ecologies” through which residents and visitors co-produce meaning over time. Methodologically, it adapts concepts from performance studies—staging/scenography, scripting/improvisation, audience–actor reciprocity, repetition/iteration, and ritual or festival intensification—and applies them to five UAE cases: Heart of Sharjah, Al Shindagha District, Umm Al Quwain Heritage District, Al Jazeera Al Hamra, and the Ajman Museum District. The analysis contrasts passive preservation detached from everyday life with emerging approaches that programme events, scaffold community roles, and deliberately allow improvisation. It concludes that treating heritage districts as performative infrastructures strengthens cultural vitality, social inclusion, and economic relevance in rapidly modernising contexts, while offering a transferable framework for heritage policy, urban design, and exhibition practice.