The dissertation seeks to place and interpret the role of registered local values and heritages in Makó (integrated into the context of town history) in the construction of local collective identity, the creation of locality and the construction of the Makó image, and to examine the role of local values and heritage in local development policy. The dissertation aims to answer the following research questions: 1) How do local values (especially with regard to settlement history) appear in the representation of the Makó image? 2) What practices are used in the heritagization processes related to the Onion Festival, the Maros Coast and the Hagymatikum Spa? 3) What role do local values and heritage elements play in urban development policy?
The main sources processed in the thesis are press materials, administrative documents and visual and textual content provided by social media platforms (public profiles, groups, opinion forums) from different periods of the investigation. The resources were “produced” or collected using three main methods: ethnographic interviewing and field research, netnography, and the methods of text analysis. The author approached the processing of the topic with a holistic approach. In the study of the role of local values and heritage in urban development, in addition to ethnography, historical and sociological approaches provide guidance.
The results of the research are interpreted by the dissertation in the conceptual framework of heritage and heritagization (patrimoinalisation), from the perspective of the preservation, representation and construction – and therefore wishes to prove that the representative application of local values and heritage elements (e.g. in tourism) and the use of the place itself and in the creation of local identity also applies in the case of Makó; it is therefore a set of phenomena that builds on local characteristics, but at the same time fits into a wider socio-cultural practice.
The heritage practices prevailing in Makó take the form of musealization, festivalization, local history writing, archiving, registration in a store of values, designation of places of memory, as well as narrative and commomorative acts. Another common feature of heritage practices is that they actually look to the future by formulating the past from the present, prepare cultural and social practices for the future, contribute to the development of a “usable vision”. The acts of preservation of values and heritages are not only aimed at recording some event of the past, but also at its useful practical use. The designation and recording and dataing of local values, the heritage processes themselves are organized along group interests. The elements in the Makó store of values, the phenomena presented in the case studies, can be shown the character of the heritage that produces, maintains and serves group identity, and the attachment of heritage performers to the institution and organization.
Tourism plays a prominent role in Makó’s urban development policy today. The key element of the narrative produced in the creation of the cityscape is the duality of tradition and modernity, in which onions are tradition and the past, and tourism is the present and the future that are built on it.