Place-Heritage as a Language for Negotiating the Future by Suzie Cloves

Article Information

Published: 2023
Type: brief communication (2,000 – 5,000 words)
Author(s): Suzie Cloves
ISSN: 2977-3954
DOI: https://doi.org/10.60844/7je2-rf33
Download: Full Article

Abstract

This article challenges the convention that heritage is simply about preserving physical fragments of the past, proposing that we understand it instead as an arena and language for negotiating a mutually agreeable future. It establishes the concept of urban habitat as a communal external memory system interwoven with cognitive heritage, and relates this to recent iconoclasms, mnemonic wars, and the potential for heritage landscapes as arenas for negotiating mutually agreeable future narratives. The roles, strengths and weaknesses of civic planning processes are addressed, with an investigation of literature around quantifying cognitive landscape heritage in order for it to be factored into official due process when changes are made to communal habitats. It concludes that this quantification is a developing field and that there is room for expansion in this area of cultural memory studies.

Keywords

Habitat; Heritage; Historic; Memory; Place; Unchange

Biograpahy

Suzie recently completed an MA in Public History and Heritage at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). For her practice-based dissertation, she created a sonic augmented reality (AR) overlaying a historic public park to explore geolocated sound as a way to research and communicate about place heritage. Her current Leverhulme funded PhD study, also at MMU, uses sonic AR as a research methodology to explore how urban landscape heritage affects our relationships with places, each other and nature.

Contact: suzanne.cloves@stu.mmu.ac.uk
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-9279-3803