Place-Heritage as a Language for Negotiating the Future

Cloves, Suzie (2023) Place-Heritage as a Language for Negotiating the Future. The Hive Journal (1). pp. 28-40. ISSN 2977-3954

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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.