Urbanity has been a key concept to describe western cities since the beginning of the 20th century. But the importance of urbanity is no longer self-evident in global cities since the pivotal moment of 1980/90, when we witnessed the acceleration of flux, the emergence of megacities and the transformation of capitalism. At the same time, urban heritage became of greater interest. Then, as urbanity weakened, it began to be defended by public policies, local commitments and activists in a new way: as collective memories and palimpsest traces. In this article, I consider two examples in the French city of Saint-Etienne to illustrate the heritagization of urbanity: an exhibition about the memory of Algerian miners, and the dramatic demolition of a high-rise building that created a great stir because of its local symbolic significance. These two examples show that urbanity keeps a great place in the imaginary of urban dwellers, including the elites. From a general point of view, we try to preserve the values that we attach to cities, perhaps more than trying to preserve the cities themselves.

“Washoku, traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese” was inscribed in UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013, joining the company of French, Mexican, and Mediterranean “national” food traditions in the exclusive List. Although a relatively novel abstraction, washoku (literally “Japanese food”) was formally defined and recreated by a panel of government-appointed experts for inscription purposes.

This paper investigates washoku’s evolution into intangible heritage and the consequences of inscription. Analysis of field data from official meetings and primary text sources reveal that Japanese food heritage was both influenced and undermined by UNESCO’s intangible heritage system and the overriding precedent set by the “gastronomic meal of the French.” The example of washoku, though successfully inscribed, casts doubts on the feasibility of national food traditions in UNESCO’s system for intangible heritage, including their roles in promoting cultural diversity and heritage preservation.

In this paper we report on a 15-year project to construct a comprehensive catalogue of Hawaiian starnames documented in historical sources, published during the IAU General Assembly. Hawaiian star knowledge represents incomparable intangible heritage relating to Polynesian navigation in the Pacific. It both informs and motivates living cultural traditions aiming to reconstruct and build upon such knowledge.