“Everything That Exists Is Heritage”: Discursive Strategies in Urban Heritage Work in Russia

Abstract

This article addresses the question of how professionals engaged in urban heritage work navigate multiple heritage discourses in everyday practice. Laurajane Smith’s concept of Authorized Heritage Discourse posits that actors remain bound to particular discourses based on their professional position, yet how practitioners actually engage with discursive multiplicity in practice remains empirically unexplored. Drawing on twenty in-depth interviews with practitioners working with urban heritage in Russia, this article identifies three discursive strategies: legitimising professional positions by invoking multiple identities, managing conflict through expert exclusion, and justifying specific decisions by mobilising different heritage definitions and value criteria. These strategies enable professionals to operate in contexts without a unified source of authority, compensate for positional weaknesses, and maintain control over decision-making processes. Rather than individual tactics, these strategies point to a persistent structural feature of the Russian heritage field, conceptualised as institutional uncertainty — a condition where coordination among actors is achieved not through submission to a single authoritative centre but through ongoing negotiations between multiple sources of legitimacy and systems of argumentation.