Curate the past toward the future
Your hub is a place where to co-define a common heritage value
How to use heritage as a catalyst for innovation and social inclusion in former industrial districts? This chapter will offer a possible strategy, and the tools and methods that are part of this strategy. The main challenge lies in revitalising the sites without gentrifying them. This is difficult, because working with heritage, i.e. working with traces of the past that have been carefully selected, often has a gentrifying effect: it makes locations attractive for specific groups of people, while pushing away others.
The methods and tools presented here are thus designed to support Fab City Hubs and organisations who want to set up an innovative space that works with heritage towards regeneration and social justice. The strategy is based on the idea that ‘heritage work’ should be considered as a way of curating the past, and therefore should implicate practical, theoretical and ethical reflection.
Restoring an abandoned meat factory, archiving long forgotten textile workers’ songs, or revitalising traditional ways of urban farming are all examples of curating the past. It is a conscious, future-oriented way of working with the multiple meanings and possible significances of traces from the past, including those traces that (seemed to) have been lost, hidden, forgotten, ignored, or suppressed.
Why does it matter ?
Fab City Hubs intervene in the local context with the aim of making cities more inclusive and sustainable. In CENTRINNO it is and has been continually acknowledged that this also should imply historical engagement with the buildings or sites from which the FCH’s operate. This engagement asks for a critical interest in processes of heritagisation, including the ones that the FCH’s themselves are part of. Being aware of what happened in the past, what happened with the past, and how the past works in the present should make it possible to accelerate the desired transition process, while taking seriously the ethical concerns that come with these types of interventions in a specific context.
Curating the past - as in heritagisation (Harrison, 2013), fostering, safeguarding, showcasing, collecting, archiving, revitalising - can have a positive effect, but it can also, albeit unintentionally, do harm. People may have divergent interests, feelings and memories in relation to the actual buildings and sites that are used for the development of FCH’s. Mutual misunderstanding, or even sentiments of disgust, antagonism and polarisation can be the result of such divergent experiences.
In CENTRINNO we generate knowledge about alternative and silenced histories. We want to reveal how these histories and objects unsettle ways of looking at the world and its histories and how to deal with this discomfort. We do this by ‘reconnecting’ traces from the past with their different historical and cultural biographies. In order to understand the impact of the industrial past in the present, we also need to explore how it came about. How did ‘we’ turn specific traces of that past into ‘heritage’, while other aspects were neglected?
By acknowledging the history and the impact of the industrial past - in all its different dimensions – FCH’s are better equipped to work in an ethical manner with the past towards the future, to acknowledge and eventually curate the past in the process of re-generation.
Curating the past with a focus on inclusion and regeneration is relevant as we do not want to just replicate the past, but stimulate critical reflection on the relation between the histories of the sites and the major problems societies are facing today, in particular problems regarding social injustice and climate change. These link the industrial era of production to the current-day versions of class dynamics and capital-prioritising exploitation and extractivism. Curating the past is an intervention that may work out differently depending on the context. This means that, in working with (traces of) the past, not only the practical dimensions of the work should be taken into consideration, but also the conceptual and ethical dimensions. In this sense, theory, practice and ethics are always interrelated.
Curating the past is also important as it prioritises the equality of different members of the community, attempting to find ways to include those who have previously been oppressed or marginalised. In the industrial context, rethinking the industrial via heritage methodology means to engage meaningfully with what remains from the industrial histories, individual and collective, that proliferate in and through these industrial spaces. This, again, includes the exclusion of people through the passage of historical time, with an emphasis within CENTRINNO of unearthing and re-displaying the voices and skills that have been excluded or marginalised within the grander narrative of industrial progress.
What then is our strategy in relation to heritage?
Collect stories and memories related to the industrial past and share them online showing the content relates to each other. This can help FCHs to see how the past works in the present and how they themselves also play a role in this.
Key aspects
Find here a list of key aspects you should take into consideration when you want to design activities and practices that are heritage sensitive for your Fab City Hub.
Tools/Stories
Find here a curated selection of Tools and Stories from the 9 cities part of the Fab City Hub Network that could inspire you to develop an heritage sensitive approach for your Fab City Hub.
👥pageEmotion Networking👥pageOral Histories👥pageEthnographic Fieldwork👥pageParticipatory Exhibition Making🏭pageDesigning Democratic Dialogues🏭pageTraditional and digital weavingOther Resources
Find here a list of resources collected to know more about Heritage and Heritage sensitive strategies .
→ Check this BLOG POST about Heritage as a Roadmap to Innovation
→ CENTRINNO Living Archive
(link coming soon)
A digital platform giving more information on ways of working of the past in the present, showing how the past works in the present, giving insights into ways of working with the past in the present. Finally, the Living Archive shows how the 9 Fab City Hub Network members have been undertaking different ways of working with the past in the present.
→ Curated decay
→ Artistic intervention
→ Heritage Futures
Heritage Futures was a 4-year research programme (2015-2019) funded by a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Large Grant (‘Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage,’ AH/M004376/1), and supported additionally by its host universities and partner organisations.
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