ALL POSSIBLE PASTS: Heritage, Simulacra, and Gentrification in Seoul

Abstract Urban heritage scholars have often criticized simulacra as ‘bad’ copies that degrade the ‘good’ model of the past through commercialization and gentrification. This article challenges such Platonic dichotomies of good/bad and model/copy, arguing that the binary of good heritage and bad simulacra is flawed because heritage is itself actualized only as simulacra —a process of becoming that generates new trajectories and connections to all possible pasts . Drawing on an ethnographic study of Seochon Hanok Village in Seoul, South Korea, the article explores how various urban actors differently imagine and perform heritage in and through ongoing conflicts and negotiations to authenticate their divergent and coexisting simulacra of the past. Consequently, the article argues that a more inclusive approach to urban heritage emerges not by protecting a supposedly good heritage, but by embracing the ceaseless becomings and differences that revive all possible pasts as simulacra.