Accessibility statement

Claire Boardman

Deep Mapping the City: Heritage Inspired Place Disruption to Promote Social Cohesion in Diverse Inner Urban Neighbourhoods.

Supervisors: 

Dr Kate Giles (Archaeology)

Dr Debbie Maxwell (Theatre, Film, TV & Interactive Media)

 

A University of York Digital Creativity Labs and Department of Archaeology collaborative project funded by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)

 

In an era of localism and participatory public decision making, ‘the community’ has moved to centre stage and been charged with maintaining the power balance between social and commercial interests in lieu of a much reduced public sector. However, at the same time, economics-driven urban regeneration has enabled and promoted the development of highly mobile and migratory urban populations; undermining the social cohesiveness required by and characteristic of all communities. 

This longitudinal, multi-discipline, multimethod research focuses on two 'ordinary' inner-urban neighbourhoods dominated by late 19th century and early 20th century 'worker housing'. Necessitated by rapid urban expansion, their repetitive, utilitarian architecture obscures completely any deeper past and offers no focal point for historic environment led regeneration initiatives. 

Without being physically or consciously visible and therefore cognitively and emotionally accessible, the active role the past can play in daily sense-making practices, the connective tissue of all communities, is negated. However, though elusive, there remain traces of deeper inner-urban pasts scattered across the city’s archives, collections, memories, and myths.

Employing a designed ethnographic intervention, it explores the potential of institutional and community archival content, participatory interpretation and place-based digital storytelling to reinstate lost urban pasts into the contemporary consciousness of each neighbourhood. In this way, it challenges existing place histories and disrupts individual and communal ‘sense of place’, while simultaneously creating increased opportunities for new people-place connections.

Finally, it considers both the impact and sustainability of neighbourhood-owned, heritage-inspired digital placemaking in ‘ordinary places’ and how current urban heritage management and local authority planning processes might act to enable or block a reinvigorated, digitally mediated, local urban ‘folk-tale’ practice. 

 

Contact details

Claire Boardman
PhD Candidate
Department of Archaeology
University of York
The King's Manor
York
YO1 7EP