Heritage is what you choose to make it
Use assets in new ways and identify new assets
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One of the 5 networked heritage principles
“I think everyone obviously has a personal idea of what heritage is. For me it’s about the experience of the place, the sense of place, the physicality of it. Green spaces, buildings and the activity that takes form; whether between or within those spaces…
It’s both a tangible and intangible — something which you feel connected to or disconnected from. It might be about your cultural experience or your historical knowledge of a space, a place, a skill, a species or a story.”
Maria Adebowale-Schwarte, Director of Living Space Project
Heritage is what you choose to make it. It is a unique experience and as such evades definition at distance. In practice, something is a part of heritage if people think it is.
All places have history, and all history unfolds in a place. ‘Heritage’ always involves a process of actively remembering, through conserving, recording, memorialising or even mimicking that past. Our research has tried to understand as much about heritage activities — participating, volunteering, contributing and investing — as heritage assets — the castles and palaces and national parks that dominate the popular imagination (see the RSA’s Heritage Index).
When heritage makes the news, it is often via a one-issue debate, with local politicians contributing on those issues where councils have some power. This contributes to a sometimes skewed public perspective of what heritage constitutes, and to whom it belongs. Many of these debates focus on planning, such as allowing new uses for listed buildings, proposed development on green space, or levels of council funding for museums. Everyday issues like extending a house in a conservation area further reinforce a limited experience and understanding of heritage as alterations to the built environment.
Stimulating engagement and participation, and generating meaning for local people, is a crucial foundation in heritage making a fuller contribution to the prospects and fortunes of a local area. Just as heritage is fundamental to place, a ‘place’, in context, is critical in the successful expression and experience of heritage. Buildings, parks and streets — any part of the material world — can help people to gain perspective and confidence about how they fit in the world; but this needs to explicitly address spatial relations — the place. The Firth of Tay, for example, is more than part of Dundee’s history — it provided the reason for people to create Dundee in the first place.
As soon as we talk about value and identity we invoke and inspire an exploration of heritage. Without greater citizen contributions, the under-representation of certain groups will remain — something partners in Bristol are working to address by ‘putting citizens on the map’. Encouraging and adopting an approach to public engagement which advances a shared understanding of what is valued by local people and how that applies to their individual and collective identities, and which furthermore builds on that understanding to inform everyday decision-making, is a critical path to successful place-making.
Importantly, the model of project development in the heritage sector involves funders being largely reactive to applications received. Funding for impactful interventions among the most excluded communities is stifled because those communities often lack the capacity and experience to bring forward funding applications. Feedback gathered in our research suggested a social gradient in the persistence among groups who receive ‘first-round’ knock-backs; applicants from more privileged backgrounds respond with determination rather than disillusion.
“It speaks for itself — if you know about your heritage where you live you are connected to where you live,” said one of our workshop participants.
Fostering connections, between people and between the past, present and future, underpins our concept of inspiring a mass movement whereby people regard themselves as — and are — heritage citizens. The internet is a powerful tool, and can connect specialists and enthusiasts with speed and efficiency in a way simply unimaginable just 20 years ago. Creating heritage can be as simple as organising for a newspaper photographer to get a group shot of all the people who have ever lived or worked in a building, thus building new social connections. The voluntary capacity of the public can be engaged in ways which reinforce feelings of connection, as partners in Manchester are discovering through their volunteering for a wellbeing programme.
The vision for networked heritage relies on all stakeholders broadening their concept of heritage assets and using networks to broaden perspectives and participation. As one person in Bristol challenged others: “We need to be asking how can we maximise impact of the green belt rather than minimise on the green belt?” Local strategies are too often developed at distance, from a perspective of public management, and then communicated to poorly defined ‘communities’ through consultation. Local people are the place-makers. Their role in place-making is fundamental. Their contribution is an asset to be catalysed and channelled for public benefit. Heritage is one of their key resources, and it is a renewable resource.
In practice:
CREDIT: James Scott via Flickr
James Scott, a historian who works for the Internet Archive, was able to recruit 70 volunteers and over $1,000 in donations in the space of a week, to help save 50,000 engineering manuals for household appliances dating back to the 1930s, from a shop about to cease trading. The handling of this archive is sensitive, because digitising the manuals could imperil other commercial operations that trade in such manuals. Those who donated received original manuals from the stock. James has aspirations to turn his into a model for rapid-response archiving called Archive Corps.
Connect
Support networks that cut across heritage, arts and culture — like the Happy Museum Project, the Share Academy, Museums Showoff or Pecha Kucha in Dundee, and create meaningful opportunities for people to contribute to heritage, such as investigating hospital archives or through their photography of an ancient monument.
Unite
Evidence from community cohesion work shows that people from different backgrounds build better relationships by working together on projects of common interest such as cooking, dancing or improving quality of local services, than on work which focuses on differences, such as migration stories and celebrating different religious beliefs.
Invest
Invest in heritage projects which help build confidence among disadvantaged groups, such as Theatre in Prisons and Reclaim, in Manchester, and target capacity support, skills development and mentoring to applicants from excluded communities in navigating multi-stage funding processes.
Inspire
Inspire through new awards and recognition for heritage activists locally; such as The Accessibles, a comic exploring the history of disability activism, and winner in the 2016 Community Awards organised by Manchester Histories. At a national scale, the culture and heritage open data challenge run by Nesta and Open Data Institute, Historic England’s Angel Awards, and the Museum Association’s awards have already established good precedent.
