Protecting cultural heritage or stealing?

The preservation of culture, a culture, has its value, of course it does. A useful indication of this being when people, voluntarily, pay the necessary prices to preserve said culture. As and when the external culture changes, so that the society around decides that such preservational prices are no longer worth paying then, by definition, the preservation isn’t worth it by the standards of that surrounding society.

Of course, it’s always possible to disguise this:

Barcelona council has come to the rescue of some of the city’s most emblematic and best-loved bars by adding them to the list of protected sites and buildings. However, thanks to Covid-19 restrictions, you won’t be able to get a drink in any of them for at least the next few weeks.

The city has added 11 bodegas to the list of 220 shops that are considered part of the city’s cultural heritage. The move has been widely welcomed, though it comes too late to save many small businesses, from toy and book shops to grocery and furniture stores, that were part of the fabric and essence of the city but were forced out by soaring rents. In most cases they have been replaced by chain stores.

How have they been saved?

"We cannot protect 100% the commercial activity but we can make it difficult for other activities that do not harmonise with the identity of the street to come in," said Antoni Vives, Barcelona's Deputy Mayor for Urban Habitat. With regard to the content of the property, "the conclusion is that the furniture and the property should go together" said Civit. Each of the 228 protected shop buildings will possess a technical sheet specifying everything hitherto that must be safeguarded and "in case something has to be moved, how it has to be moved" he added.

The saving involves restrictions upon change of use through that insistence upon keeping those internal things like furniture and so on.

That is, the owners of the sites may not change use in order to gain the higher value that stems from such. Or, as we might put it, the property of landlords is stolen in order to maintain the public pleasures of old shops and bars. The benefits of preserving those things objectively not worth preserving are socialised while the costs are privatised.

That is, the answer to the headline is yes. It is both cultural preservation and stealing.

There is an answer to this too. If some group of people - any group of them - decide that something is worth preserving then raise the money and go buy it. Can’t raise the money? Then no one actually wants the preservation enough, do they?

Don’t nick it through regulation.