Bežigrad stadium, which had been officially recognized as a cultural monument of national significance in 2009, has not been serving its purpose and has been dilapidating since 2007. The cause of this is the conflict between various actors involved with the project of its renovation, who use the term public interest as a justification for their proposed interventions into the monument. Because the stadium is recognised as a public place and a heritage site,
therefore carrying both a symbolic and a more practical significance to the community, building interventions need to be in line with the public interest. Public interest is adopted by the people that are recognised as its holders with lawful democratic processes. These processes include multiple sectors of the public that have to cooperate, as each of them have differing responsibilities and a limited range of power. As it transpired in the stadium renovation project, the concepts of public are too vaguely defined within the existing legislation and unreflectively used, both by actors that are recognised as holders of public interest and by those who aren’t. An example of the latter are the project’s investors that portray their actions as valuable to the public and consistently discredit public servants. Contradictions also came from the inside of Slovenia’s central authority on monument conservation, where employees disagreed with each other, mainly about the justification of investors’ interventions into the monument. The causes that made the conflict possible in the first place are to be found in the specific state of cultural heritage in contemporary capitalism, where heritage is subjugated to economic needs and cooperation of the society at large. The Bežigrad stadium itself proved to be a highly specific subject to analyse, because of its multiple uses and affiliations throughout history that brought about the discontinuities between the questions of who owns the stadium and to whom it belongs.
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