People-Centred Methodologies for Heritage Conservation:Exploring Emotional Attachments to Historic Urban Places 9780367364182, 9781032006239, 9780429345807

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Exploring emotional attachments to historic places: Bridging concept, practice and method
Concept: place as emotional construct
Practice: moving away from place as geographic location?
Method: accessing attachments to historic places
Structuring the collection
References
Chapter 2: Attachment to older or historic places: Relating what we know from the perspectives of phenomenology and neuroscience
Introduction
Phenomenologies: radically empirical, qualitative, pre-reflective inquiry into people and older places
Questions, methods and analysis in phenomenology
Neuropsychological and neurobiological evidence for how people perceive and experience place
Questions, methods and analysis in neuropsychology and neurobiology and an example
Conclusion
Works cited
Part I: Cities and towns
Chapter 3: Longing for the past: Lost cities on social media
Introduction
Interdisciplinary insights
Ethics of social media research
The lost cities
Following lost cities
Liking lost cities
Commenting on lost cities
Lost Edinburgh
Lost Perth
Curating lost cities
Emotional attachment and nostalgia
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Histories of urban heritage: Emotional and experiential attachments across time and space
Setting the scene
Language, lovability and place attachment
Working with language
Melbourne Lovability Index
Ballarat Imagine
Sorrento and Queenscliff Sea Change study
Language and history
Getting to the heart of things
What can a lexicon of emotion offer?
Notes
References
Chapter 5: Emoji as method: Accessing emotional responses to changing historic places 1
Emoji culture: describing emotional states and stimulating emotional responses
Emoji research: a nascent field
Emoji as method(s)
Photo-emoji elicitation
Historic maps and aerial photos
DIY plaque
Place and time
Emotions and heritage management
Conclusion
Note
References
Weblinks
Part II: Neighbourhoods
Chapter 6: Narrating places – blurring boundaries: Co-creating digital histories of place
Locating protest
Collaborate or perish
In Real Life (IRL)
Authority and the survey
Conclusion
References
Conference papers
Interviews
Chapter 7: Living in and Loving Leith: Using ethnography to explore place attachment and identity processes
Introduction
Understanding the ‘meaning-making’ process
Ethnography, auto-ethnography and walking in place
Place, identity and the past
Auld Leithers
Real Leithers
Adopted Leithers
New Leithers
Discussing attachment to, and through, places, identities and pasts
Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Re-creating memories of Gulou: Three temporalities and emotions
Introduction: re-enacting the Bell and Drum Towers tradition
Memory, space and emotional attachments
Methodology: ethnography and the analysis of emotions
Memories around the Gulou Project: understanding temporalities and emotions
Officials: authorised owners of the place, history to be restored and designed
Preservationists: spiritual owners: history to be recorded and maintained
Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Centre
Gulou Preservation Team
Local discourse: strangers in their own place, history to be remembered and forgotten
Conclusion: time, memory and emotion
References
Chapter 9: Visual research methodologies and the heritage of ‘everyday’ places
Place attachment in heritage practice
Two Australian examples
Multi-sensory engagement with place
Concluding remarks: pitfalls and opportunities
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Part III: Sites
Chapter 10: Building emotional GIS: A spatial investigation of place attachment for urban historic environments in Edinburgh, Scotland
Introduction
Place attachment, civic engagement and place attachment mapping
The spatial attributes of place attachment
Method
Case study area
Instrument
Sampling
Data collection
Data preparation and analysis
Results
The creation of EGIS
Discussion
Limitations
Building an EGIS for civic engagement
The future of place attachment mapping and EGIS
Declaration of conflicting interests
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Chapter 11: Observing attachment: Understanding everyday life, urban heritage and public space in the Port of Veracruz, Mexico
Introduction
Understanding urban heritage through observations on everyday life and spatial culture
Research methods
The exploration stage: observations, morphological analysis, interviews and archival analysis
Mapped observations
Participant observation
Morphological analysis
Interviews and memories of the Plazuela
Archival analysis
The complementary stage: questionnaires and interviews
Plazuela de la Campana and music in the historic centre of Veracruz
The revitalisation of the Plazuela with music and dance
The urban form, use and sociability
On the relation of everyday life, place attachment and heritage
Conclusions
Bibliography
Chapter 12: It’s only a joke if you don’t take the fitness industry seriously: Photographs as archives of place attachment at the early twentieth-century gym
The gym as heritage place
Imaging historical expressions of emotion and place attachment
The emperor has no clothes: Eugen Sandow, turn of the century, British Empire
Mythologies of Muscle Beach, 1930s USA
On Broadway: Grace Brothers Gymnasium, postwar Australia
Conclusion
Note
References
Chapter 13: Making visible attachments: artists as a lever for highlighting a sense of place and emotional attachments to heritage: Articulating public art and urban renovation in Porto-Novo, Benin
Exploring the sensitive and emotional dimensions of heritage: investigating what matters for people
New patrimonialisation processes focusing on people
Public art: a way of revealing symbolic and poetic dimensions of the city?
The traditional squares of Porto-Novo: combining cultural, religious and social heritage
The fundamental role of the voodoo culture
A multifaceted attachment to the squares: ‘I consider it like the apple of my eye’
The renovation of the squares: articulating heritage valorisation and artistic creation
A participatory approach
Collecting and sharing histories and memories of the squares
Artists and residents co-designing art works
A new image of the squares: increased attachment to heritage
Art works for revealing intangible heritage, bridging the past and the present
(Re)discovery, (re)appropriation and transmission of heritage
Improving the urban environment: strengthening senses of place and belonging
Sharing the heritage, widening the ‘common’
Conclusions
Notes
References
Chapter 14: Emotional attachments to historic urban places: Heart-bombing heritage
References
Index

Citation preview

People-Centred Methodologies for Heritage Conservation

This book presents methodological approaches that can help explore the ways in which people develop emotional attachments to historic urban places. With a focus on the powerful relations that form between people and places, this book uses people-centred methodologies to examine the ways in which emotional attachments can be accessed, researched, interpreted and documented as part of heritage scholarship and management. It demonstrates how a range of different research methods drawn primarily from disciplines across the arts, humanities and social sciences can be used to better understand the cultural values of heritage places. In so doing, the chapters bring together a series of diverse case studies from both established and early-career scholars in Australia, China, Europe, North America and Central America. These case studies outline methods that have been successfully employed to consider attachments between people and historic places in different contexts. This book advocates a need to shift to a more nuanced understanding of people’s relations to historic places by situating emotional attachments towards the core of urban heritage thinking and practice. It offers a practical guide for both academics and industry professionals towards people-centred methodologies for urban heritage conservation. Rebecca Madgin is Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow. Rebecca’s work explores emotional attachments between people and historic places in the context of urban redevelopment initiatives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. James Lesh is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne School of Design in the Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage. His research examines twentieth- and twenty-first century urban history and heritage conservation.

Critical Studies in Heritage, Emotion and Affect In Memory of Professor Steve Watson (1958–2016) Series Editors: Divya P. Tolia-Kelly (University of Sussex) and Emma Waterton (Western Sydney University)

This book series, edited by Divya P. Tolia-Kelly and Emma Waterton, is dedicated to Professor Steve Watson. Steve was a pioneer in heritage studies and was inspirational in both our personal academic trajectories. We, as three editors of the series, started this journey together, but alas we lost his magnificent scholarship and valued counsel too soon. The series brings together a variety of new approaches to heritage as a significant affective cultural experience. Collectively, the volumes in the series provide orientation and a voice for scholars who are making distinctive progress in a field that draws from a range of disciplines, including geography, history, cultural studies, archaeology, heritage studies, public history, tourism studies, sociology and anthropology – as evidenced in the disciplinary origins of contributors to current heritage debates. The series publishes a mix of speculative and research-informed monographs and edited collections that will shape the agenda for heritage research and debate. The series engages with the concept and practice of Heritage as co-constituted through emotion and affect. The series privileges the cultural politics of emotion and affect as key categories of heritage experience. These are the registers through which the authors in the series engage with theory, methods and innovations in scholarship in the sphere of heritage studies. Heritage in the Home Domestic Prehabitation and Inheritance Caron Lipman Affective Architectures More-Than-Representational Geographies of Heritage Edited by Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas and Angela M. Person The Museum as a Space of Social Care Nuala Morse People-Centred Methodologies for Heritage Conservation Exploring Emotional Attachments to Historic Urban Places Edited by Rebecca Madgin and James Lesh For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Critical-Studies-in-Heritage-Emotion-and-Affect/book-series/CSHEA

People-Centred Methodologies for Heritage Conservation Exploring Emotional Attachments to Historic Urban Places Edited by Rebecca Madgin and James Lesh

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Rebecca Madgin and James Lesh; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Rebecca Madgin and James Lesh to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-36418-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-00623-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-34580-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by SPi Global, India

Contents

List of Figures viii List of Tables x Notes on Contributors xi Acknowledgements xiv 1

Exploring emotional attachments to historic places: Bridging concept, practice and method

1

REBECCA MADGIN AND JAMES LESH

2

Attachment to older or historic places: Relating what we know from the perspectives of phenomenology and neuroscience

16

JEREMY C. WELLS

PART I

Cities and towns

39

3

41

Longing for the past: Lost cities on social media JENNY GREGORY AND SANDRA CHAMBERS

4

Histories of urban heritage: Emotional and experiential attachments across time and space

65

URSULA DE JONG, CRISTINA GARDUÑO FREEMAN, BEAU B. BEZA, FIONA GRAY AND MATT NOVACEVSKI

5

Emoji as method: Accessing emotional responses to changing historic places REBECCA MADGIN

80

vi  Contents PART II

Neighbourhoods 6

Narrating places – blurring boundaries: Co-creating digital histories of place

95 97

SARAH A. DOWDING

7

Living in and Loving Leith: Using ethnography to explore place attachment and identity processes

112

HANNAH GARROW

8

Re-creating memories of Gulou: Three temporalities and emotions

129

FLORENCE GRAEZER BIDEAU AND HAIMING YAN

9

Visual research methodologies and the heritage of ‘everyday’ places

143

STEVEN COOKE AND KRISTAL BUCKLEY

PART III

Sites

157

10 Building emotional GIS: A spatial investigation of place attachment for urban historic environments in Edinburgh, Scotland

159

YANG WANG

11 Observing attachment: Understanding everyday life, urban heritage and public space in the Port of Veracruz, Mexico

177

ILKKA TÖRMÄ AND FERNANDO GUTIÉRREZ

12 It’s only a joke if you don’t take the fitness industry seriously: Photographs as archives of place attachment at the early twentieth-century gym

194

KALI MYERS

13 Making visible attachments: artists as a lever for highlighting a sense of place and emotional attachments to heritage: Articulating public art and urban renovation in Porto-Novo, Benin 212 ELIZABETH AUCLAIR AND ELISE GARCIA

Contents  vii 14 Emotional attachments to historic urban places: Heart-bombing heritage

228

THOMPSON M. MAYES

Index 241

Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 8.1 10.1 10.2 10.3 11.1 11.2 11.3 12.1

The neocortex and its associated lobes The cerebral cortex and limbic system Detail of medial temporal lobe, limbic lobe and occipital lobe showing location of specific structures Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain (Nirvana) playing in secret at an acoustic charity gig in 1991 to help raise cash for the city’s Sick Kids Hospital Public art ANZAC tribute on bus stop, Fremantle Crowds at Portobello Outdoor Bathing Pool in April 1955, Daily Record Archives Perth Entertainment Centre, c.1970 General view of Trinity Almshouses in Mile End Road, illustrated by Matt Garbutt in 1896 Map of surveyoflondon.org as it stood in July 2019 Rose McLaughlin, originally from Inishowen, Co. Donegal, walking past warehouses at 120 Leman Street (now demolished) in the 1980s Plan of the 2010 Beijing Time Cultural City project and plan of the 2012 Drum and Bell Tower Square Restoration project Spatial distribution of SHP locations Spatial distribution of SHP locations in central Edinburgh Perspective view of the leverage function for the point process model Selected observation hours showing the change from a weekend night to weekday noon in the Plazuela Visibility analysis of the urban form and recorded people The Plazuela during music events and weekdays ‘One of the Spacious Exercise Halls’, c.1898. The Sandow Institute of Curative Physical Therapeutics at 32A St James’s Street London

25 26 27 48 49 51 54 100 104 108 131 167 168 169 187 188 189 201

Figures  ix 12.2 12.3 13.1 13.2 14.1

Abbye ‘Pudgy’ Stockton on Santa Monica Beach, 1947 Men exercising in the Grace Brothers Gymnasium, Sydney Visit with the residents on Migan Square, 2018 Artists and craftsmen working on Djissou Comè Square, 2015 A heart-bombing by The Young Ohio Preservationists at the Mount Vernon Avenue Commercial Building in Columbus, Ohio, 2017

203 206 219 221 238

Tables

3.1 3.2 3.3

Top 5 likes on Lost Edinburgh 2011–15 Top 5 likes on Lost Perth 2013–15 Comparison of era of top 25 likes on Lost Edinburgh and Lost Perth 3.4 Emotion words used in comments on Portobello Outdoor Pool 3.5 Emotion words used in comments on Perth Entertainment Centre 4.1 Questions asked in the Melbourne study 4.2 Questions asked in the Ballarat Imagine Survey 4.3 Questions asked in the ‘Sea change communities: intergenerational perception and sense of place’ study 10.1 A segment of the first five entries in the SHP location datafile 10.2 Ten most frequently identified historic places

47 47 48 52 56 71 71 72 165 168

Contributors

Elizabeth Auclair has a PhD in geography. She is senior lecturer in geography and planning at CY Cergy Paris Université. Since 2019 she has headed the geography research centre MRTE. Her work concerns artistic, cultural and heritage policies and alternative approaches for sustainable cities. With Graham Fairclough, she has edited Theory and practice in heritage and sustainability: living between past and future (Routledge, 2015). Beau B. Beza is Deputy Associate Dean, Teaching and Learning - Faculty of Science, Engineering and Built Environment, Deakin University. His research focuses on the social production of space and its spatial realization. In 2016, he co-edited and contributed chapters to Sustainability Citizenship in Cities: Theory and Practice (Routledge). Florence Graezer Bideau is an anthropologist. She is a senior lecturer and senior scientist in EPFL’s College of Humanities and School of Architecture. Her research focuses on the relation between culture and power; cultural heritage; and the making of the city from a comparative perspective. Kristal Buckley, AM, is a lecturer in cultural heritage at Deakin University. Her teaching and research interests focus on natural and cultural heritage practices, including world heritage. Sandra Chambers is a teacher who has worked in remote and urban Australia. She undertook much of the research for this chapter after completing a Bachelor of Arts (History) from the University of Western Australia and is particularly interested in Australian and environmental history. Steven Cooke is a cultural and historical geographer and Associate Professor at Deakin University with research interests related to heritage, memory and identity. He is the author of over 30 scholarly publications, including two highly commended books on the memory of war and genocide. Sarah A. Dowding is Research Associate at the Survey of London, the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. She specialises in London’s built environment, working as historian and website editor on the Survey’s experimental Histories of Whitechapel project.

xii  Contributors Cristina Garduño Freeman is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Australian Centre for Architectural History Urban and Cultural Heritage. In 2018 she published her monograph titled Participatory Culture and the Social Value of an Architectural Icon: Sydney Opera House with Routledge. Elise Garcia has a PhD in planning and is an Associate Professor in CY Cergy Paris University. She works on cultural policies and practices. Hannah Garrow completed her ESRC-funded PhD at Newcastle University in February 2020. Her research explores the relationship between place attachment and motivations for community and environmental action. She is a public policy professional with a background in heritage management and urban planning and currently works in a senior policy role in the public sector. Fiona Gray is an Adjunct Associate Professor and advisor on the National Trust of Australia (Vic) Heritage Advocacy Committee. She is also the Director of Civic Collective, a research and design consulting agency specialising in place-based challenges for regional cities and rural towns. Jenny Gregory, AM, FRHS, is Emeritus Professor of History at The University of Western Australia. She has published widely in the areas of urban history, planning and heritage. Current projects include research into lost heritage places and the creation of a sense of place. Fernando Gutiérrez is a PhD candidate at UCL Institute of the Americas. He holds an MSc in sustainable urbanism from The Bartlett UCL, and is a qualified architect in Mexico. Fernando is interested in public space, urban regeneration and urban heritage, particularly in Latin America. Ursula de Jong is Honorary Associate Professor, School of Architecture and Built Environment at Deakin University. She is a widely published architectural historian and researcher of place. She is Director and Deputy Chair of the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) and President of the Nepean Conservation Group, Inc. James Lesh is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne School of Design in the Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage. His research examines twentieth- and twenty-first century urban history and heritage conservation. Thompson M. Mayes is Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel at the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States. He has written and spoken extensively about why old places matter to people, historic preservation law and public policy, and historic sites. He is the author of Why Old Places Matter (Rowman & Littlefield 2018). Rebecca Madgin is Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow. Rebecca’s work explores emotional attachments between people and historic places in the context of urban redevelopment initiatives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Contributors  xiii Kali Myers is a historian and cultural heritage practitioner working in Melbourne/ Naarm. Matt Novacevski is a practising planner, placemaker and teacher. He is completing a PhD at the University of Melbourne, where his research focuses on how interactions between place philosophies might inform the evaluation of placemaking interventions in Australia. Ilkka Törmä is an urban designer and independent researcher. He is interested in change and persistence in space and previously studied the changeability of London high streets. Ilkka holds a MSc in architecture from Aalto University and a Master of Research degree from The Bartlett, UCL. Yang Wang is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow. He is primarily interested in people–place emotion, civic engagement, British urban associational culture and the broader civil society in the UK. Jeremy C. Wells is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park (USA). His research focuses on the psychology of heritage places, making the preservation enterprise more equitable, and community engagement tools for preservation planners. He is the co-author of Human-Centered Built Environment Heritage Preservation. Haiming Yan is a sociologist. He is Associate Research Fellow at the Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage, and director of ICOMOS China secretariat. His research focuses on heritage and society, cultural sociology and UNESCO’s World Heritage programme. He co-edited Heritage Sites in Contemporary China: Cultural Policies and Management Practices (Routledge, 2018).

Acknowledgements

Edited collections are always the product of collective endeavour. This collection is no different. The editors would like to thank a range of people and organisations for their support in enabling the ideas contained within the book to come to fruition. Collectively we would like to thank all the authors and copy-editors involved in the production of the book. Thanks for your expertise, patience and positivity as we worked to bring the book to print. We would also like to thank the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and the European Urban History Association. Both of these organisations provide a lively and stimulating atmosphere in which ideas can be freely exchanged and debated, and indeed the chapters that form this collection are largely derived from the 2018 conferences of both organisations. Rebecca would like to acknowledge and thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for funding her Leadership Fellowship project on emotional attachments to historic urban places. Rebecca would also like to thank her AHRC project partners Historic Environment Scotland, Montagu Evans LLP and SAVE Britain's Heritage and particularly Barbara Cummins, Chris Miele and Henrietta Billings who have helped to guide and shape the AHRC project. James would like to acknowledge the support of the Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage (ACAHUCH) in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning for providing research fellowships and publication grants towards this collection. Both editors believe in the transformative power of transnational approaches to heritage conservation. This is reflected not only in the composition of the book but also in the writing and production process. We would like to thank the University of Glasgow and in particular the College of Social Sciences’ International Partnership Development Fund and the visiting positions offered to Rebecca by the University of Melbourne and University of Sydney which enabled us to spend a concentrated period working on the collection in 2019. The final stages of this project came together amid the COVID-19 pandemic. We would like to acknowledge the resilience shown by everyone involved in this project towards completing the collection during this challenging period. Although the embrace of communication technology has gone some way towards

Acknowledgements  xv bridging physical social distancing, we also look forward to again coming together in person once this moment has passed. The views and any errors in the collection are the responsibility of the authors. Finally, we would like to thank everyone involved at Routledge, particularly Faye Leerink, Nonita Saha, Emma Waterton and Divya Tolia-Kelly, for the smooth production process and for believing in the importance of heritage and emotion.

1 Exploring emotional attachments to historic places Bridging concept, practice and method Rebecca Madgin and James Lesh

Accessing why and how people form emotional attachments to historic places is the central concern of this edited collection. The field of Critical Heritage Studies has largely moved away from seeing the value of heritage as objective and material-centric and only capable of being evaluated by experts. One nascent aspect of this shift has been the turn to explore the emotional and affective dimensions of heritage both in situ and in museum contexts (Smith, 2020; Smith, Wetherell and Campbell, 2018; Tolia-Kelly, Waterton and Watson, 2017). This shift in scholarship has been matched by an evolving heritage sector in which a number of international documents – such as the Burra Charter (Australia ICOMOS, 1979) and the Québec Declaration on the Preservation of the Spirit of Place (ICOMOS, 2008), along with the UNESCO Historic Urban Landscapes recommendation (Bandarin and van Oers, 2015) – have emphasised the need to holistically understand the cultural significance of historic places within heritage management. In parallel, the growth of people-centred conservation is providing new ways of thinking about historic places, the reasons why they matter to individuals and collectives and how this knowledge can influence the protection of the past. As Wells writes, ‘People-centred and human-­centred heritage conservation seeks to balance practice between people and building and landscape fabric’ (2020: 1). The difference between people-centred and human-centred conservation is methodological. Research design for people-­centred studies draw insights from collective experiences, while human-centred studies explore individual experiences and extrapolate for collectives. Methodologies for both ­people- and human-centred heritage conservation are adopted here, as the objective of this collection is to foreground the role of both individuals and collectives across heritage practices and processes (Smith, 2006). This collection is located within these emerging trends in scholarship and practice which seek to contribute further depth to the meaning of historic places for people. The authors within this collection believe that historic places are a locus of emotion and emotional attachments. Moving one step beyond this, we believe that seeing historic places as an emotional construct, rather than just as material legacies, can liberate us from identifying what matters to instead focusing on

2  Rebecca Madgin and James Lesh how heritage makes us feel and thus why heritage is important to the continuity of both place and person. In this sense we don’t prioritise or valorise synthetic distinctions such as the tangible and the intangible of place heritage, but rather emphasise the relationship between people and place in all its dimensions. We believe that emotional attachments to historic places are constitutive of the very reasons why the past matters to people and are therefore fundamental to conservation. However, we recognise that significant barriers remain in evidencing this viewpoint so that it can work alongside and complement existing and traditional heritage theories and approaches for the historic environment. This introduction outlines three ways in which the emotional relationships between people and place could be given greater prominence within both critical heritage studies and heritage management amid the shift to people-centred conservation. First, we argue that a more refined conceptual framework is needed. The chapter foregrounds the concept of ‘place attachment’, defined as people’s emotional and affective bonds with historic places (Altman and Low, 1992), as a way to theoretically ground an understanding of why and how people develop emotional relationships with historic places. In choosing to focus on ‘emotion’, ‘place’ and ‘attachment’, we deliberately eschew a complex heritage lexicon comprised of a plethora of seemingly interchangeable terms. For example, ‘social value’ and ‘social significance’ dominate discussion (Jones and Leech, 2015; Jones et al., 2018). In other international charters and policy documents, ‘intangible’, ‘spirit’, ‘feeling’, ‘meaning’, ‘sense of place’, ‘identity’, ‘social’ and ‘communal value’ have all been adopted to try to develop a better understanding of the relationship between people and place. While each of these terms could be said to implicitly reference ‘emotion’ and ‘attachment to historic places’, the terms are rarely, if ever, used. The use of the terms ‘emotion’, ‘place’ and ‘attachment’ are therefore deliberate and an attempt to move beyond the traditional terms which have their own intellectual and practical baggage. Second, we argue that while the rhetoric within heritage discourse seems to recognise people–place relationships, it does not yet empower heritage management to move away from its traditional focus on material-centred conservation. The introduction highlights the evolution of the discourse within the heritage sector to examine potential synergies between the concept of place attachment and the practice of heritage conservation. Here the chapter argues that moving away from phrases such as ‘sense of place’ and towards incorporating the meanings associated with ‘place attachment’ can evolve concepts and practices away from the traditional emphasis on materiality and towards focusing on the deeper relationship between people and historic places. Third, and finally, the chapter introduces a range of different methods and methodological approaches that are each designed to specifically interrogate emotional attachments between people and historic places. In so doing, the final section of the introduction explores how the current neglect of emotional attachments could be addressed by widening the lens to include different sources and methods that could, in time, be considered as valid knowledge within both urban and cultural heritage scholarship and heritage management.

Exploring emotional attachments to historic places  3

Concept: place as emotional construct The people-centred methodologies developed within this collection all work with ‘place’ in its broadest definition (Cresswell, 2005). We define place as a centre of meaning rather than just as geographic container, or what would commonly be referred to as ‘space’. ‘Place’ and ‘space’ have a long genesis within academic literature and particularly humanistic geography (Tuan, 1977), but despite many attempts to define them their inherent opaqueness is still very much recognised: If two different authors use the words ‘red’, ‘hard’, or ‘disappointed’, no one doubts that they mean approximately the same thing … But in the case of words such as ‘place’ or ‘space’, whose relationship with psychological experience is less direct, there exists a far-reaching uncertainty of interpretation. (Einstein in Malpas, 1999: 19) Place is still ‘one of the most multi-layered and multi-purpose words in our language’ (Harvey in Knox and Pinch, 2013: 193). The term is often defined in binary terms and set up as place versus space. In this definition space can be seen as a geographic container, a set of GPS co-ordinates or a spot on a map. Place, we argue, is a much richer and existential concept. Gieryn (2000; 2006) suggests that it can be broken down into three components: geographic location, material form and investment with meaning and value. While acknowledging that the primacy of materiality is contested, we do however want to focus on the connection between the three components. Because of its relevance for the conservation of historic places, it is the latter component – the investment of a place with meaning and value – that the methods in this book particularly seek to interrogate. We examine how different methods can access how and why places become invested with emotion, attachment and meaning. In so doing we align with phenomenological studies that view place as an essential part of our ontological security and indeed as an ‘inescapable part of existence’ (Manzo, 2003: 48). At its most basic and foundational sense, place is therefore the ‘frame within which experience…is to be understood’ (Malpas, 1999: 16). Place is not just ‘space’ or a location but rather the foundation stone of individual and collective life and so, we argue, it is inherently an emotional construct. Place can be tangible in terms of the built form. Place can also simultaneously be intangible in terms of meanings, memories and practices. The interpretative lens of place allows the authors in this collection to interpret tangible and intangible heritage as indivisible. Authors emphasise the meanings, memories and practices which construct the meaning and value of historic places. In so doing, the authors seek to break down binary positions in which place is defined against space, or tangible is seen as separate to intangible, to instead focus on the way in which ‘place’ liberates analysis from the tyranny of dichotomies. Conventional approaches to conservation tend to re-constitute these dichotomies. This collection seeks to provide ways into collapsing these dichotomies by suggesting historic places are created through physical fabric and human experiences, as well as through relationships and stories.

4  Rebecca Madgin and James Lesh Research into ‘place’ is informed by a range of multi-disciplinary influences. In particular, the authors in this collection frame their understandings through the lens of environmental psychology, memory studies, urban history and human(istic) geography. The authors recognise the potential of the place attachment field to help develop a better understanding of why and how people develop emotional attachments with historic places. Put simply, the place attachment field seeks to understand the emotional and/or affective bonds between people and place (Altman and Low, 1992). The field has, over the last five decades, forged a path towards understanding why people form emotional attachments to a variety of different types of places including houses (Billig, 2016), recreational spaces (Madgin et al., 2016) and second homes (Aronsson, 2004). Research in this field covers a range of different scales including the city (Casakin, Hernández and Ruiz, 2015), the neighbourhood (Bonaiuto et al., 1999) and the landscape (Brown and Raymond, 2007). Lewicka’s seminal review of the place attachment field demonstrated a preference for quantitative methodological approaches that seek to predict the kinds of people and kinds of places which become connected through emotional attachments. For example, researchers have focused on ‘predictors’ such as gender and length of residence as a way to understand the nature of a person’s bond with a particular place (Lewicka, 2011). Such predictors have often been generated by large-scale quantitative questionnaires and surveys that have been then subjected to statistical analysis. Both data collection and analysis are thus framed through a belief in the primacy of predictors as a way to understand the emotional bond between people and place. This approach remains influential, yet Manzo and Devine-Wright’s important edited collection (2014) did recognise the need to think more broadly about different methodological approaches and thus their book was in three sections: ‘theories’, ‘methods’ and ‘applications’. Their book highlighted the use of more qualitative techniques through chapters on narratives (Rishbeth, 2014) and photo-based methods (Stedman et al., 2014). In this manner, the shift away from qualitative methods has enabled a thick and rich description of the emergence, nature and intensity of emotional attachments that moves beyond predicting why people will form (and have formed) emotional attachments to place. Although there has been very little work conducted on historic places within the field of place attachment, there has recently been an increase in the number of scholars working in heritage contexts such as tourist sites (Yuan et al., 2019), museums (Eckersley, 2017) and urban or ‘everyday’ environments (Alawadi, 2017). These types of studies each recognise that the conceptual framework provided by the place attachment field could work in parallel with the emerging people-centred focus within critical heritage studies. Many of these studies adopt a geographic focus and they do so in a way that foregrounds the emotional components of place (Alawadi, 2017; Lewicka, 2008; Madgin et al., 2018; Wells, 2015). The focus of this book rests with urban places as we believe that they are distinctive repositories of meaning and attachment, are key locales within heritage management and regeneration strategies, and can be subject to intense disputes

Exploring emotional attachments to historic places  5 due to a large number of potential stakeholders. Historic places become contested in urban environments due to an intensity of social interactions and competing political and property interests. The historical relationship between modernisation and development and conservation has had profound impacts on the ways in which heritage is managed and experienced (Glendinning, 2013; Harrison, 2013; Klemek, 2011). The history of the conservation movement has been typically written as a series of reactions to urban, social and political change, and it is in these responses to change that we believe previously latent emotional attachments come to the fore. As urban historians have examined, the responses of communities to change must also be understood as at once perfectly rational and intensely emotional (Kenny, 2014; Prestel, 2017). The ways that historic places are experienced in cities are fluid and variable, and emotional attachments are consistently being made and re-made in response to broader socio-economic, cultural, environmental and political changes. As this collection demonstrates, cities continue to be an important social laboratory for the development of heritage ideas and practices. The place attachment field has the potential to help frame an understanding of emotional attachments to historic places in four main ways. First, and perhaps most crucially, the place attachment field re-orients critical heritage studies and the heritage sector away from the dominant frames through which we have traditionally explored why heritage matters. Second, and relatedly, the field provides a large corpus of work stretching back over five decades that provides a strong conceptual grounding within which historic places can be examined. Third, the field provides a number of different quantitative and increasingly qualitative methods that can be adapted and developed by drawing on the plural disciplinary backgrounds of critical heritage scholars in conjunction with the requirements of heritage processes. Finally, at the heart of the place attachment field is a belief that ‘place’ is not merely a geographic location but also an inherently emotional construct. Establishing and maintaining this mindset shift within the heritage sector towards people-centred conservation is perhaps the biggest hurdle to theories and practices that have traditionally focused on the existence of material fabric rather than the socially and emotionally constructed meanings that are attached to the physical remains of the past.

Practice: moving away from place as geographic location? Within heritage management, the term ‘place’ has a democratic sensibility enshrined within it. Place appeared as a descriptor in the English Town and Country Planning Act (1932) which preserved ‘buildings or other objects’ and ‘places of natural interest and beauty [both] urban or rural’ (Delafons, 1997: 36–37). Place took on a more expansive meaning in the United States National Register of Historic Places, established in 1966 by the National Historic Preservation Act. This legislation expanded the earlier National Historic Landmarks system (created in 1935) and allowed for the listing of sites, memorials, parks and monuments. In 1970s Australia, further efforts were made to embrace a wider range of heritage sites by actively rejecting the term ‘monument’ in favour of the moniker

6  Rebecca Madgin and James Lesh ‘place’ (Lesh, 2020). The first edition of the Burra Charter, published in 1979, thus adopted the term ‘place’ as the focus for the heritage sector. For the drafters of the Burra Charter, the term ‘monument’ embodied traditional European conceptions of heritage which privileged stone temples, cathedrals and palaces. As a counterpoint, the term ‘place’ was used to embrace Australian Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian heritage: from celebrated architecture and government buildings to industrial and vernacular landscapes. Across the world, the term ‘place’ transitioned heritage management from monumental sites to more expansive subjects amid the field’s democratic, ‘relativist’ or ‘postmodern’ turn which had started by the 1980s (Glendinning, 2013; Shua, 2018). Key battlegrounds for this shift in heritage ideas and practices were cities and urban places, where post-war inner-city decline and renewal efforts had inspired social movements and fresh approaches to conservation (Pendlebury, 2009; Madgin, 2020). The transition towards place terminology within heritage management was a positive step. But cutting-edge thinking around place – primarily developed in the fields of human(istic) geography and environmental psychology – has not always been embraced within heritage practice. As suggested above, within practice, the concept of place has often been a geographical and physical one. It has enabled a broadening remit of sites to enter heritage designation and conservation practice. But it has not yet led to human- and people-centred heritage conservation (Wells and Stiefel, 2018), which would emphasise the meaning and attachments of place for people. Rather, the geolocational focus of the idea of place has been a reason for the creation of the synthetic division between intangible and tangible heritage when it comes to shaping historic places. So-called intangible heritage has typically dealt with senses of place and social value, while so-called tangible heritage has concerned itself with the fabric and material components of historic built environments. This division is not only at odds with how people experience place but also conflicts with the notion that cultural values are, by definition, always intangible (Avrami et al., 2019; Byrne, Brayshaw and Ireland, 2003; Smith and Campbell, 2017). Historic places develop over time through a confluence of intangible and tangible factors which intermingle to produce cultural value (Lesh, 2021). The impact of the binary for the historic environment has been to veil the meaning which people place on buildings and structures, while authorising the continuation of traditional modes of heritage expertise which can diminish community perspectives on built worlds. A further issue remains concerning the proliferation of terms that are prefixed with the word ‘place’ in urban policy and planning. References to ‘place identity’, ‘place branding’, ‘place marketing’, ‘place management’ and ‘place making’ are supported by initiatives such as the Place Standard (2015) and the Place Principle (2019) which were introduced in Scotland to guide and support planning. In the alphabet soup approach of urban policy making, place has therefore become the favoured term. However, it is terms that have ‘place’ as a suffix that have seemingly dominated heritage practice. For example, ‘spirit of place’ and ‘sense of place’ are favoured within international heritage documents. The Québec Declaration is just one example of this. Neil A. Silberman (2015) writes that the ‘spirit of place’ – genius loci – has its origins in Roman beliefs and rituals, but that in the twenty-first century, historic places are now conceived of more broadly. Even while re-constituting the

Exploring emotional attachments to historic places  7 tangible/intangible binary, this broader definition is nevertheless supported in the Declaration, where ‘spirit of place’ is defined as the tangible (buildings, sites, landscapes, routes, objects) and the intangible elements (memories, narratives, written documents, rituals, festivals, traditional knowledge, values, textures, colors, odors, etc.), that is to say the physical and the spiritual elements that give meaning, value, emotion and mystery to place. (ICOMOS, 2008) The acknowledgement of ‘emotion’ here is a crucial recognition of the role that emotions play within heritage practice. Despite this, ‘spirit of place’ does not dominate international discourse and indeed John Schofield and Rosy Szymanski (2011) suggest ‘spirit of place’ and ‘sense of place’ overlap, with the latter being the most influential terminology within heritage practice to date. More recently, Bandarin and van Oers (2015: 319) equated sense of place and genius loci by seeing the: complex layering of natural, cultural, built, intangible and local heritage, superimposed on and interacting with each other, and connecting the physical with the socio-economic and cultural environment, is what can be labelled as the historic urban landscape of a city [as] the critical underpinning of its sense of place, or genius loci. From an archaeological perspective, Schofield and Szymanski and van Oers in the Historic Urban Landscape approach advocate for a ‘sense of place’ as being a foundational component of heritage practice. While there seems to be an acceptance of the importance of concepts such as ‘spirit-’ and ‘sense of place’ within heritage management, arguably this has not coalesced into a coherent conceptual framework for places. Similarly, the adoption of methods which produce a robust empirical base that can in turn affect heritage management remains unexplored. Indeed, Wells found that ‘of all the values of heritage conservation, the spirit and feeling of places may be the most subjective and lacking in sufficient methodological rigour’ (2017: 19). This view is supported by a range of different heritage organisations such as UNESCO who, in their Operational Guidelines, recognised that ‘attributes such as spirit and feeling do not lend themselves easily to practical applications of the conditions of authenticity, but nevertheless are important indicators of character and sense of place, for example, in communities maintaining tradition and cultural continuity’ (2015: 22). While there is a growing awareness of the need to better understand the relationship between people and historic places, methodological approaches that can capture this are still developing. While recognising that notions of a ‘sense of place’ have long been influential within heritage practice, this collection instead proposes ‘place attachment’ as an alternative way forward. We suggest that the ‘sense of place’ approach, which has been used by heritage practitioners for at least three decades, has not sufficiently embraced the emotional elements of the relationship between people and

8  Rebecca Madgin and James Lesh place, nor has it been able to sufficiently ground the development of methods within a robust conceptual framework. The place attachment field, by contrast, provides established frameworks for understanding the relationship between people and place which enables the development of new conceptual and methodological approaches for a people-centred conservation practice. The challenge then remains for the critical heritage studies field to advance this knowledge by fusing different disciplinary interests, approaches and methods and by collecting evidence on why and how people develop emotional attachments to historic places.

Method: accessing attachments to historic places Place attachment has its intellectual origins in both the humanities and social sciences. It boasts a philosophical and methodological plurality, and a rigour and replicability for the heritage sphere. By definition, place attachment scholarship also centralises people in the study of place. By approaching historic places through a place attachment lens, our ambition is to re-conceive of (historic) place as an emotional and value-laden construct, a material site and a geographic location. This viewpoint is one that has gradually gained traction in different disciplines as scholars have, to varying degrees, applied the concept of place attachment to case studies of historic places. Across these studies, the approach generally replicates the wider place attachment field by emphasising quantitative methods. For example, a number of these papers rely on one method, often the questionnaire/survey supported by statistical analysis (Wu et al., 2019a, 2019b; Yuan et al., 2019). However, there has also been a willingness to try different methods such as auto-ethnography (Fusté-Forné and Nguyen, 2018) and community-participatory research (Wells et al., 2019) supported by content analysis, grounded theory and thick/rich description. Research on the emotional bonds between people and historic places is thus developing its own suite of methods. Furthermore, other papers combine different qualitative methods. This is most clearly seen with Eckersley’s work on museums (2017) in which a new ‘people-place-process belonging complex’ is proposed. This conceptual development, which partly draws on the place attachment field, adopts an integrated and mixed qualitative methods involving site visits, focus groups, participant observations and interviews. Zhang and Smith (2019) adopt a similar approach, using semi-structured and structured interviews along with field observations to deduce how tourists feel about particular historic places. In these ways, Alawadi, Eckersley, and Zhang and Smith’s approaches align with those taken in this volume by Auclair and Garcia, Cooke and Buckley, Garrow, Madgin, and Törmä and Gutiérrez, as they each combine a range of qualitative methods, or, in the case of Wang and Wells, develop mixed methods in ways that help to access people’s emotional attachments to historic places. These approaches demonstrate how existing sources and methods can be used when they are turned to train their attention on people, emotion and attachment. The integration of multiple methods alongside multi- and/or inter-­disciplinary conceptual frameworks, such as place attachment and a people-centred approach, provides for methodological innovations.

Exploring emotional attachments to historic places  9 While a number of new methods are emerging, it is also important not to lose sight of the heritage studies canon (Gentry and Smith, 2019). While emotion has not often been foregrounded in research, a number of seminal works can be read through the lens of emotional attachments in ways that help us to better understand how and why these attachments form in historic places. For example, David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country (1985; 2015), Graeme Davison and Chris McConville’s A Heritage Handbook (1991) and Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory (1994) each use an expansive cultural archive including literature, art and performance to demonstrate the benefits and burdens of the past. Much of this conveys the emotional pull of the historic environment but it also establishes that data to interrogate emotional attachments can be found all around us – from the newspaper to the novel and from the ‘ye olde worlde’ shop to the superstore selling us anything from heritage sweets to historical fiction. A number of the chapters in this collection suggest ways in which this existing source material can be read through the lens of emotion and attachment. Adopting a historical method and inspired by the turn to emotion in historical scholarship, in this collection Myers explores the atypical everyday historic place of the gymnasium and its affect for fitness enthusiasts. Gregory demonstrates how subjecting social media platforms to both content and linguistic analysis can transform our understandings of the emotional responses to the loss of historic places. De Jong et al. also focus on language to examine data through the lexicon of emotion. Similarly, Dowding conveys how an iterative historical document, The Survey of London, can be mined to examine the attachments of both those who send through information and those who administer the Survey. Emotional attachments to historic places can be revealed by re-interpreting existing visual and textual source material. The chapters in this collection largely privilege the written document, but others (Madgin, Cooke and Buckley, Gregory, Myers) demonstrate that existing visual images can be used as a way of developing an understanding of emotional attachments to historic places (Whittington, 2020). Extant sources such as architectural drawings, building and area plans, newspapers, novels, artworks, films, song lyrics, poems and graffiti provide authors with ways to share stories of emotion and place attachment. This volume is not divorced from the wider policies and practices of heritage management, and indeed a number of the authors have worked across both academia and the wider heritage sector. As such, one ambition of the collection is that the methodological approaches may prove relevant to evolving policies and practices that are more focused on people-centred conservation (see Mayes, this volume). The lacuna in the extant place attachment field of robust methods that extend beyond quantitative analysis is matched within heritage practice by challenges in recognising and analysing emotional attachments between people and historic places. For example, while the annual Heritage Counts reports produced by Historic England (2008) usefully tell us the percentage of people that ‘like’, ‘love’ or ‘feel proud’ of their heritage, they do not provide an in-depth examination of why people feel the way they do. Indeed, Wells, working in a North American context, decried the use of surveys as they produce ‘exceedingly thin depths of meaning’, yet

10  Rebecca Madgin and James Lesh ‘depth of meaning is essential’ for understanding the ‘sociocultural issues involved in the conservation of historic places’ (2015: 46–47). However, the quantitative bias that exists in many spheres of policy ensures that the power of the percentage retains its persuasiveness. In addition, there are few agreed assessment processes for assessing cultural significance or undertaking conservation in ways that foreground personal attachments to historic places. Recent hearings held by the independent statutory expert panel the Heritage Council of Victoria have received submissions on community sentiment towards places, but the quality of the analysis and its role in decision making has varied. For example, a 2020 determination for the brutalist Footscray Psychiatric Hospital in Melbourne compared the community evidence from the National Trust in favour and the government department against a heritage listing. According to the determination, the department’s heritage expert’s ‘reliance on forwarded emails from former psychiatric staff and social media postings lacking context’ was used to argue it is ‘not appreciated as such by the broader community’. In contrast, a ‘wealth of primary source material’ provided in support of the listing by the National Trust and its allies generated the eventual outcome of a statutory designation (Heritage Council of Victoria, 2020). To date, within heritage management, the most advanced methodologies that prioritise people–place relations have been employed in social value assessment (Lesh, 2019). The next step will be to consider how the breadth of cultural values embodied in place have emotional and human dimensions. There are structural issues within heritage practice which make embracing place attachment complex. People-centred conservation is an emerging paradigm and heritage practitioners are rarely familiar with methodologies appropriate to assessing place attachment. The Heritage Council of Victoria (2020) put it bluntly: ‘In relation to the social media commentary, the Committee considers it unusual for [the government department’s] expert to rely on such material with little accompanying analysis or detail, and for that reason finds it inappropriate to rely upon it’. For practitioners who have largely been trained to evaluate material culture from their accumulated expertise it is quite the disruption to move away from privileging the apparent fact of the object, to the subjectivity of the experience. However, there is an increasing body of evidence that suggests practice and practitioners are shifting to think more about the importance of place attachment and emotion within heritage management (Mayes, 2018; National Trust, 2017; 2019). An ambition of this collection is thus to present innovative methods and methodological approaches in ways which are both appealing for and translatable into heritage practice (see Mayes, this volume). This requires an acceptance that diverse forms of empirical evidence and unfamiliar methodologies and methods have a place within heritage processes and practices. The assumption here is that the role of heritage management is to preserve places not on behalf of communities but in collaboration with them. New and diverse forms of academic, practitioner and community expertise will thus be required. This is not as simple as finding new ways of doing and collecting; it also requires a shift towards a people-centred mindset to incorporate a concept of place attachment which acknowledges the emotional relationship between people and place. This is not

Exploring emotional attachments to historic places  11 to suggest that the traditional valorisation of architectural and historic value is to be replaced, but rather that it is capable of evolution and enhancement. The people-centred methods and methodologies contained within this volume offer a path towards this heritage future: one where a broader consensus derived from a collaborative approach will ensure the past remains relevant today and tomorrow.

Structuring the collection As people relate to places in cities at various scales, this collection adopts a spatial structure that adopts the scale first of the city, then of the neighbourhood and finally of localised environments. In so doing we recognise that the boundaries of cities, neighbourhoods and localities are always nebulous. The richness of historic places and emotional attachments are always evolving. Attachments and emotions towards these historic places operate as much in the social imagination as on the ground in the lived experiences of them. However, this collection’s structure enables the methods used by the authors to be located in particular geographic scales that are crucial for heritage management strategies. While the chapters could be read at a scalar level, they also crucially reveal how places are not just geographic locations but are infused with emotional attachments that go beyond scale. For example, the chapters can be read for their temporal dimensions. Garrow’s chapter suggests the value of a deeply embedded ethnographic approach where the researcher lived and worked in the locale, whereas Madgin’s chapter was designed to collect emotional attachments in short (circa two-hour) workshops. Other chapters require a steeper learning curve that involves mastering software packages and statistical techniques (Wang) or neuroscientific knowledge to be combined with social scientific knowledge (Wells). Some methods are more resource intensive than others – Cooke and Buckley use innovative new technology while De Jong et al. require larger numbers of participants for their loveability indices. Interrogating emotional attachments can be a desk-based exercise using extant data, such as Gregory’s use of social media, Myers’ use of historical archives, or a combination of newly created and extant data as with Dowding’s use of the Survey of London. Others require prolonged in-situ qualitative fieldwork as shown with Bideau and Yan, Auclair and Törmä, and Gutiérrez. The methods and approaches adopted within this collection therefore demonstrate the variety of ways in which emotional attachments to historic places can be collected and analysed. We do not propose that these methods be read as an ‘out-of-the-box’ toolkit, but rather that potential users draw inspiration from them. We hope these methods provoke insights into the ways they could be combined across disciplines and between theory and practice, taking account of users’ own epistemological viewpoints and practical considerations. For the methods contained within this collection to have a real impact on theories and practices of heritage requires that academics, students, emerging and existing practitioners engage with new and diverse forms of empirical evidence

12  Rebecca Madgin and James Lesh and new ways of collaborative working. Public responses to places will be deemed valid. Deep archival research and interpretation by historians will be necessary. Fresh qualitative and quantitative data will need to be collected and analysed. Sociological, ethnographic and anthropological methodologies will need to work alongside traditional methodologies derived from archaeology, architecture, and urban and architectural history. Digital approaches will play a growing role. The chapters in this collection demonstrate just some of the above and provide many clues as to how a corpus of evidence not normally considered as part of existing heritage practices can help us to understand how and why people form emotional attachments to historic places, thereby providing innovative ways forward for people-centred heritage conservation.

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Exploring emotional attachments to historic places  15 Stedman, R.C., Amsden, B.L., Beckley, T.M. and Tidball, K.G. (2014), “Photo-Based Methods for Understanding Place Meanings as Foundations of Attachment”, in Manzo, L.C. and Devine-Wright, P. (Eds), Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications, Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 112–124. Tolia-Kelly, D.P., Waterton, E. and Watson, S. (Eds). (2017), Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures, Routledge, London. Tuan, Y. (1977), Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. UNESCO (2015), Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention, available at: http://whc.unesco.org/archive/opguide13-en.pdf. Wells, J.C. (2015), “Making a case for historic place conservation based on people’s values”, Forum Journal, Vol. 29 No. 3, pp. 44–62. Wells, J.C. (2017), “A Methodological Framework for Assessing the ‘Spirit and Feeling’ of World Heritage Properties”, in Gensheimer, T.R. and Guichard, C.L. (Eds), World Heritage and National Registers: Stewardship in Perspective, Taylor & Francis Group, London, pp. 19–32. Wells, J.C. (2020), “The Affect of Old Places: Exploring the Dimensions of Place Attachment and Senescent Environment”, in Kopec, D.A. and Bliss, A. (Eds), Place Meaning and Attachment: Authenticity, Heritage And Preservation, Abingdon, Routledge, pp. 1–15. Wells, J.C. and Stiefel, B. (Eds). (2018), Human-Centered Built Environment Heritage Preservation: Theory and Evidence-Based Practice, Routledge, New York. Wells, J.C., Silva, A.P., Araújo, L., Azevêdo, G., Barros, A., Lins, M.E., Ferreira, E., Guerra, A., de Abreu e Lima, V., Moura, A.I., and Tenório, G. (2019), “Empowering Communities to Identify, Treat, and Protect Their Heritage: A Cultural Landscape Case Study of the Horto d'El Rey, Olinda, Brazil”, in Fouseki, K., Guttormsen, T.S. and Swensen, G. (Eds), Heritage and Sustainable Urban Transformations: Deep Cities, Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon. Whittington, V. (2020), “Bicentenaries and belonging: Public heritage of the lower blue mountains and the politics of place attachment”, Journal of Community Archaeology & Heritage, Vol. 7 No. 1, pp. 54–72. Wu, R., Huang, X., Li, Z., Liu, Y. and Liu, Y. (2019a), “Deciphering the meaning and mechanism of migrants’ and locals’ neighborhood attachment in Chinese Cities: Evidence from Guangzhou”, Cities, Vol. 85, pp. 187–195. Wu, R., Li, Z., Liu, Y., Huang, X. and Liu, Y. (2019b), “Neighborhood governance in post-reform urban China: Place attachment impact on civic engagement in Guangzhou”, Land Use Policy, Vol. 81, pp. 472–482. Yuan, Q., Song, H., Chen, N. and Shang, W. (2019), “Roles of tourism involvement and place attachment in determining residents’ attitudes toward industrial heritage tourism in a resource-exhausted city in China”, Sustainability, Vol. 11 No. 19, p. 5151. Zhang, R. and Smith, L. (2019), “Bonding and dissonance: Rethinking the interrelations among stakeholders in heritage tourism”, Tourism Management, Vol. 74, pp. 212–223.

2 Attachment to older or historic places Relating what we know from the perspectives of phenomenology and neuroscience Jeremy C. Wells Introduction Place attachment is a well-known concept in humanistic geography, environmental conservation, environmental psychology and urban planning, but is largely absent from built heritage conservation (or historic preservation in the USA). In this latter field, the use of the term ‘sense of place’ or ‘spirit of place’ is much more common, but these concepts are also less well defined and often applied in vague ways. Even spirit of place (or ‘spirit and feeling’), which is used as part of UNESCO’s World Heritage nomination process (UNESCO, 2017), is ill defined – especially in terms of how one should assess the phenomenon. The Québec Declaration (ICOMOS, 2008), an international heritage conservation charter, defines spirit of place as ‘the tangible (buildings, sites, landscapes, routes, objects) and the intangible elements (memories, narratives, written documents, rituals, festivals, traditional knowledge, values, textures, colours, odours, etc.), that is to say the physical and the spiritual elements that give meaning, value, emotion and mystery to place’. As defined in this charter, spirit of place is actually much closer to sense of place, the latter of which implies that one must experience a specific place to understand it; conversely, spirit of place assumes an innate set of characteristics independent of experience (Brook, 2000). To be sure, place attachment is rather explicitly defined in environmental psychology through concepts such as place identity, rootedness and place dependence (Proshansky, Fabian, & Kaminoff, 1995; Tuan, 1980; Vaske & Kobrin, 2001). There is also a related concept – place disruption – that describes what happens when the attachment is destroyed (Brown & Perkins, 1992). Concomitant with place attachment is the understanding that ‘attachment’ refers to an emotional experience associated with a specific place – usually a positive one. While the place may be associated with objective qualities (e.g., size, orientation, massing, colour), what is most important for the individual is their feelings about the place which results in this emotional attachment (Low & Altman, 1992). One reason why place attachment is not often associated with built heritage conservation or historic preservation is that these fields have long been based on objective (non-emotional) criteria promulgated by rules and regulations, leaving little or no room for the feelings that people have for historic or older places (Wells & Baldwin, 2012).

Attachment to older or historic places  17 In this chapter, I will therefore review research on the emotional attachment to older or historic places through a phenomenological perspective, which will then inform an exploratory inquiry into the use of neuroscience concepts and research to elucidate the emotional experience of being in historic places. I use phenomenologies to start this investigation primarily because of their widespread adoption in understanding people’s emotional attachment to specific places; I end with neuroscience because of its great potential in uncovering the biological reasons for attachment to places. Unlike phenomenologies, which are often criticised for introducing cultural biases, neuroscience promises the potential of a universal concept of place attachment that is common across humanity: a fundamental, biological reason why people become attached to places. Before I begin, however, it is important to contextualise my discussion within the field of environment/behaviour research (EBR), which has a long history of attempting to understand the relationship between people and place using social science research methods. These methods include phenomenologies and neuroscience, among many other possibilities. Environmental psychologists and sympathetic architects established EBR as a field of inquiry in the 1960s. EBR’s aims were to use evidence from the social sciences to help design better places for people. The concern was that ‘good’ design was simply associated with what an architect personally liked or did not like; there were no objective criteria (or evidence) through which ‘better’ design could be articulated and then used to improve design (Rapoport, 2008). While there was great hope that EBR would revolutionise the design fields, it never became ubiquitous, although it is now well established in health care facilities design. The field, however, does present some of the most well-developed theories and research to explore people, place and emotional affect.

Phenomenologies: radically empirical, qualitative, pre-reflective inquiry into people and older places Is it possible to experience the world without your body? Obviously, the answer is ‘no’, yet many built environment researchers and practitioners fail to consider the embodied experience in relationship to the design and conservation of places (Howett, 1993; Pallasmaa, 2011: 119; Wells, 2011). To help the reader understand how critically important the embodied experience is, think of where you are right now, as you are reading this text. How do you feel? Cold? Hot? What do you hear? What do you smell? Is it dark? Bright? Are you comfortable? Uncomfortable? These sensations are the inescapable result of the embodied experience; moreover, the design and character of the built environment has the power to make a person feel a certain way. On a larger scale, the embodied experience facilitates or impairs overall quality of life. Within built environment research and environmental psychology, the phenomenology, or more specifically a phenomenological reduction, is a methodology used to access pre-reflective meanings associated with the embodied experience. The ‘lifeworld’ is a term that describes this embodied experience, especially in relation to its focus on perception (pre-reflective) rather than

18  Jeremy C. Wells higher-level cognition that might explain why and how things are perceived. In other words, a phenomenology does not attempt to explain why a particular perception exists; instead, it focuses on a ‘radically empirical’ description of this pre-reflective experience (Seamon, 1982). One achieves this radically empirical state through immensely thick, abundant and qualitative descriptions of a specific phenomenon. This description must be done through bracketing, in which the researcher attempts, to the highest degree possible, to understand and experience the phenomenon as if it is fresh and entirely new. In this way, natural attitudes and biases are (ideally) extinguished, which, if present, could taint the collected data (Moustakas, 1994). In sum, a phenomenology seeks the polar opposite of a detached, objective description of reality though a focus on feeling, emotions and perceptions before they are changed though any kind of reflective process. Humanistic geography is widely credited as the first field to connect the embodied experience to specific places, and in the process, help define sense of place (Cresswell, 2011: 33–39). It was in the 1970s that researchers from this field, such as Yi-Fu Tuan (1974), used phenomenological reductions to understand people’s embodied experiences, including emotional attachments, in various geographical contexts. Within humanistic geography, a phenomenology is one of the few methodological approaches capable of revealing and understanding some of the deepest, most subjective human experiences. If one were to create a spectrum of research methodologies and, on one extreme, place purely quantitative methods, the other extreme would be represented by phenomenologies. This spectrum therefore represents the continuum between extreme objectivity and extreme subjectivity. In between these polar opposites would be other social science methods, such as grounded theory and ethnographies. The capacity to explore extremely subjective experiences is one reason why phenomenologies are also used in nursing research to understand people’s experience of pain (Munhall, 2007). Pain is one of the most profound (or disturbing) emotions possible and much would be lost by ignoring the deeply personal, subjective qualities of the embodied experience in this context. Given this usefulness of phenomenologies in understanding the emotional relationship between people and place, why do they remain relatively rare, even after many decades of research on this topic? A fundamental reason for this situation is that there is no consensus on a definition, nor is there agreement on what, exactly, a phenomenology is supposed to be and how it should be used to answer research questions (Shīrāzī, 2016). Considering that phenomenology originates in structuralist philosophical traditions – chiefly Husserl (1962) and Heidegger (1962) – it should not be surprising that a definition has always been a constantly moving target. To be sure, post-structuralist philosophers dismiss phenomenologies while embracing pervasive relativism and, in the process, deny researchers some kind of applied method to understand the relationship between people and place (e.g., Derrida, 1973; Foucault, 1972). One is therefore forced to ‘choose sides’ between structuralist (e.g., phenomenological) and post-structuralist (e.g., relativist) approaches (Visker, 1999). Today, in some disciplines, choosing a phenomenology as a research methodology may result in being branded as naïve or old-fashioned and out of touch with contemporary philosophical thought (Sheridan, 1997). In architectural

Attachment to older or historic places  19 theory, in particular, the lead thinker in phenomenology, Christian Norberg-Schulz (1980) has been the subject of much criticism in the twenty-first century, especially for his supposedly failed attempt to make architectural design ‘ahistorical’ through a phenomenological method (Otero-Pailos, 2010). Van Gerrewey (2012) claims that Norberg-Schulz failed to consider the embodied experience of place because of this focus, but there is simply insufficient scholarly literature on the topic to know if these criticisms can be broadly substantiated. Regardless, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, phenomenologies are often considered passé in the fashion-driven world of architecture, as Gregory Wharton, a practising architect, epitomises in his observation that ‘Architectural phenomenology is so [19]90s’ (Archinet, 2014). Similarly, the field of humanistic geography, especially in the United States, has undergone a significant decline in the past few decades from its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the 1990s, faculty lines for such specialists have simply not been maintained. Some of this change has been due to an increased emphasis within geography on quantitative methods and post-­structuralist and Marxist perspectives, but also on research that has more applied outcomes. David Seamon (2015: 39) notes that this lack of application is, in part, what ‘exiled’ humanistic geography from the broader discipline of geography because of its ‘seeming unwillingness to deal with broader societal and structural forces’. Other criticisms include the dominance of first-person accounts by male academics which could not properly represent the diversity of human experience; the ‘essentialism’ that a phenomenological reduction seeks was therefore illusory. As Seamon refutes, however, these criticisms are hardly universal and only apply to specific, narrow instances. There are many cases of published work in which the use of a phenomenology probes specific lived experiences (e.g., Masberg & ­Silverman, 1996; Stefanovic, 1998; Wells & Baldwin, 2012). Moreover, there are also third-person accounts that can gather data, via a phenomenology, from a diverse array of people; in this sense the raw method used to access data – e.g., interviews – is no different than, for instance, what ethnographers employ. But while the use of phenomenologies has languished within geography proper, this approach has actually grown since the 1990s in other, allied fields and disciplines such as anthropology, architecture, and media studies (see Askland & Bunn, 2018; Casey, 2007; Champion, 2018; Kogl, 2008; Malpas, 1999; Mugerauer, 1994; Stefanovic, 2000). Specific examples include Kusenbach’s (2003) ‘go along street phenomenology’ used to supplement ethnographies and the use of concepts associated with place attachment in sociological research (Gieryn, 2000). But one area from which the phenomenology is largely absent is historic preservation/built heritage conservation, albeit with some notable exceptions. Considering the emphasis on sense of place often touted as the desirable outcome of built heritage conservation (e.g., Ford, 1974; Rowntree, 1981; Datel, 1985; Lew, 1989; Benton, 2001; Dedek, 2014), this absence may seem odd, but perhaps explainable given that the disciplines that are most often associated with this work – history, archaeology, applied architectural design and construction management – do not use phenomenologies either.

20  Jeremy C. Wells There are significant exceptions, however, to this lack of research combining phenomenologies and the historic environment to produce empirical evidence. Since the mid-1980s, this work has addressed nostalgia, spontaneous fantasies, understanding the visitor’s experience at an historic site, a ‘sense of sacrality’ in relation to religious heritage places and the authenticity of virtual heritage. In total, there are only about 15 authors from a wide variety of disciplines over the past 35 years who have conducted a phenomenology that addressed some kind of built heritage topic and that produced novel data. In this period of time, a few additional authors have explored built heritage and phenomenologies from a purely theoretical basis (i.e., no production of data for analysis), which are useful forays into understanding the relationship between smell and historical authenticity (Tošić, 2016) and ways to understand how sense of place can be retained in historic waterfronts (Mohamed & Salim, 2018). Smell, in particular, is undervalued in heritage conservation work. Using an experiential phenomenology to explore people’s experiences of heritage areas in Norway, Swensen and Saeter (2011) revealed that memorable heritage places are not only associated with personal biographies, but also with sensory experiences, such as smells and sounds. Swensen and Saeter’s research, and other empirical research like theirs, is especially useful because it grounds theory, which is essential for applied conservation practice. It is for this reason that this review on the application of phenomenology to built heritage will specifically focus on research that has produced this kind of novel empirical data. Johannus Hofer, a Swiss medical student, is credited with the invention of the term ‘nostalgia’, which he defined as a kind of ‘homesickness’ with specific, physical symptoms. The word is a combination of two Greek words, nostos (a return to a native land) and algos (suffering or grief). When Hoffer created his neologism in 1688, he was attempting to understand why some soldiers exhibited psychosomatic symptoms such as stomach pain, anxiety and headaches upon leaving home (Anspach, 1934). In a contemporary context within phenomenology, nostalgia is understood as a kind of romantic yearning for an imagined past, although in most cases, personal experiences are involved in its conception (Casey, 1987). Using an existential phenomenology, Adams and Larkham (2016) studied the nostalgia people held for specific places in Birmingham and Coventry (UK) erased by post-World War II development. They concluded that while the nostalgia resulting from these losses was painful (especially when coupled with personal and/or violent experiences), the study’s participants also expressed optimism for potentially positive affects brought by these changes. To be sure, evidence from psychology indicates that the overall impact of nostalgic experiences is indeed positive; from their literature review on the subject, Sedikides et al. (2008) conclude that nostalgia ‘generates positive affectivity’, improves how individuals regard themselves and strengthens social bonds. Related to nostalgia is the experience of the spontaneous fantasy, a phenomenon that I discovered in my work comparing residents’ experiences of two urban areas whose design was nearly identical, but whose age was significantly different (Wells & Baldwin, 2012; Wells, 2017). Historic Charleston (South Carolina, USA) is the location of the first historic district in the United States – this was

Attachment to older or historic places  21 the first case in my study. In historic Charleston, the majority of buildings were constructed before the American Civil War (before 1861). The second case was I’On, a new urbanist development in Mount Pleasant (South Carolina, USA). The majority of I’On was built in the twenty-first century. The architectural design of the houses as well as the urban design (e.g., building setbacks, density, urban street pattern) were nearly identical. By conducting an existential phenomenology and interviewing residents using photo-elicitation techniques, a pattern arose whereby only residents of historic Charleston described a phenomenon unique to their experiences. While walking in their neighbourhood, a typical participant would look at a specific element of the landscape (e.g., stairs, balconies, paving stones) and immediately, without any pre-cognition, a vignette of the past would pop into the person’s mind. Because this experience was entirely spontaneous and often not related to any objective, factual past, I called this experience a ‘spontaneous fantasy’. Residents of I’On did not report this kind of experience. Through binary logistic regression, I was able to establish a correlation between the appearance of patina (i.e., signs of decay/age) in a neighbourhood and the likelihood of a resident experiencing a spontaneous fantasy. Moreover, residents who experienced spontaneous fantasies had a higher degree of place attachment to their neighbourhoods than residents who did not experience this phenomenon. It is important to clarify the differences between spontaneous fantasy and daydreaming. The former phenomenon is not under the direct conscious control of the individual who experiences it, unlike the latter phenomenon. In this way, the spontaneous fantasy appears to be more deeply connected with pre-reflective experience than daydreaming. According to an overview on daydreaming from a psychological perspective, Stawarczyk et al. (2011) conclude that daydreaming (or mind wandering) is predominantly future-oriented. This is quite different from a spontaneous fantasy, which is clearly past-oriented. Other researchers conducting existential phenomenologies report participants having experiences similar to spontaneous fantasies, as with Farmer and Knapp’s (2008) study of historic site interpretation at West Baden Springs Hotel (Indiana, USA). For instance, one participant in this study reported that ‘you could visualise and in your own mind go back and see the people in their finery, imagining people in their old time garb, wandering around the premises with their parasols and frilly dresses’ (ibid.: 352). As with my research, it appears that participants in Farmer and Knapp’s study did not premediate this fantasy (i.e., it was not a daydream). Similarly, Ingrid Stefanovic’s (1998) phenomenological research on Cavtat (Croatia), revealed the quality of ‘oneiric visions’ that seemed to be catalysed by the sense of spontaneity and mystery inherent to this ancient environment. Phenomenologies are useful tools to understand the visitor’s experience at an historic site, as with Farmer and Knapp’s (2008) examination of interpretation programmes at the West Baden Springs Hotel (Indiana). This study also used a questionnaire (the phenomenology was used to follow up on experiences from the survey instrument). They discovered that visitors remember more about the history of site if they can experience it directly through immersion. Without this immersion, and an associated emotional response, visitors did not retain

22  Jeremy C. Wells long-term information from the site tour. Literature in critical heritage studies supports the association of historic site visitation with social activities, including cathartic ones, rather than pedagogical purposes (Smith & Campbell, 2015). In an existential phenomenology, Masberg and Silverman (1996) uncovered the same phenomenon, as well as support for many of the stereotypes the public holds for heritage sites, such as their association with old buildings, history and ‘famous people’. Many historic sites have religious associations with, for example, churches and shrines. For the people who use and experience these places, authenticity is not merely historical, but religious as well (Stefanovic, 1998; Levi & Rio, 2019). Using a first-person phenomenology, A. Rajapakse (2018) examined the experience of being in the city of Anuradhapura (Sri Lanka), which is well known for its sacred sites associated with Buddhism. He was interested in understanding what a ‘sense of sacrality’ is in relation to the city – a phenomenon that attached residents emotionally to these places. A sense of sacrality is related to the ability of these places to feel as if they are conveying power to those who experience them as well as a sense that these places will fulfil prophecy. By understanding this sense of sacrality, it is possible to develop a conservation plan that conserves this sense and thus maintains the importance of these historic sites for the public. Lastly, Ghani, Rafi and Woods (2017) used an existential phenomenology to understand the perceived authenticity of a virtual heritage environment (projected using a head-mounted display). This appears to be one of the few studies of this type, and the only one that used a phenomenology to understand authenticity. The environment was a virtual representation of Kampung Hulu Mosque (Melaka, Malaysia). Twenty people participated in interviews using a ‘think aloud’ method to reveal their experience of this virtual environment. In analysing the collected data, the authors concluded that the environment was ‘incomplete’, especially in terms of missing proper environmental context, including sound. It is also important to note that the materials represented in this virtual environment also lacked the normal patina or decay of surfaces that would normally be present in an historic place.

Questions, methods and analysis in phenomenology There are many methodological approaches in phenomenology, the most important of which, for this specific inquiry, include transcendental (Stein & Batzdorff, 1990; Bruzina, 2004) and hermeneutical (Gadamer, 1976; Ricoeur, 1967). Transcendental phenomenology is mainly found in philosophical discourses and is purely descriptive in nature. Christopher Tilley’s (2004) work on stone in landscapes is a good example of this approach; his texts contain many detailed measurements of stone and detailed descriptions of colour and texture, but there is no interpretation of these features and what they mean or how they might make a person feel. When a researcher is interested in the interpretation of meaning, which in a phenomenological context is the pre-reflective exploration of meanings the moment they arrive in our consciousness, a hermeneutical methodology is used. But if the goal is to mix the two approaches – transcendental and hermeneutical – in an environmental

Attachment to older or historic places  23 context where we are interested in how the richness of the embodied experience generates meaning and affect, the approach is existential. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1963) is credited with exploring the foundations of this methodological approach. It is also worth mentioning experiential phenomenologies, which can be conceptualised as a kind of ‘applied’ phenomenology. Binswanger (1963) conducted some of the earliest examples of this applied approach by adapting the ideas of Husserl and Heidegger into the practice of psychiatry. Work in nursing that explores the nature of the kind of pain patients feel, with the goal of mitigating this experience, is an example of this approach (Munhall, 2007). Theoretically, one can take any tradition in phenomenology and transform it into an experiential phenomenology if the context is to use the collected and analysed data to answer a real-world problem. In this sense, an experiential, existential phenomenology holds promise as a technique that conservation practitioners who work in the historic environment could employ. Research questions that are uniquely suited for an existential phenomenology relate to personal affect and perceptions within specific environmental contexts. How do certain environments make people feel? What are the specific elements of an environment that engender feelings in people? How do people perceive specific places? What do they notice? What do they ignore? All of these questions explore the embodied experience, which is a focus on how the body senses, feels and is affected by what is around it. There is always an emphasis on pre-reflective, pre-cognitive meanings. Data from a phenomenological reduction might consist of statements such as ‘feels cold’, ‘too bright’ or more detailed description of meanings that arise without direct conscious control, such as memories or images in the mind’s eye. ‘Data’ in this sense would not, therefore, include a reflection on why something feels cold or why an image appeared suddenly in the mind’s eye. Again, the goal, is to get as close to the initial point of perception and feeling as possible and not focus on causality. Within an existential phenomenology, one can use a first-person or third-person orientation. In a first-person existential phenomenology, one examines one’s own pre-reflective, embodied experiences; data collected can consist of written notes, reflections and substantial raw description of feelings and perceptions related to specific environments. A third-person phenomenology attempts to access the pre-reflective, embodied experiences of other people. The most common method to accomplish this goal is the interview; much like a first-person approach, collected data consists of written notes along with audio recordings. It is common for photo-elicitation methods to be used to help assist in connecting people to specific experiences during interviews. The analysis of data collected in either a first- or third-person phenomenology is similar to the coding process used in other types of qualitative research, such as ethnographies (c.f., Auerbach & Silverstein, 2003). Clark Moustakas (2010) is one of the few authors who has attempted to describe a phenomenological ‘method’, a task that is deceptively difficult. The reason why so few method guidebooks exist for phenomenologies is that one of the first steps in conducting this kind of study is to bracket your own personal experiences, biases and

24  Jeremy C. Wells preconceived notions prior to collecting data. The goal is to have an imposed naivety to all experiences, such that even experiences that are well known to the researcher become fresh and novel. Going into this context with a pre-defined method has the potential to destroy this naivety. Moustakas describes this issue in detail and treads a fine line between avoiding too many preconceived, rigid steps associated with a traditional method and the need to have some kind of structure to a research protocol. He also advocates novel approaches to qualitative data coding unique to a phenomenology, such as listing every expression related to a specific experience, but the overall way in which themes are created and meanings clustered is, again, similar to other methods for qualitative data analysis. While the phenomenology – especially the existential phenomenology – has long been important in understanding people’s emotional attachment to places, newer technology allows us to actually peer inside people’s heads and see which part of their brains activate given certain external environmental stimuli. This can help us understand psychological commonalities between people and the relationship between historical environments, behaviour and cognition. I will now discuss neuropsychological and neurobiological research in relation to place attachment with specific reference to historic environments.

Neuropsychological and neurobiological evidence for how people perceive and experience place To date, researchers have had little interest in applying other methods from EBR to questions that address the historic environment, such as behavioural mapping, environmental attitude measurement, visual preference studies, simulated environments, post-occupancy evaluations and neuroscience. Where extant, most of the published scholarly literature in this area uses visual preference studies, in which participants are shown photographs of older cultural landscapes and asked to complete a survey based on their perception (e.g., Ahn, 2013; Askari, Dola, & Soltani, 2014; Herzog & Gale, 1996; Levi, 2005). The collected quantitative data are then analysed using statistical methods. To be sure, many other visual preference studies, while not directly addressing older buildings or the older built environment, nonetheless provide useful insight, including indications that people prefer complexity in building design to simplicity (Stamps, 2000). Because more complex (or ornamental) design is emblematic of pre-modern, pre-World War II building design, this lends empirical support as to why people may prefer ‘historic’ environments. While most of these EBR methods have been used to investigate place attachment in many contexts – especially natural environments (e.g., Blake, 2002; Gosling & Williams, 2010; Beery & Jönsson, 2017) – the use of methods from neuroscience is largely absent from research in this area (Lengen & Kistemann, 2012). As opposed to other methods, neuroscience seeks an understanding of the relationship between the physical brain, behaviour and cognition; as such, there is a focus on the biology inherent in the brain and nervous system as well as specific areas of the brain and their function. In broad terms, neuroscience can be divided into neuropsychological and neurobiological research. Neuropsychological

Attachment to older or historic places  25 research is based on experiments (e.g., measurement of reaction time in controlled settings), standardised tests (card sorting, questionnaires), electrophysiology (e.g., EEG, MEG) and neuroimaging (e.g., fMRI, PET, CAT). Neurobiological research typically involves experimental designs using animals as subjects; when people are involved, the focus is usually on how brain lesions and electrostimulation affect cognitive and behavioural function. Unlike neuropsychology, neurobiology is invasive, requiring direct access to the brain and nervous system. To be sure, neuroscience research has provided fundamental insights into the perception and coding of environmental stimuli, orientation, attention and emotion as well as place memory. We know that the most important areas of the brain that address this process are the temporal lobe (specifically, the limbic system) and parts of the occipital lobe (specifically the right lingual gyrus) (see Figure 2.1). These areas of the brain are associated with lower-level psychological processes not directly under our control that focus on perception and emotion as opposed to the frontal lobe, which is responsible for higher-order cognition and analytical reasoning, including language, learning and the expression of personality traits. In this sense, the phenomenologist’s focus on pre-reflective (i.e., pre-analytical) description is supported by neuroscience research, in that most aspects of sense of place and place attachment do not appear to happen in the frontal lobe of the brain. Therefore, a rejection of interpreted, reflective, or analysed experience is an attempt to get closer to the parts of the brain that are not under direct conscious control. This is not to say that areas of the frontal lobe, such as the prefrontal cortex, do not play a

Figure 2.1  The neocortex and its associated lobes (Illustration by the author).

26  Jeremy C. Wells role in place attachment and perceptions associated with sense of place, but research in this particular area is less definitive. Limited evidence for frontal lobe activation demonstrates that the medial prefrontal cortex appears to be most involved with spatial environments (Kensinger & Schacter 2006). Even though there is currently disagreement on whether or not the limbic system is a valid grouping of different functional areas of the brain, its common use as category of processes continues (see Figure 2.2). Functionally, it is understood as a kind of screening interface between incoming, raw sensory information and the cerebral cortex (the part of the brain with higher functions). It plays a critical role in emotions and memory, including spatial memory (Champney, 2016: 236–242). In terms of the processing of stimuli (especially visual) closely related to place attachment, it appears that the following structures associated with the limbic system are most important: the hippocampus, parahippocampal cortex, the retrosplenial cortex and the entorhinal cortex. The hippocampus is unique in that it has ‘place cells’ which are neurons that fire only on encountering a specific place and other cells that fire only upon encountering a certain element of a specific place (Georges-Francois, Rolls & Robertson, 1999). Researchers think that the hippocampus is therefore responsible for spatially mapping the environment, which is critical for navigation

Figure 2.2  The cerebral cortex and limbic system (Illustration by the author).

Attachment to older or historic places  27 (Moser & Moser, 2009); perhaps not surprisingly, taxi drivers, who need to be especially good with spatial navigation, have been found to have unusually large hippocampi (McHugh & Bannerman, 2010: 279). A major interface between the hippocampus and the neocortex (area of higher cognition) is the entorhinal cortex which has specific cells that seem to encode the environment as Euclidian space (grid cells) (Hafting et al., 2005), cells that detect borders (Solstad et al., 2008), and cells that are attuned to the orientation of the head (Sargolini et al., 2006). The entorhinal cortex is therefore understood to contain neural maps of specific environments (Vann & Albasser, 2011). Near the hippocampus, in the temporal lobe, is the occipitotemporal sulcus, which seems to be involved in analysing shapes, including texture, and the overall grouping of items (Bar et al., 2001). Refer to Figure 2.3 for locations of these structures. An area associated with the hippocampus, the parahippocampal place area, uniquely responds to visual stimuli associated with rooms and landscapes in deference to individual objects, such as buildings (see Figure 2.3). Notably, the PPA does not appear to react at all to human faces, which means that this region of the brain is uniquely attuned to landscape cues (Epstein & Kanwisher, 1998). What appears to be clear from research is that the neocortex does not seem to store direct, visual representations of environments, a task in which the PPA seems to specialise. In addition, the PPA may have a potential role in spontaneous fantasies. Mégevand et al. (2014) were able to elicit immediate visual scene ‘hallucinations’ on the direct electrical stimulation of the PPA in a subject. On stimulation, random visual memories from the subject’s past flashed into their mind’s eye, such as a scene from a train station or a closet. Remarkably, the stimulation also

Figure 2.3  Detail of medial temporal lobe, limbic lobe and occipital lobe showing location of specific structures (Illustration by the author).

28  Jeremy C. Wells resulted in a combination of a visual memory together with visual aspects of the current environment in which the subject was situated, such as when the subject described how they saw the researchers in their room spontaneously become ‘Italians working in a pizzeria’ (ibid.: 5402). The subject also reported feelings of ‘déjà vu’ with some scenes. Although artificially provoked, this experience is remarkably similar to the way that subjects describe spontaneous fantasies; regardless, it would be reasonable to theorise that the PPA, because of its fundamental role in place memory, should be involved in this process. Similar visual hallucinations have also been reported by other researchers. Very near the PPA, in the occipital lobe, is the lingual gyrus, which contains the lingual landmark area (LLA) (see Figure 2.3). This is a particularly interesting part of the brain because its function seems to be the recognition of environmental landmarks, including buildings (Aguirre et al., 1998). In this sense it seems to be attuned to specific objects in a landscape (micro focus) as opposed to a complete landscape (holistic focus), which the PPA encodes. Indeed, Aguirre et al. (1998) are confident that no other area of the brain responds more strongly and specifically to buildings, although the reason why such a place exists in the human brain is not clearly understood, at least from an evolutionary perspective. An issue with neuroscience and similar research is that many of the studies tend to over-represent Western subjects. We do know, however, that the PPA’s selectivity and function for place recognition and memory in East Asian subjects appear to be identical to Western subjects. This result is in contrast to facial recognition, which has been shown to activate slightly different areas of the brain in the same groups (Goh et al., 2010). Research on other cultural groups has also shown a lack of correlation between cultural identity and the way the PPA and the LLA activate when processing spatial environmental stimuli (Gutchess et al., 2006). Lastly, while the amygdala is considered to be central in emotional responses and overall mental states, little research exists linking the amygdala to essential areas of the brain related to landmarks and places, such as the PPA and LLA. This omission is important because emotional attachment to places is a fundamental component of place attachment theory and empirically represented in many quantitative and qualitative studies from environmental psychology and humanistic geography. This situation may be due, in part, to the difficulty psychologists have had in understanding positive emotional states, which lack the kind of specific biophysical markers that negative states, such as fear, have. In addition, many studies on positive emotional affect tend to centre on artificially induced euphoric states via the administration of mind-altering drugs rather than focusing on naturally occurring lived experiences. In addition, because emotional states tend to evolve over time rather than occurring spontaneously, fMRI, which is one of the most common neuroimaging techniques, may not be able to accurately resolve the specific areas of the brain that support emotional states (in this case, PET may be a better imaging tool). Some tentative research, however, seems to support the possibility that positive emotional states are more broadly processed in the limbic system rather than centring in the amygdala. Indeed, the amygdala may have little influence on positive emotional states (Burgdorf & Panksepp, 2006). A meta-analysis of 385 PET and fMRI studies addressing

Attachment to older or historic places  29 emotion and the amygdala seems to support this premise because activation of this part of the brain was more closely associated with negative rather than positive emotions (Costafreda et al., 2008). Rather than being centred in the limbic system, positive emotional affect may therefore be more closely associated with the basal ganglia, which is considered to be the most ‘primitive’ part of the brain. Induced euphoric states have been achieved through direct stimulation of the nucleus accumbens, an area of the brain that has also been linked to addiction (Heath, 1954, 1972; Okun et al., 2004). The ventral tegmental area (VTA) is also associated with intensely positive affect, including romantic love (Fisher, Aron & Brown, 2005), pleasure from music (Blood & Zatorre, 2001) and orgasm (Holstege et al., 2003). It is interesting to note that an animal-based study found that the entorhinal cortex significantly modulated the VTA within a well-defined neural circuit, which shows that these brain areas appear to be in close communication with each other (Todd & Grace, 1999). An fMRI study by Bunzeck and Düzel found that when subjects were exposed to novel visual stimuli, both the PPA and the VTA activated, suggesting that the positive affect from this kind of experience resulted from VTA activation (Bunzeck & Düzel, 2006). There does not appear to be any literature that addresses associations of the nucleus accumbens or the VTA with broader concepts in place attachment or sense of place, however. Lastly, it is useful to mention that while there does not appear to be any refereed scholarship directly linking neuroscience to place attachment, the UK’s National Trust funded a research project to ‘understand the depth of people’s connection to place’, released as the report Places that Make Us (National Trust, 2017). As part of this work, Bertram Opitz, Professor in Neuroimaging and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Surrey, was retained to conduct fMRI scans on subjects while showing them images of ten places and ten objects that were particularly meaningful to each subject. Opitz reported that the following three areas of the brain activated only when shown these images associated with places, but not objects: the left amygdala, the medial prefrontal cortex and the PPA. The latter two aspects are supported by other research. Activation of these areas did not happen with the images of objects or control images of common places. What these results show is the possibility that the amygdala may indeed be associated with positive place affect as well as the central role the PPA appears to play in place attachment.

Questions, methods and analysis in neuropsychology and neurobiology and an example Methodologically, neuropsychology and neurobiology are usually quantitative in their approach, following the scientific method. The goal is to collect measurable data that are then subjected to multivariate statistical analysis, including various types of regression, correlational tests and non-parametric tests. Specific to the analysis of fMRI image data are coherence analysis and Granger causality tests (Ashby, 2019). Some kinds of research are observational and rely on raw description – such as when determining what part of the brain activates upon a subject

30  Jeremy C. Wells being subjected to a certain stimulus – but statistical methods are often employed to answer these kinds of seemingly facile research questions. Research questions in neuropsychology and neurobiology are usually reductive in the sense that the phenomenon being explored needs to be narrowly defined. Examples of research questions include differences in how long certain reactions take when lying versus telling the truth (e.g., Suchotzki et al., 2017); psychological tests that are used to understand if there is a relationship between mindfulness and neuroticism (e.g., Iani et al., 2017); measuring differences in electrical activity in the brain to determine how people process real and modelled 3D images (e.g., Grima Murcia et al., 2019); which areas of the brain activate upon viewing certain landscape images (e.g., Tang et al., 2017); and testing how electroconvulsive therapy physically and chemically changes the brain in animal models (e.g., Singh and Kar, 2017). Specific methods used in neuroscience might include: • survey instruments (dependent and independent variables, sometimes with open-ended questions). Data are analysed via multivariate statistical methods; • electroencephalography (EEG), which records electrical activity in the brain. Data consists of waveforms representing electrical activity that is interpreted visually. In some cases computer software that can perform quantitative electroencephalography is used; • functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which uses very high-power magnetic fields to image where more and less oxygen is being used in the brain; high oxygen levels in a certain area of the brain equates to more brain activity at the cellular level in that particular area; • experiments on animals to determine how various stimuli and environmental conditions affect the brain physically and chemically. Normally, the animals must be killed in order to examine their brains microscopically as well as to conduct various analytical tests on brain tissues. There are many other possible methods beyond those listed here, but these should provide a sense of what is possible. In order to help elucidate how research in neuropsychology is conducted, I will use the National Trust’s (2017) study mentioned earlier, which used the fMRI method to answer questions related to people’s emotional attachment to places. This study had an unusually broad research question, which was to explore the ‘emotional connection between people and place’. The study specifically looked only at places that people knew well and with which there was a long-term, intimate, personal connection. Although not explicitly stated, the guiding research questions appeared to be: 1. What areas of the brain activate when a subject views a meaningful, environmental scene for which he/she has great familiarity? 2. What stories do people have about places that are particularly meaningful to them?

Attachment to older or historic places  31 3. What are the correlations between specific places that are meaningful to people, the kinds of emotions they feel and if they thought these places were worth protecting? The researchers answered question 1 using an fMRI study, question 2 through qualitative interviews and question 3 through a survey instrument. For the purposes of this example, I will only focus on the fMRI portion of the study, in which the brains of 20 people were scanned. While being scanned, subjects viewed photographs of ten places and ten objects that were particularly meaningful to them. To provide a comparison, subjects also viewed images of ten common places and objects along with 20 control images that had previously been tested to generate known emotional responses. The design of the study was based on the hypothesis that the images that were well known to the subjects should elicit a stronger emotional reaction that should be readily identifiable in the fMRI scans. During an fMRI scan, a computer takes a picture of a certain region of the brain around once every one-half second to three seconds. The machine’s operator needs to be aware of the specific area of the brain to be targeted prior to conducting the scan. In the case of the National Trust study, because they were expecting emotional responses in their subjects, the scans targeted the brain’s temporal lobes. The actual time that a subject stays in the scanner is usually relatively short – around 15 minutes – although the researchers did not report the length of time subjects were in the scanner for this particular study. The collected scan images then need to be pre-processed to correct for timing errors and head motion. The last step in the analytical process requires a statistical analysis on the images in order to make useable conclusions about which areas of the brain were activating upon seeing certain images. The results of the fMRI portion of the National Trust study was that the left amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex (mFPC) and parahippocampal place area all uniquely activated in subjects that viewed images of places that were familiar to them. The amygdala is responsible, in part, for the emotional intensity of an experience; the conclusion was that subjects did, indeed, have a more deeply emotional experience with places that were familiar to them versus generic images of other places. The researchers concluded that ‘Activity in the mFPC to meaningful places suggests that the positive memories and feelings we associate with that place are accessed and become conscious’ (National Trust 2017: 15). Activation in the PPA was expected from previous studies that have shown this particular area of the brain uniquely reacts to places versus buildings.

Conclusion This investigation began with an introduction to the basic concepts associated with place attachment and the disciplines and methods used to understand this phenomenon, and ended with a foray into neuroscience. But why does any of this really matter in the context of built heritage conservation? The answer is that the field of built heritage conservation lacks both appreciation for and the use of research methodologies that access psychological perceptions, experiences and

32  Jeremy C. Wells feelings that increasingly appear to be fundamental to why people value historic places. Archival research and oral history, while useful in the right context, are ill suited to address questions related to heritage psychology. This knowledge deficit needs to be addressed on two levels: (1) applied research tools that can be used by a practitioner; and (2) primary research that informs practice. While phenomenologies can address both the applied and primary research needs, it is the former that has the most promise. In conservation practice, we already use the interview method for oral histories and ethnographies to help achieve a more people-centric emphasis on what makes historic places important (as opposed to a focus based on historical facts and aesthetics that would be more useful for an architectural historian or an architect). With a phenomenology, the method is the same, but the methodology is different. Instead of stories about the past or insight into emic meanings from certain cultures, imagine how useful it would be to inform which places are worthy of conservation based on people’s emotional attachment to them. Or, in a more direct sense, perhaps we should consider prioritising saving the places for which people have the strongest feelings. Thus, we switch from a search for cultural meanings to psychological ones that then inform practice. But, before this can happen, we need to translate existential phenomenologies into the kind of experiential phenomenologies used in other fields, such as nursing, so that practitioners can readily perform this kind of work. Requiring someone who works in the conservation field to be an expert in ­Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty is not practical, nor is it essential to access people’s feelings and emotional attachments for certain places. While phenomenologies are well established and have long been used to understand the emotional relationship people have with specific places, their application is not without controversy. Long abandoned by their birth ­discipline – geography – existential phenomenologies are now used across many disciplines as a useful tool to reveal the pre-reflective qualities of lived experience. Human interpretation is always necessary in a phenomenology, which is a kind of double-edged sword: if the goal is to understand a profoundly emotional experience in the greatest and fullest richness of meaning and depth, a human will always be required to gather and interpret data. But this human intervention also means that a failure to properly bracket experience could introduce biases – especially cultural biases – into the results. While phenomenologists have long sought a kind of universal interpretation of human experience through their work, this goal is likely difficult to achieve because of inevitable bracketing failures, no matter how diligent a researcher is in the conduct of their work. On the other hand, neuroscience does have this potential for a universal interpretation of human experience. While neuroscience likely has less pragmatic import for day-to-day conservation practice, it should be useful in informing practice more broadly and more universally. Until now, historic environment practitioners have used culturally bound meanings to help inform concepts of significance and authenticity in association with conventional art/historical values; to be sure, in this frame, we assume that these meanings will change depending on the cultural context. But what if there might exist some kind of universal human meanings associated

Attachment to older or historic places  33 with old places? What if certain kinds of environmental patina catalyse the same feelings in the same regions of the brain in most human beings, independent of cultural context? If this hypothesis proves true, it might fundamentally change how we approach significance and authenticity in the historic environment. Currently, we do not have any evidence to confirm or refute these hypotheses, but the lack of knowledge in this area should be driving the need for primary research in the psychological aspects of people and heritage. Perhaps this line of inquiry will not be particularly useful for practice or perhaps it could totally upend the field of heritage conservation – we cannot know unless these questions are answered using new methodologies and methods from neuroscience. Neuroscience, while obviously not capable of the depth of meaning of a phenomenology, does offer the tantalising possibility of describing a universal human experience related to places. This result is possible because specific regions of the brain specialise in processing environmental stimuli in specific ways in all people, regardless of their geography. The role of the limbic system in spatial environmental processing and memory is now well established. The PPA seems particularly intriguing as the possible area of the brain that may play a central role in place attachment. The key here is that if this hypothesis is indeed true, then the PPA will likely play this role for all people across all cultures, thus achieving a kind of universal process that could potentially inform a kind of universal conservation policy. In other words, if the accepted goal for heritage conservation is to retain the experiential authenticity of an historic place, then a conservation process could be developed to maximise this authenticity using neuropsychological and neurobiological evidence. But before such an outcome is even remotely feasible, researchers need to address the fundamental lack of primary neuroscience research that addresses place attachment. The National Trust’s research paper is an intriguing result in this direction that will hopefully inspire others to follow, especially in terms of producing refereed scholarship. Ideally, the connection between conservation policy and research in this area may also inspire additional funders, without whom such research could not happen. To date, nearly all funded research on place attachment has only focused on public health; this overly narrow focus needs to expand to address all potential human environments, whether they are natural or cultural, in broader planning and policy contexts. If these kinds of changes are able to happen over the next decade, research that overlaps neuroscience, built heritage conservation and place attachment holds the promise of radically revising conservation policy and practice for the good of humanity.

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36  Jeremy C. Wells Husserl, E. 1962, Ideas: General introduction to pure phenomenology, Translated by W.R.B. Gibson. Collier Books, New York. Iani, L., Lauriola, M., Cafaro, V., Didonna, F. 2017, Dimensions of mindfulness and their relations with psychological well-being and neuroticism, Mindfulness, 8(3), pp. 664–676. ICOMOS 2008, Québec Declaration on the Preservation of the Spirit of Place. http://www.international.icomos.org/quebec2008/quebec_declaration/pdf/ GA16_Quebec_Declaration_Final_EN.pdf Kensinger, E., Schacter, D. 2006, Processing emotional pictures and words: Effects of valence and arousal, Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 6, 110–126. Kogl, A. 2008, Strange places, Lexington, New York. Kusenbach, M. 2003, Street phenomenology: The go-along as ethnographic research tool, Ethnography, 4(3), pp. 455–485. Lengen, C., Kistemann, T., 2012, Sense of place and place identity: Review of neuroscientific evidence, Health & Place, 18, pp. 1162–1171. Levi, D.J. 2005, Does history matter? Perceptions and attitudes toward fake historic architecture and historic preservation, Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 22(2), pp. 149–159. Levi, D., Rio, V. (2019). Attitudes toward preservation and management of historic religious sites: A study of three missions in California, Focus: The Journal of Planning Practice and Education, 15(1), pp. 67–72. Lew, A.A. 1989, Authenticity and sense of place in the tourism development experience of older retail districts, Journal of Travel Research, 27(4), pp. 15–22. Low, S.M., Altman, I. 1992, Place attachment: A conceptual inquiry, in I. Altman & S.M. Low (eds), Place attachment, Plenum Press, New York, pp. 1–12. Malpas, J. 1999, Place and experience: A philosophical topography, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Masberg, A., Silverman, H. 1996, Visitor experiences at heritage sites: A phenomenological approach, Journal of Travel Research, 34(4), pp. 20–25. McHugh, S.B., Bannerman, D.M. 2010, Cognition: Learning and memory spatial, in Koob, G., Le Moal, M., Thompson, R. (eds), Encyclopedia of behavioral neuroscience, Elsevier, London, pp. 279–287. Mégevand, P., Groppe, D.M., Goldfinger, M.S., Hwang, S.T., Kingsley, P.B., Davidesco, I., Mehta, A.D. 2014, Seeing scenes: Topographic visual hallucinations evoked by direct electrical stimulation of the parahippocampal place area, The Journal of Neuroscience, 34(16), pp. 5399–5405. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962, Phenomenology of perception: An introduction, Routledge, London. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1963, The structure of behavior, Beacon Press, Boston. Mohamed, B., Salim, N. 2018, Preserving sense of place at historic waterfronts in Malaysia, SHS Web of Conferences, 45, pp. 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/20184506004 Moser, E., Moser, E.-B. 2009, Hippocampus and neural representations, in Squire, L.R. (ed.), Encyclopedia of neuroscience, Vol. 1. Elsevier, London, pp. 1129–1136. Moustakas, C.E., 1994, Phenomenological research methods, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA. Moustakas, C.E. 2010, Phenomenological research methods, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA. Mugerauer, R. 1994, Interpretations on behalf of place: Environmental displacements and alternative responses, State University of New York Press, Albany. Munhall, P. 2007, A phenomenological method, in P. Munhall (ed.), Nursing research: A qualitative perspective, Jones and Bartlet, Sudbury, MA, pp. 145–210.

Attachment to older or historic places  37 National Trust 2017, Places that make us: Research report, National Trust, Wiltshire, UK. https://nt.global.ssl.fastly.net/documents/places-that-make-us-research-report.pdf Norberg-Schulz, C. 1980, Genius loci: towards a phenomenology of architecture, Rizzoli, New York. Okun, M., Bowers, D., Springer, U., Shapira, N., Malone, D., Rezai, A., Nuttin, B., Heilman, K., Morecraft, R., Rasmussen, S., Greenberg, B., Foote, K., Goodman, W. 2004, What’s in a ‘smile?’ Intra-operative observations of contralateral smiles induced by deep brain stimulation. Neurocase, 10(4), 271–279. Otero-Pailos, J. 2010, Architecture's historical turn: Phenomenology and the rise of the postmodern, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Pallasmaa, J. 2011, The Embodied Image: Imagination and Imagery in Architecture, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester. Proshansky, H.M., Fabian, A.K., Kaminoff, R. 1995, Place-identity: physical world socialization of the self, in L. Groat (ed.), Giving places meaning, Academic Press, London, pp. 87–113. Rajapakse, A. 2018, Reconceptualizing sacred city meaning: The sacred city of Anuradhapura, Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 1(1), 15–28. Rapoport, A. 2008, Environment-behaviour studies: Past, present, and future, Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 25(4), pp. 276–281. Ricoeur, P. 1967, Husserl: An analysis of his phenomenology, Northwestern University Press, Evanston. Rowntree, L. 1981, Creating a sense of place: The evolution of historic preservation of Salzburg, Austria, Journal of Urban History, 8(1), pp. 61–76. Sargolini, F., Fyhn, M., Hafting, T., McNaughton, B., Witter, M., Moser, M.-B., Moser, E. 2006. Conjunctive representation of position, direction, and velocity in entorhinal cortex. Science, 312, 758–762. Seamon, D. 1982, The phenomenological contribution to environmental psychology, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2, pp. 119–140. Seamon, D. 2015, Lived emplacement and the locality of being: A return to humanistic geography? in S.C. Aitken & G. Valentine (eds), Approaches to human geography: Philosophies, theories, people and practices, Sage, New York, pp. 35–48. Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Arndt, J. & Routledge, C., 2008, Nostalgia: past, present, and future, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(5), pp. 304–307. Sheridan, J. 1997, Preface, in B.C. Hopkins (ed.), Husserl in contemporary context: Prospects and projects for phenomenology, Kluwer, Dordrecht. Shīrāzī, M. 2016, Towards an articulated phenomenological interpretation of architecture, Routledge, London. Singh, A., Kar, S.K. 2017, How electroconvulsive therapy works?: Understanding the neurobiological mechanisms, Clinical Psychopharmacology and Neuroscience, 15(3), pp. 210–221. Smith, L., Campbell, G. 2015, The elephant in the room: Heritage affect, and emotion, in W. Logan, M.N. Craith & U. Kockel (eds), A companion to heritage studies, Wiley Blackwell, Chichester, pp. 443–460. Solstad, T., Boccara, C., Kropff, E., Moser, M.-B., Moser, E. 2008, Representation of geometric borders in the entorhinal cortex, Science 19, 1865–1868. Stamps, A.E., 2000, Psychology and the aesthetics of the built environment, Kluwer Academic, Boston. Stawarczyk, D., Majerus, S., Maj, M., Van der Linden, M., D’Argembeau, A. 2011, Mindwandering: Phenomenology and function as assessed with a novel experience sampling method, Acta Psychologica, 136, pp. 370–381.

38  Jeremy C. Wells Stefanovic, I.L., 1998, Phenomenological encounters with place: Cavtat to Square One, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 18(1), pp. 31–44. Stefanovic, I.L. 2000, Safeguarding our common future, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. Stein, E., Batzdorff, S.M. 1990, Edith Stein: Selected writings, Templegate Publishers, Springfield, IL. Suchotzki, K., Verschuere, B., Van Bockstaele, B., Ben-Shakhar, G., Crombez, G. 2017, Lying takes time: A meta-analysis on reaction time measures of deception. Psychological Bulletin, 143(4), pp. 428–453. Swensen, G., Saeter, O. 2011, The mall method: Applied in a study of inhabitants’ appreciation of urban cultural heritage areas, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 10(2), pp. 125–139. Tang, I.C., Tsai, Y.P., Lin, Y.J., Chen, J.H., Hsieh, C.H., Hung, S.H., Sullivan, W.C., Tang, H.F., Chang, C.Y. 2017, Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to analyze brain region activity when viewing landscapes, Landscape and Urban Planning, 162, pp. 137–144. Tilley, C.Y. 2004, The materiality of stone: Explorations in landscape phenomenology. Berg, New York, NY. Todd, C.L., Grace, A.A. 1999, Modulation of ventral tegmental area dopamine cell activity by the ventral subiculum and entorhinal cortex, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 877, pp. 688–690. Tošić, J. 2016, Perfumed historic buildings: Issues of authenticity, Spatium, 36, pp. 92–99. Tuan, Y.F. 1974, Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Tuan, Y.F. 1980, Rootedness versus sense of place, Landscape, 24, pp. 3–8. UNESCO 2017, Operational guidelines for the implementation of the World Heritage Convention. https://whc.unesco.org/en/guidelines/ Van Gerrewey, C. 2012, Christian Norberg-Schulz (1926–2000): Architecture protected by phenomenology, Environment, Space and Place, 4(1), pp. 29–47. Vann, S., Albasser, M. 2011, Hippocampus and neocortex: Recognition and spatial memory, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 21, pp. 440–445. Vaske, J.J., Kobrin, K.C. 2001, Place attachment and environmentally responsible behavior, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 32(4), pp. 116–121. Visker, R. 1999, Truth and singularity: Taking Foucault into phenomenology, Kluwer, Dordrecht. Wells, J.C. 2011, Historic preservation, significance, and phenomenology, Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology, 22(1), pp. 13–15. Wells, J.C., 2017, How are old places different from new places? A psychological investigation of the correlation between patina, spontaneous fantasies, and place attachment, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 23(5), pp. 445–469. Wells, J.C., Baldwin, E.D. 2012, Historic preservation, significance, and age value: A comparative phenomenology of historic Charleston and the nearby new-urbanist community of I’On, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 32(4), pp. 384–400.

Part I

Cities and towns

3 Longing for the past Lost cities on social media Jenny Gregory and Sandra Chambers

Introduction The past decade has seen a rapid rise in the use of social media. Among the many groups that have sprung up on Facebook are some that focus exclusively on urban heritage that has disappeared. Few of those who participate in these social media groups are trained historians. They are simply people who enjoy looking at, remembering and discussing places from the past that are long gone. Perhaps surprisingly, there has been little analysis by urban historians of the way social media has been used to record responses to the loss of the cultural heritage of cities. Urban historians generally study cities as sites of urban transformation. But their methodology has changed over time, depending on the period under evaluation, theoretical changes in approach, the availability of sources and the means of accessing and analysing sources (Zunz, 1985: 3; Rowney, 1977; Rodger & Sweet, 2008). Some urban historians have argued that the city should be studied as a site; some that the process of urbanisation should be our focus. Others have questioned whether we should be looking for the engine of urban growth or whether the city itself has agency (Stave, 1974; De Munck, 2017). There is no single approach to the study of urban history. Indeed, it has been argued by some that the scale of the twentieth-century city makes all but a multi-focal kaleidoscopic approach to the study of its history unmanageable (Roe, 1982: 19). The resulting interdisciplinarity of urban history is underscored by Shane Ewen’s observation that the origins of the study of urban history lie at ‘the intersection of the humanities and social sciences’ (Ewen, 2016: 17). He also notes that urban historians tend to be ‘present minded’ – looking to the past to understand contemporary urban problems – and stresses the value of interdisciplinary and comparative approaches (Ewen, 2016). This chapter utilises the insights of a variety of disciplines and takes a comparative approach to show how transformations in the city over time can be observed through the lens of social media. It concludes that social media provide a valuable source for urban historians to analyse social attitudes towards urban heritage and emotional attachments to place.

42  Jenny Gregory and Sandra Chambers

Interdisciplinary insights Urban historians often incorporate and borrow from other disciplines to examine the multifaceted nature of the city. This capacity is writ large in this chapter, for much of the research on social media and the emotional responses to social issues that it reveals comes from disciplines other than history. Such studies have been widespread in marketing and in the tourism industry, and some of them can offer valuable insights for urban historians. To underscore the insights that can be gained by an interdisciplinary approach, this article notes the discipline base of each of the scholars cited. In 2011 the UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape proposed ‘the use of information and communication technology to document, understand and present the complex layering of urban areas and their constituent components’ (UNESCO, 2011). By then Facebook, launched in 2004, was up and running with 845 million monthly active users. In the first quarter of 2020 the number reached 2.603 billion monthly active users (Statista, 2020). Given these numbers, numerous scholars have noted the value of Facebook for social research. As heritage architects Ginzarly et al. noted recently: Social media provides big data for researchers to perform real-time analytics, as digital ethnographers, on what places and attributes people value in the historic urban landscapes they live or visit, enough to share with their social network. UNESCO’s research challenge is gradually being taken up. But comparatively few urban historians have analysed civic engagement in urban heritage through Facebook and similar social media outlets. Most analyses appear to be in the field of heritage tourism. Munar and Ooi, for example, have analysed tourist responses on Tripadvisor to Athen’s Acropolis and Beijing’s Forbidden City from an economic and sociological perspective. They found that tourists were more interested in sharing their emotional responses to these sites than increasing their knowledge of the site. Their responses were often short, impulsive and expressive, reflecting positive or negative emotions rather than long, guarded reflections (Munar & Ooi, 2012). Huertas and Marine-Roig and other communications and tourism experts have used content analysis to determine which content on Facebook tourism sites generates the most reactions among Facebook users. They noted that although all tourism sites communicate generic values, when their ‘brand identity’ has an emotional value (e.g., Paris conjures an aura of sophisticated charm), more user reactions are generated (Huertas & Marine-Roig, 2015, 2016; Lalicic et al., 2019). Similarly, Ramírez-Gutiérrez et al., tourism experts using insights from psychology and anthropology, focused on the way the tourist experience of cultural heritage sites is influenced and shaped by descriptions on social media. They analysed Tripadvisor for qualitative responses to three urban cultural heritage sites and a natural heritage site, finding that visits to these places stimulated emotional responses. Visitors shared these responses on Tripadvisor, thus

Longing for the past  43 affecting the experience of others. Hence, the authors concluded that social media could be used as a management tool to enhance the visitor experience (Ramírez-Gutiérrez, Fernández-Betancort & Santana-Talavera, 2018). Each of these studies suggests the importance of emotional responses to tourism sites in gauging and enhancing the visitor experience. Other studies focus more closely on the use of information and communication technology to present historic urban landscapes, as proposed by UNESCO. A study by sociologist Van der Hoeven of the social media activities of 19 Dutch heritage organisations identified, like Ramírez-Gutiérrez et al., the power of narrative in social media. Van der Hoeven found that through storytelling on social media people could express their attachments to the built environment, and reflect on ways that cities had changed over time and their likely future development. Another form of narrative was developed when online maps of historic urban landscapes were overlaid on historic maps and linked with images and documents relating to particular sites through geocoding. Both forms of narrative exposed stories about the histories of particular places, enabling people to actively engage with their urban heritage (van der Hoeven, 2019). These studies emphasise the role of emotion and narrative – storytelling – in social media. This echoes two features of recent historiography. First, the power of storytelling has been highlighted by calls for historians to ignore the cliometricians and theoreticians and return to the art of storytelling to offer interpretation, explanation and insight into the past. Proponents of this approach have argued that ‘the construction of narratives is one of humankind’s most important gifts’ (McCalman, 1997: 35; Curthoys & McGrath, 2000; Karskens, 2002; Gregory, 2003). Second, the role of emotions in connecting us to place has been highlighted. It is clear that people have strong cultural attachments to familiar places and there is an extensive literature on the meaning and significance of place in our lives, particularly during periods of rapid transformation. Cultural theorist Sara Ahmed, for example, has noted that emotions reveal the attachments that hold people in place, connect them to the world, affect their actions and create political possibilities (Rieder, n.d.). Memory also contributes to place attachment and, as historian Peter Read has noted, helps explain why both communities and individuals mourn for places lost to or threatened by urban renewal (Altman & Low, 1992; Read, 1996). We feel nostalgia for a place that we love but have lost, and ‘solastalgia’ – emotional distress – when a loved place is threatened. Both undermine our sense of place identity (Albrecht, 2005: 45–46). Narrative and emotions are intrinsic to the responses and discussions on social media sites such as Lost Edinburgh and Lost Perth. In this chapter, after touching on the ethics of social media research, we focus on an analysis of these two lost-city Facebook sites. We first provide details of the two sites, then outline the gender, age and location of those who follow the sites and examine the images that generated the most responses from these followers. Then, using a case study approach, we focus on the two most popular places on Lost Edinburgh and Lost Perth to uncover the emotions followers expressed in their response to images of these lost places. We then turn to the curation of these lost-city sites to reveal

44  Jenny Gregory and Sandra Chambers the motivations of their creators. Additionally, we consider what the popularity of these sites signifies, and how they help us to better understand the relationship between urban heritage, place attachment, emotions and nostalgia. Lastly, we reflect on the understanding that urban historians can bring to such an analysis.

Ethics of social media research There has been considerable debate about the use of material derived from social media for research purposes. Educational researchers Henderson et al., for example, have argued that there are ethical dilemmas relating to consent, traceability and the loss of confidentiality ‘in an increasingly networked, pervasive, and ultimately searchable dataverse’ (Henderson, Johnson & Auld, 2013: 556–57). Despite such concerns, however, it is clear that social media sites provide a new and rich source for analysis by urban historians. Moreover, it is irrefutable that commentary published in the print media – letters to the editor, opinion pieces, etc. – has been regularly analysed by scholars for decades without giving rise to ethical concerns. Perceptions of what is considered private have shifted. Social media sites have blurred the boundaries between public and private spaces, according to Bateman et al., experts in technology management. Their study of self-disclosure on social media suggests that people are willing to publicly disclose information about things they enjoy and care about. The views social media users express are also associated with their emotions, feelings and values. Additionally, as other studies have shown, people are often willing to disclose such information ‘to create greater intimacy when building relationships’ as occurs during interactions on social media sites (Bateman, Pike & Butler, 2011: 90). Nonetheless, to assuage any lingering ethical concerns about our analysis of public commentary by the Lost Edinburgh and Lost Perth Facebook groups, we contacted the creator/curator of each group. They expressed interest in the project, provided us with statistical data on their groups, and raised no objection to this analysis. Members of the group have not been contacted. They appear to be aware of the public nature and the global reach of their commentary and most have provided their names for all to see but, as they have not given permission for their commentary to be analysed, to maintain their privacy we have anonymised them in this chapter.

The lost cities The Lost Edinburgh Facebook group was created on 25 November 2011 in Scotland’s capital and second most populous city. In 2015, when the research for this chapter was undertaken, the group page had almost 100,000 ‘fans’ (denoted by the number of ‘likes’). In that year, Edinburgh’s metropolitan area had a population of 492,680. It is a very ancient city, though it was remade in the eighteenth century when slums were replaced by rows of Georgian terraced houses in the New Town. The population density of the city is just over 1,800 residents per square kilometre. Edinburgh’s population is predominantly

Longing for the past  45 classed as white, and the 16% born outside the UK are mainly from Poland, the Republic of Ireland, China, India and Pakistan. Nearly 50% of the non-UKborn population of Edinburgh was of European origin, among the highest for any city in the UK (National Records of Scotland, 2015). The Lost Perth Facebook group was created on 13 May 2013 in Perth, capital of the state of Western Australia. In 2015 its fan base had reached over 105,000. Perth is the fourth most populous city in Australia with around 1.94 million inhabitants living in a sprawling metropolitan area, with a population density of only 0.03 residents per square kilometre (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2019). It is a comparatively new city, having been founded as the capital of a British colony in 1829. Most of its population growth has occurred on the back of mining booms, especially as a result of gold rushes in the 1890s and 1930s, smaller booms in iron ore and nickel in the 1970s and 1980s, and an iron ore boom in the early 2000s. Perth has a higher proportion of residents from the British Isles than any other Australian capital. At the last census, the largest ancestry groups in the Perth metropolitan areas were English (27.5%), Australian (20.9%), Irish (6.8%), Scottish (6.4%) and Italian (4.0%). There are clearly considerable differences between these cities. Edinburgh is tightly concentrated around its ancient heart. Perth is a sprawling city with well over double the population of Edinburgh spread over a much larger area. But there are also similarities, with both populations having a high proportion of residents from a British background. Lost Edinburgh, nearly four years old at the time of the research, had attracted the equivalent of 14% of the city’s population. Two years after its establishment, Lost Perth had attracted the equivalent of 6% of the city’s population.

Following lost cities Using statistics provided by the curators of these groups in 2015, a great deal of information can be gleaned about the composition of the followers of Lost Edinburgh and Lost Perth at that time. There was an even split in the reported genders of followers of Lost Edinburgh. The ‘like’ statistics (based on the total number of people who like Lost Edinburgh) show that 54% were women and 45% men. This differs slightly from the average for all Facebook users which is split at 46% women and 54% men. Most followers were in the 25–44 age bracket, with a slightly higher representation of women in the 25–34 age group. Most were from the UK (76,941). The greatest number lived in Edinburgh (42,836) with smaller numbers in Glasgow (2,683), London (2,586) and other cities in Scotland. Much smaller numbers were from the USA (10,524), Australia (3,163), Canada (2,098), Spain (1,693), Italy (1,646), Germany (1,371) and Brazil, France, Greece (under 1,000). The vast majority was English speaking. Small numbers were from European language groups, mostly Italian, Spanish, Polish, German (between 1,600 and 1,000), with less than 1,000 each from French, Portuguese and Greek language groups.

46  Jenny Gregory and Sandra Chambers The majority of followers who liked Lost Perth were women: 58%. Nevertheless, 40% were men; a sizeable percentage. Nearly one-third of followers were women in the 25–44 age bracket, with more in the over 35 group. They were predominantly Australian (101,600), with most living in Perth (79,007), although other Australian capital cities – Melbourne (1,987), Sydney (1,124), Brisbane (637) – were represented, reflecting the general pattern of interstate migration in Australia. There were smaller numbers living in the UK (1,472) and USA (1,158), fewer still in New Zealand (286), Canada (226), and less than 200 each in Indonesia, Italy, India, Singapore and Brazil. Of the very small number of followers from other language groups (less than 150 each), most spoke Italian, Brazilian and Spanish, followed by French, Arabic, German and Dutch language groups.

Liking lost cities Analysis of the ‘likes’, ‘comments’ and ‘shares’ of Lost Edinburgh with almost 100,000 fans and Lost Perth with just over 105,000 fans was undertaken as follows. First, the ‘likes’, ‘comments’ and ‘shares’ posts for each lost city were counted. They were then sorted according to the number of ‘likes’. As such large numbers were involved, we decided to provide a snapshot of the content by focusing on the top five posts (determined by the number of ‘likes’) for each lost city, as shown in Figures 3.1 and 3.2, and to then provide an analysis of the top 25 posts for each lost city. Content analysis was then used to determine the number of positive and negative adjectives and emotions used in comments on the top 25 posts. It soon became clear that, in the case of Lost Edinburgh, one lost site was the focus of three posts in the top 25, generating a very large number of responses (5,782 likes, 371 comments and 1,316 shares), and that this was likely to prove fruitful for textual analysis. It was then possible to choose examples of comments which reflected users’ positive and negative feelings relating to the site. Lost Perth offered a similar opportunity as one post in the top 25 generated a very large response (14,302 likes, 292 comments and 2,253 shares). Hence a case study from each lost city, detailed later in this chapter, became possible for textual analysis. The following discussions detail the results of this methodology. Both Lost Edinburgh and Lost Perth had many posts with photos of historic buildings and events; however the Lost Edinburgh site generally had more detailed descriptions and historical information (often several paragraphs) on its photos and posts. Lost Perth had more posts of retro objects, nick-nacks and products (e.g., sweets, drinks, etc.). It also included more humorous pictures not strictly related to historical Perth that are nevertheless very popular. Demonstrating this tendency, the information in Tables 3.1 and 3.2 has been sorted to show the top five ‘likes’ – the most popular images on Lost Edinburgh and Lost Perth (Tables 3.1 and 3.2). Surprisingly, considering that most photos on Lost Edinburgh are considerably older, the most popular image on the Lost Edinburgh page was a 1991 photo and link to the archive of the pop group Nirvana. Comments in December 2016 reveal that this performance had gained mythic status. After an advertised performance

Longing for the past  47 Table 3.1  Top 5 likes on Lost Edinburgh 2011–15 Rank

Date

Subject

Medium

# Likes

# Comments

# Shares

1

1991

Photo and link to archive

5,782

371

1,316

2 3

c.1909 2015

Photo Newspaper article

3,818 3,386

 89 141

2,181 905

4

c.1930s

Photo

2,917

375

646

5

1928

Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain (Nirvana) playing in secret at an acoustic charity gig to help raise cash for the city’s Sick Kids Hospital Suffragette march Edinburgh voted world’s 4th most beautiful city Portobello outdoor Pool Rainy evening streetscape with lamplighter, Victoria Terrace

Photo

2,811

130

502

Table 3.2  Top 5 likes on Lost Perth 2013–15 Rank

Date

Subject

Medium

1

2015

2 3

2015  

Photo of street art Product Meme photo

4

2014

5

c.1960

Public art ANZAC tribute on bus stop, Fremantle Pile of flannel blankets Picture at service station with text ‘Who remembers when you got service at a servo?’ ‘Freeza’ raspberry icy pole Cuisenaire rods (coloured children’s maths stacking blocks)

# Likes

# Comments

# Shares

14,302

291

2,253

5,651 5,249

387 551

277 649

Product

4,794

360

699

Product

4,505

256

528

48  Jenny Gregory and Sandra Chambers when they were on tour with another group, Nirvana played six songs in a local pub at a charity gig organised to raise funds for a children’s hospital. It was late and only about 30 people were in the pub. The few people who witnessed the performance, together with the 1994 death of singer Kurt Cobain, helped cement it as a legendary urban moment. The top image on Lost Perth was a photo of a public art ANZAC tribute on a bus stop shelter. The work was organised by the local council and created by art students as part of national commemorations for the centenary of the World War One Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1915. The extensive loss of life at Gallipoli was the foundation of a national day of mourning, ANZAC Day, a public holiday that has been commemorated in Australia each year since the 1920s. The popularity of both these images suggests widespread awareness, concern and respect for the loss represented by untimely death. Table 3.3 compares the eras of the top 25 ‘likes’ on each of the lost-city sites. Most images posted were from the second half of the twentieth century, but Lost Perth had a higher percentage in this period. No images on Lost Perth were from the nineteenth century or the early twentieth century, but a total of 32% of Lost

Figure 3.1  Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain (Nirvana) playing in secret at an acoustic charity gig in 1991 to help raise cash for the city’s Sick Kids Hospital, posted on Lost Edinburgh, 2 February 2015. Table 3.3  Comparison of era of top 25 likes on Lost Edinburgh and Lost Perth Lost Edinburgh % 1850–1899 1900–1949 1950–1999 2000–2015 TOTAL

16 16 40 28 100

Lost Perth % 0 0 64 36 100

Longing for the past  49

Figure 3.2  Public art ANZAC tribute on bus stop, Fremantle, posted on Lost Perth, 22 April 2015. Photographed by W. Duffy. Permission to use granted 29 July 2020.

50  Jenny Gregory and Sandra Chambers Edinburgh images were from these periods. While the sample is small, it is perhaps not surprising that posts on the older city reach further into the past than those on Lost Perth.

Commenting on lost cities On both Lost Edinburgh and Lost Perth, posts of more recent events, photos or objects generally received more comments, especially from people reminiscing about the subject of the post. Posts with subjects beyond living memory generally received fewer comments, but for those that were beyond living memory, respondents tended to focus on the historic value of the subject or to lament the destruction of the historic building or site. Both groups were very interactive. Followers interacted with ‘official’ information provided by the curator, commenting to add historical knowledge to posts and to debate the historical accuracy of dates and other details. On some posts, the curator requested feedback about the date of a particular photo or object. As the following case studies demonstrate, the most popular sites – the ones that attracted the most comments – were of buildings or sites created or lost in the living memory of followers. Lost Edinburgh On Lost Edinburgh, the majority of comments between 2011 and 2015 were in response to posts of images of the Portobello Outdoor Bathing Pool (1936–1988). At first glance the decision to erect a large Art Deco open ocean pool in the Edinburgh suburb of Portobello on the North Sea, where summer temperatures range from 4° to 20°, seems extraordinary. However, the nearby Portobello Power Station (1923–1977) – a ‘colossal monster’ with ‘cathedral type beauty’ in the words of two Lost Edinburgh followers – supplied wastewater used to cool its generators to heat the icy water in the pool and also supplied the energy to run the pool’s popular wave-making machine. The pool was so popular that in good weather people formed long queues for entry. Moreover, the seaside suburb – with its wide beach, long pier (1871–1917), Marine Gardens pleasure park (1909–c1939), boats for hire, bathing boxes, pony rides and promenade with tea rooms – displayed in images on Lost Edinburgh was a popular destination for holiday makers from all over Britain for much of the twentieth century (McLean, 2013a, 2013b). It was not until the ageing power station closed in 1977, when newer coal-fired power stations took over the Edinburgh electricity supply, that the pool’s popularity diminished (McLean, 2019). Today the Portobello Pitz 5-a-side football pitches are located on the site (Figure 3.3). In the analysis of the volume of individual ‘likes’ on Lost Edinburgh, a 1930s photo of the pool was ranked fourth, a 1957 photo ranked ninth and a 1960s photo ranked tenth. Outside the top ten were another 28 posted images; most from the 1960s but spanning the whole period of the pool’s life. These included a six-minute film of the baths made in 1939 and now held in the National Library of Scotland. Photos of the Portobello Pool posted on Lost Edinburgh were ‘liked’

Longing for the past  51

Figure 3.3  Crowds at Portobello Outdoor Bathing Pool in April 1955, Daily Record Archives.

a total of 7,355 times, commented on a total of 1,003 times, and shared a total of 1,817 times. The first four posts of images of the pool on Lost Edinburgh, some of which were multiple photos submitted by fans, were posted without comment from the curator, who simply acknowledged their provenance. Then, in February 2012, the curator gradually began commenting on the photos as they were sent in or on those that he had found: ‘classic diving board shot’; ‘spot the Power Station in the background’; ‘next time you’re having a kickabout at the pits in Porty, give a wee thought to what once stood there before!’; ‘Who was brave enough to jump off the top board?’. At the fourteenth post, in December 2012 – twelve months after the first post of a pool image – the reason for his initial restraint in commenting became clear when he admitted: I’ve not been around long enough to remember this pool – never mind to have actually visited it. It has always struck me as odd though that an open air pool could ever have existed in such a brass monkey climate like ours, and indeed, most accounts don’t shy away from the fact that the water was frequently baltic. Still, it sounded like the place to be during the summer. A pity it couldn’t have been given a glass roof or something.

52  Jenny Gregory and Sandra Chambers The level of interest in the pool prompted research by the curator which was then published in The Scotsman under the banner ‘Lost Edinburgh’ in March 2013. He announced it on the Facebook group: ‘this week’s Lost Edinburgh piece features the open air pool at Portobello. I’m sure you guys will have a few fond memories of this.’ Almost a year later, in February 2014, he posted a photo of the pool in its inaugural year along with 132 words on its history. This engagement with fans sustained interest and encouraged more and more comments. The users’ comments also demonstrate that group members had an emotional response to the images posted. Table 3.4 shows all the emotion words that the Table 3.4  Emotion words used in comments on Portobello Outdoor Pool Positive emotion words

#

Negative emotion words

#

Love/loved

83

Freezing, Baltic, glacial, heartstopping, bracing, cold, shivery

82

Great/Good/Fond – memories/times Happy/Halcyon/Good – days/times

80

Disappointment

14

Great

31

Sad

13

Fun

26

Blame

10

Fab/fabulous

13

Miss

7

Happy

11

Sorrow

4

Brilliant

10

Anger

4

Amazing/amazed

9

Hate

4

Excited/scared/terrified

9

Loss

3

Fantastic

7

Dirty

1

Enjoy

5

Wonderful

4

Beautiful

3

Awesome

3

Magic

3

Brave/courageous

3

Lovely

2

Gorgeous

1

Marvellous

1

Superb

1

Pleasure

1

Holy grail

1

Legendary

1 308

142

Longing for the past  53 images evoked. More than twice as many positive as negative emotion words were elicited, with most commentators loving the photos and remembering good times and happy days as the following examples show: Practically lived in it from April till it closed in October, my memories of this great place will never fade. My playground for many years, loved it, the raft, the waves and the top diving board, spent most of summer holidays in it. A number also revealed their excitement at the pool, especially on the high diving board, where some felt ‘scared’ or even ‘terrified’, others ‘brave’. Given the context, these responses were interpreted as positive emotions. I was too feart tae dive off the 15 m. … so I used tae jump, thought I would never come up. Remember the raft and the waves? Happy days. I once jumped from the 10 mtr. (top) board. It took me 5 minutes to pluck up courage…. and 10 minutes to hit the water! The water was 15 ft. deep there and it took me 3 days to reach the surface…. seemed like that. That was it…. never again. Almost all negative emotion words related to the temperature of the water, especially after the power station was decommissioned in the 1970s. It was ‘Baltic’, ‘glacial’ and ‘heart-stopping’: Remember swimming there when it was snowing! I would wait impatiently for ‘summer’ when the ‘Pool’ opened (May) & get my season ticket …. god knows how I stood the cold water … even though it was supposed to be ‘heated’ from the power station next door!…. ah the wonderful 50s of my youth. Turned blue swimming there. Glacial. No heating whatsoever. I loved Portobello open air pool, it was huge… and freezing cold. If you came down the shute really fast and your hands started burning when you hit the water the burning stopped instantly and the wind was knocked out of you it was so cold. Brrrr, it needed to be a really hot day to appreciate it! There was also ‘disappointment’, ‘sadness’, ‘sorrow’ and a sense of ‘loss’ that the pool no longer existed, with some blaming the council and expressing anger that it had been demolished. It could have been kept if only the council had been forward thinking. This pool and next door, Portobello Power Station were iconic buildings. I miss

54  Jenny Gregory and Sandra Chambers them both. The ‘woosh’ of steam released from the power station, the wave machine in the pool. Yes… miss it all. Great places, great times. I thought Portybelly pool was the last word in sophistication when I was a kid. It’s a shame the city couldn’t find a way to keep it, even just to admire the, in my opinion, architecture. Great memories there…. Shame that this inept council left it to rot. It was a sin, closing that pool and destroying it like that. Lost Perth The image that inspired the most comments on Lost Perth between 2011 and 2015 was of the Perth Entertainment Centre, liked by 3,165 people, commented on by 1,470 and shared by 288. The site was developed by a consortium as the architect-designed Channel 7 Edgley Entertainment Centre. Its construction costs spiralled, and the state government bailed out the consortium by taking over ownership from 1975 until 1988 when it was acquired by a private company (McKay, 2010). Opened in 1974, closed in 2002 and demolished in 2011, the Entertainment Centre had a capacity of just over 8,200. Fans recalled a roll call of international and national acts: Bob Hope, Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Tina Turner, Paul Simon, Rod Stewart, Elton John, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Queen, Disney on Ice, children’s TV character Fat Cat, the 1979 Miss Universe contest, Jesus Christ Superstar, Phantom of the Opera, Moscow Circus, Bolshoi Ballet, Placido Domingo, Harlem Globetrotters, Davis Cup, World Wrestling and much more (Figure 3.4). The Entertainment Centre generated strong memories, with all 1,470 comments quickly appearing on the same day. Eliciting this rapid response was the curator’s initial post, accompanied by two photos: The magnificent Perth Entertainment Centre. Set a world record as the largest building of her kind and only cost 8 million dollars when opened in December 1974. My favourite act I saw was ABBA, how about you?

Figure 3.4  Perth Entertainment Centre, c.1970, postcard, National View by Murfett Pty Ltd Australia.

Longing for the past  55 In reaction to this question many responses were simply a list of shows people had seen. So many great bands. KISS – Split Enz – Adam & The Ants – Mondo Rock – Duran Duran – INXS – Blondie – U2… RIP Perth Entertainment Centre. David Bowie, Rod Stewart, Tina Turner and Kiss. Who didn’t I see. Eurythmics. Janet Jackson. U2. Billy Joel. Jimmy Barnes. Pet Shop Boys. Sade. Lloyd Cole. INXS. Prodigy. Phil Collins. Harry Conick Jr. Arrested development. Robbie Williams. Those that provided more information tended to be ‘short, impulsive and expressive’ in their expression, to echo Munar and Ooi’s findings in their study of social media users referred to earlier. Commenters used emotion words, as Table 3.5 shows. Bands were ‘great’, acts, shows and concerts – the gigs – were ‘incredible’. But many also gave a sense of the excitement that memories of the Entertainment Centre generated. ABBA for me too!! I ran down to the front of the stage and I was crammed up against front cage. I looked up and, I swear, Anna Frid[sic] smiled at me!!!! She did!!!! Me!!!!! I slept in the queue for 2 days to get tickets to see Sherbet. That was probably more fun than the concert! ‘Screaming’ kids or teenagers were a negative for some, but a positive for others with the following comments having a generational overlay: So many great memories…but the standout was the mighty Sherbet in 1976. Mum and Dad drove me up from Esperance [714km south of Perth] just in time for the concert. Dad slept in the carpark while Mum braved all us screaming teenagers. After it was over and I had calmed down enough to get in the car, Dad turned around and drove back to Esperance. Long day :-) There were other comments sharing novel experiences with description doing the work of emotion words: My husband worked for the transport company that brought over the ­Moscow Circus for the Edgleys. Had a call one night (via the good old 2-way in his car) to go the Entertainment Centre to help with an emergency SOS. A lion was on the loose!! I locked myself in the car! I was an extra in the London Festival Ballet’s SLEEPING BEAUTY with Rudolph Nureyev… I was one of the soldiers ‘asleep’ on the stairs. Every night Rudie would sweep down and lift my visor and I always looked him straight in the eyes – clearly not ‘asleep’. Furious, he would slam the

56  Jenny Gregory and Sandra Chambers Table 3.5  Emotion words used in comments on Perth Entertainment Centre Positive emotion words

#

Negative emotion words

#

Great bands, incredible shows, amazing acts/concerts, wonderful gigs

28

Shame/disappointed

5

Awesome

23

Miss

4

Great memories

23

Waste

2

Love

19

Sad

1

Great/versatile/state of the art venue

16

Shame/embarrassed

1

Brilliant

10

Lack of vision

1

Fantastic

9

Horrible acoustics

1

Best time/good times/happy days/

8

Screaming teenagers

1

Wonderful

7

Unforgettable

4

Wow

4

Futuristic/ alien spaceship

3

Fun

2

Magic

1

Unbelievable

1

Never surpassed

1

Happy

1

Lucky

1

Enjoy

1

Great acoustics

1

Screaming teenagers

1 164

16

visor down! He was quite a character, with extremely colourful language backstage. I used to work there. Saw all sorts of gigs. This one time my supervisor took me for a walk to a section (which were off limits to public) of the building & upstairs into the roof part & there was all sorts of writing on the walls from band members & famous people since it was open. Best memory of that place. It was like a time warp. It’s a shame the building has gone. Few negative emotions were expressed. Like the previous comment, most described the sense of loss that was felt by the disappearance of the venue:

Longing for the past  57 Sad. very futuristic – I think it’s lack of vision that it was demolished. This was a great place. Shame it went … it could have been used a lot longer than it did. 10 years roughly it sat there doing nothing.

Curating lost cities Why would anyone create and curate such groups? Curators of these lost-city groups are motivated by a passion for the past and, in the case of Lost Edinburgh, acknowledgement of the power of reminiscence therapy for the elderly. It is an enormous investment in time. The co-founder and administrator of Lost Edinburgh as of 2015, when this research was undertaken, was David McLean. He revealed little of himself on the site, except in his choice of posts. The well-researched background information he frequently provided in posts suggested a research background and it later became clear that he was a journalist. In a media interview (Patrick, 2016), he revealed his motivation in co-founding Lost Edinburgh: It all started with another man’s story – that of David’s grandfather. ‘Around five years ago he was starting to show signs of dementia,’ says David. ‘He must have been around 81 at the time. I didn’t think he had long left so I made him a wee DVD slideshow of old Edinburgh images.’ The slideshow rekindled memories of David’s grandfather’s working days in the city’s old stations as a wheeltapper…David…decided to put the images online to allow others to reminisce – and so Lost Edinburgh was launched…. ‘We aren’t academic, and we’re not trying to come across as know-it-alls – that’s not to say we don’t share what information we have, but we like to get a bit of a conversation. The comments are hugely important. It’s amazing the conversation you can get going by speaking about something close to people’s hearts.’ As noted on his Twitter feed, established in 2012, McLean is heritage writer for The Scotsman and Edinburgh Evening News, as well as creator of Lost Edinburgh and Lost Glasgow. A number of spinoffs have developed from the Facebook groups. In 2014, McLean published a book, Edinburgh in the 1950s: Ten Years that Changed a City, aiming ‘to bring people together through reminiscence and oral history work and to pass on knowledge of the past to younger generations’ (Gillon, McLean & Parkinson, 2014). He has been interviewed on BBC Radio Scotland (McLean, 2018). In 2018, the Caledonian – a luxury hotel owned by the Waldorf Astoria – hosted a photographic exhibition of its former life as Edinburgh’s Princes Street Station, where David’s grandfather had worked (Hotel News Scotland, 2018). David continues to regularly write articles on news, politics, crime, people, travel and lifestyle (including heritage) for The Scotsman. His personal passion for the past, and his awareness of the value of historic photos in reminiscence therapy, is intermingled with his role as a journalist. The creator of Lost Perth, Warren Duffy, has told followers of Lost Perth a considerable amount about himself and his motivations:

58  Jenny Gregory and Sandra Chambers Ever since my father died when I was seven years of age, I have wondered ‘what if’. Where would I be today if Dad was here with me, where did Dad work, why is the building gone and where did all the workers go? I travelled the world with the Navy, set myself up selling new homes and now run my own fencing business and along the way, I have gathered more information about the history of Perth, this beautiful city. I could talk the leg off a chair chatting about the history of Perth whilst learning more about where my customers live and where they grew up. I began to share my passion online and have been amazed by the huge following of similar minded people who have joined my Lost Perth Facebook page (Duffy, 2015). By 2013, the commercial possibilities of Lost Perth had become obvious to Duffy. Lost Perth began to advertise a range of merchandise – photographic prints, posters and T-shirts – on the Lost Perth shop page, and Duffy turned to crowdfunding to publish a book on Lost Perth. The pitch mentioned the delight that many people, their parents and grandparents were experiencing as they reminisced about the venues, people, items, events and sites ‘which had all but been forgotten’: Now we want to put those memories and stories in print, so they’ll have a place in history forever. We want Lost Perth The Book to find a place on your coffee table or on your grandparent’s bedside table. We want it to contain YOUR STORIES, YOUR MEMORIES, YOUR PHOTOGRAPHS. We want it to be YOUR BOOK and that is why we are asking YOU to help fund it. Over AU$71,000 was raised to publish the book in 2013 (Watts et al., 2013). Sales were then sufficient to fund the publication of a second volume (Duffy and Tonkin, 2014). Speaking on radio 6PR in 2017, not long after the second volume was launched, Duffy stated that the two had sold a total of 50,000 copies. Since 2017, Duffy has been interviewed on commercial radio about Lost Perth numerous times. In 2018 the discovery of 74 16mm film reels – in colour and black and white and ranging in dates from 1948 to 1961 – in a kerbside rubbish collection became a media story. Duffy purchased the reels from the finder. He personally paid $5,400 for some reels to be digitised, and then began a crowdfunding campaign online to raise $12,000 to digitise the remainder. Noting that museums and libraries ‘do not have the funds to convert their own collection so it is up to us if we wish to watch these films ourselves’, he planned to create a DVD of film highlights to ‘take from town to town for charities to hold film nights where we will find more great photos and memories for Lost Perth and libraries’ (Acott, 2018). In 2017, Duffy stood unsuccessfully for election to the state parliament, representing One Nation, a small populist right-wing political party. The curators of both Lost Edinburgh and Lost Perth have recognised the power of the past and its importance in the emotional life of individuals.

Longing for the past  59

Emotional attachment and nostalgia At the core of the many emotions expressed by members of the Lost Edinburgh and Lost Perth Facebook groups is nostalgia. As discussed by a number of scholars, there have been multiple understandings of nostalgia. In its early modern iteration, nostalgia was underpinned by the idea of melancholy, while in the nineteenth century it was used to explain debilitating homesickness among soldiers. Today, nostalgia is part of the memory boom that has developed during decades of rapid transformation in the urban environment. Critics from the discipline of Geography have suggested that in encouraging disappointment with the present it inhibits change (Watson & Wells, 2005: 23), but recent psychological experiments have highlighted its positive affect and case studies have shown that it may be best understood as ‘a mobile and multifaceted phenomenon’ (Bonnett & Alexander, 2013: 400). Nostalgia and the response to historic photographs has been the subject of much scholarly discussion. In the pre-social media world before the advent of Photoshop and fake images, Roland Barthes, although attuned to the falsity of images, argued that a photo is evidence of a moment in the past (Barthes, 1980). Acclaimed intellectual and writer Susan Sontag warned that ‘photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgements by the generalised pathos of looking at time past’ (Sontag, 1977/2008: 71). Likewise, renowned Marxist historian Raphael Samuel – arguing that the popularity of historic photographs in Britain had created an ‘iconography of the national past’ – concluded that historic photos grasped ‘after shadows’ (Samuel, 1994). In the same vein as Sontag and Samuel, geographer and historian David Lowenthal critiqued the rise of nostalgia in the late twentieth century when he argued that ‘nostalgic dreams have become almost habitual, if not epidemic’ (Lowenthal, 1985: 4). These observations ring true today, particularly as it is now possible to alter a photo digitally with comparative ease and things may not be as they seem. But the curators of these lost-city groups are passionate about the past and there seems no reason to suspect that the photos they showcase have been doctored. Lost Edinburgh, for example, declares that it is ‘dedicated to sharing old photos showcasing the ever-changing face of Edinburgh, its history and its community throughout the centuries’. Sociologists Pickering and Keightley have argued that researchers should move beyond conceptions of nostalgia in which audiences are simply viewed as passively absorbing nostalgic content (Pickering & Keightley, 2006: 929). Nostalgia is a negotiation between past and present, between continuity and discontinuity, as literary scholars Atia and Davies observe: ‘it insists on the bond between our present selves and a certain fragment of the past, but also on the force of our separation from what we have lost’ (Atia & Davies, 2010: 183). While nostalgia may take ‘a free ride on memory…removing disturbing thoughts about the past and retain[ing] only the good ones’ – as philosopher Avishai Margalit concludes – nonetheless it has positive aspects (Margalit, 2011: 280). Noting that nostalgia is a complex emotion, psychologists Routledge et al. found that although psychological

60  Jenny Gregory and Sandra Chambers threats such as loneliness and meaningless can generate nostalgia, nostalgia itself can have a positive effect on psychological health because it increases social connectedness, enhances positive self-regard, improves mood and contributes to perceptions of the meaning of life by linking the past and the present (Routledge et al., 2013: 812). The curators of both Lost Edinburgh and Lost Perth came to this conclusion as they shared photos and read the comments that were generated, but McLean went further, pointing to the value of reminiscence therapy.

Conclusion The fans of Lost Edinburgh and Lost Perth had overwhelmingly positive responses to the images posted on these sites: the number of likes, comments and shares, along with the use of positive emotion words, are testament to that. But what does the popularity of these sites signify and how does it help us to better understand the relationship between urban heritage and emotional attachments? In an earlier article, I analysed the responses of an online Facebook community to the loss of urban heritage in Perth, Australia (Gregory, 2015). I found that the users’ memories of lost places encouraged the development of an emotional community with shared values and, in some cases, fostered the social capital and civic engagement necessary to protest against the destruction of the city’s heritage. Heritage architects Greenop et al. have since assessed the value of ‘citizen heritage’ on a Facebook site which was critical of changes to Brisbane’s civic square. They found that social media commentary often highlighted intangible qualities that were ignored in formal methods of assessing heritage values, and that analysis of social media commentary could therefore provide a valuable augmentation to conventional statutory processes. Do the Lost Perth and Lost Edinburgh Facebook groups display similar possibilities? It is clear that, using historian Barbara Rosenwein’s term, an ‘emotional community’ with shared values has been created on these two lost-city Facebook groups (Plamper, 2010). The high level of engagement on each site makes that clear. These groups, however, generally focus on buildings, places and objects already ‘lost’. Although negative emotions were revealed in comments and, in the Lost Edinburgh case study there was a strong tendency to blame civic authorities for the loss, the object of that loss was already gone. In neither Lost Edinburgh nor Lost Perth was there any evidence of the involvement of a group actively protesting against the impending loss of a place. Nevertheless, could the views of emotional communities developed in similar social media sites usefully inform statutory heritage processes, as Greenop et al. suggest? These Facebook lost-city groups reveal the existence of large numbers of people who care deeply about the past and take delight in rekindling their memories of lost places. Those who remembered these places or objects expressed strong positive feelings, as did those seeing these images for the first time. This suggests that rather than focusing solely on tangible evidence, regulatory authorities should indeed take heed of the intangible – the emotional impact of the loss of place – particularly at a time of rapid urban transformation in which

Longing for the past  61 older values are being eroded and many feel a loss of control and uncertainty about the future. Cultural geographer Dolores Hayden has observed that ‘streets, buildings and patterns of settlement frame the lives of many people and often outlast many lifetimes’ and are ‘storehouses for social memories’ (Hayden, 1995: 9). But what happens when cities are transformed and these ‘storehouses’ are lost? This study has focused on the response of individuals to the loss of urban fabric in two cities, both British in origin. With over 71% of the Scottish population (National Records of Scotland, 2019) and 86% of the Australian population (United Nations, 2018) living in cities, Edinburgh and Perth are emblematic of highly urbanised societies in which change is an ever-present aspect of urban life. Rodgers and Sweet (2008) see our relationship to the city as a means of combating ‘the anonymity of modernity’. Social media sites, such as Lost Edinburgh and Lost Perth, provide individuals with the opportunity to remember what has been lost in their cities. They act as a vector for emotion, habituating and extending the emotional impact of nostalgia on the group. The collective memories generated on these sites bind the emotional communities that have been created and highlight the continuing relationship between people, identity and place. As this chapter demonstrates, urban historians can provide a distinct perspective in understanding the historical and ongoing emotional relationships between people and places. Their interdisciplinary and comparative approaches, and their openness to the use of new sources, can bring insight to our understanding of the urban past and its importance to contemporary urban society.

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64  Jenny Gregory and Sandra Chambers Sontag, S. (1977/2008). On Photography. London: Penguin, p. 71. Statista(2020)‘NumberofmonthlyactiveFacebookusersworldwide’.Availableat:https://www. statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/. Stave, B. (1974). Conversation with Sam Bass Warner, Journal of Urban History, pp. 92, 100, 108. The Bathing Pool, Portobello, Edinburgh. (1939). [Online]. Directed by William Kirkness. Edinburgh. Scottish Screen Archive, National Library of Scotland http://ssa.nls.uk/film. cfm?fid=3559 (Viewed 16 October 2019). UNESCO. (2011). Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape. Available at: https://whc.unesco.org/uploads/activities/documents/activity-638-98.pdf (Accessed: 20 May 2019), clause 27. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (2018) Country Profiles – Population Dynamics, Available at: https://population.un.org/wup/Country-Profiles/ (Accessed: 3 July 2020). van der Hoeven, A. (2019). Historic urban landscapes on social media: The contributions of online narrative practices to urban heritage conservation. City, Culture and Society, 17, pp. 61–68. Watson, S. and Wells, K. (2005). Spaces of Nostalgia: The Hollowing out of a London Market. Social & Cultural Geography, 6 (1), pp. 17–30. Watts, K., Duffy, W., Verboon, A., Laming, L., and Watts, M. (2013). Lost Perth, Australia: LP Publishing. Zunz, O. (1985). Reliving the Past, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, p. 3.

4 Histories of urban heritage Emotional and experiential attachments across time and space Ursula de Jong, Cristina Garduño Freeman, Beau B. Beza, Fiona Gray and Matt Novacevski Setting the scene Heritage lists, registers and classifications are often critiqued for de-contextualising places from their communities. Their focus is on defining properties, documenting values and ensuring material conservation. Yet, the very reason for inscribing places of heritage significance is because of the values particular groups of people hold for them. The emergent methodology explored in this research inverts this focus on conserving the material by seeking to develop a means to articulate people’s attachment to place, in order that it be considered and honoured in a way that may contribute to more refined understandings of the interactions between people and places, and in practice, to policy making and heritage conservation. Attachment to place is difficult to evidence and quantify. It is subjective, dynamic, often residing in the everyday experiences of people, and is maintained through the less definable and less easily managed attributes of place. In Australia and the UK, attachment to place within the field of heritage can be said to parallel the concept of social value. This particular dimension of place and heritage is now mature and widely recognised, in spite of the fact that inscriptions under this form of significance remain underrepresented (Mornement and Garduño Freeman, 2018). The qualitative approach in heritage is matched by a similar desire within urban studies to see cities and places through a people-centred lens and to engage with place attachment through communities’ culturally specific points of view. This shift towards understanding heritage and historic places through the eyes of those who value them demands that new methodologies are developed to document the attachments and emotions people have towards these places. While these methodologies might be seen to challenge existing material conservation practices, we argue that they are complementary. They frame places and precincts through the values that are meaningful to communities. This shift engages with the challenge of measuring or identifying elements that define place attachment in particular locations, a challenge that has proven elusive despite considerable research (Lewicka, 2011). The term ‘lovability’ has emerged as a way of describing and valuing the phenomenon of place attachment within the discourses of urban analysis and placemaking (Garduño Freeman and Gray, 2015; Garduño Freeman, Gray and

66  Ursula de Jong et al. Novacevski, 2016; Gray et al., 2018; Hartley, 2018; Novacevski, Gray and Garduño Freeman, 2017). But methodologies for its analysis are not yet well established, partly because of the complex relationships between place, emotion and language. We therefore propose that a lexicon of emotion could be used to underpin a new conceptual approach to examining places for their lovability, particularly in relation to significant historic places. A lexicon of emotion seeks to privilege subjective and relational terms in the content analysis of existing qualitative data. In doing so, it does not pre-empt the ‘things’, ‘places’ or ‘practices’ that people find meaningful, but instead looks for the emotive terms they use as a way to understand attachment. The conceptualisation of a ‘lexicon of emotion’ as an analytical filter is founded on the established link between language and places (Garduño Freeman, Beza and Mejia, 2020; Tuan, 1991). A lexicon of emotion in this context comprises a pool of adjectives and nouns that can be used to interrogate the nature of bonds between people and places, and to consider how these bonds are formed. A lexicon of emotion is predicated on the idea that attachment is generated and maintained by people’s experiences, and therefore can be distinct for different groups and individuals. On the intrinsic connections between language and place, Malpas (2018: 52), for example, notes the conceptualisation and articulation of place through language is a prerequisite to understanding the rich and complex ways that places can operate. This includes the processes of place attachment. Our impressions and sensory stimuli that arise from interactions between people and place become words – abstract yet meaningful concepts that illuminate and co-create understandings of place (Lefebvre, 1991: 138). As a result, a lexicon of emotion challenges the notion that cultural significance is intrinsic to particular places and not others, and instead aligns itself with conceptions of heritage as a social and cultural process (Smith, 2006). The methodology uses the emotional components of language as a filter to understand the objects of attachment that are meaningful to individuals, groups and communities. The value of such an approach is that the ‘lexicon of emotion’ can be applied to existing qualitative data, helping to reveal new dimensions of the significance of places. Applying a lexicon of emotion can help articulate and reveal the attachment of communities to their places, at a variety of scales. In this chapter, lovability and a lexicon of emotion are explored for three case-study communities in the Australian state of Victoria: the capital, Melbourne, the seaside towns of Queenscliff and Sorrento (located 100 km south of Melbourne on either side of the entrance to Port Philip) and the goldfields regional city, Ballarat (located 100 km north-west of Melbourne). Through engaging with these case studies, this chapter demonstrates the role of heritage in forming bonds of place attachment. The research emphasises, first, the need for a broader recognition of community values that allows for the contextualisation of heritage across different urban scales. The second major finding of the chapter is that place attachment is fostered by more aspects of the urban environment than ‘just’ heritage sites. A wider conception of heritage is therefore required that brings to the fore the interaction between cultural heritage – as in built heritage, historic buildings and materials – and natural heritage – the landscape and environment – that recognises the interconnections between these

Histories of urban heritage  67 forms. A third set of findings forms around the similarities and differences in insights drawn across the three urban scales – small townships (≥1,000 people), a regional centre (≥100,000) and a major metropolitan city (≥1,000,000). The similarities in the data point to the need to articulate place attachment around heritage places. This tells us something about heritage as an evaluative discipline, particularly through new concepts and conventions such as UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage adopted in 2003 and the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (FARO Convention) adopted in 2005.

Language, lovability and place attachment Our exploration of lovability was born from the long-running search across spatial disciplines to better understand the idea of place attachment and was initially developed through a project titled The Melbourne Lovability Index.1 The idea that people can form attachments to places has long been discussed in fields as diverse as psychology, urban planning and literature. According to Lewicka (2011: 207), the term ‘place attachment’ was first coined in the 1980s, yet the concept draws on a body of theory dating back to Greek philosophy (Casey, 1997). More recent scholarship contextualises this concept within philosophies of ontology (as a study of being) and phenomenology (a  study of experience) developed during the twenty-first century (Dovey, 2016: 106). A human need for place attachment, for example, is embodied in Heidegger’s (Heidegger, 1971: 159) observation of one’s existential need to dwell, and one’s eternal search for the ‘nature of dwelling’. In this sense, the act of dwelling may be constituted via the processes through which people seek to form bonds of attachment to places across a variety of scales, from home to neighbourhood, city or landscape. Thus we recognise that this need to ‘connect’ or ground oneself has been extensively explored (Norberg-Schulz, 1980; Relph, 1976). Yet place attachment is increasingly understood as a manifestation of the social value that a place carries, and various literature points to the importance of place attachment across environmental sustainability, economic growth and human wellbeing discourses (see, for example, Schwartz, 2016; Manzo and Perkins, 2006; Devine-Wright, 2009). The intangibility of the elements that form these attachments has contributed to difficulties in understanding the nature of place attachment, and how it might be assessed through an evaluative framework. To this end, Lewicka (2011: 226) suggests three further lines of inquiry into place attachment: • • •

To study place attachment within a larger socio-political context […] focusing on the role that various forms of social capital play in creating emotional bonds between people and place. Understanding the relationships between place attachment and the physical nature of places. Interrogating processes through which people form meaningful relations with places.

68  Ursula de Jong et al. Lewicka’s directions call into focus questions of lived experience and the role of language in simultaneously shaping and conveying both the lived experience and the ways in which bonds of place attachment are formed. Examination of an attachment to place therefore needs to be linked to the local language, which can be used to specifically identify ‘[…] linguistic and cultural distinctions [of the built form] within specific national context[s] […]’ (Beza et al., 2018: 39). A lexicon developed through the idea of lovability engages with the phenomenon of place by providing a means to distil not only the generalised qualities and traits that define place attachment across scales, but the processes and cultural contexts that are integral to forming the bonds of place attachment. This fosters further understanding of the physical and social elements likely to engender place attachment, including the important role heritage places play at multiple levels. The lexicon of emotion responds to the role of language in articulating and shaping our relationships with place. For example, Tuan (1991) argues that language has the ability to render visible the intangible aspects of place, and that through the power of language we make, articulate and express place. As the difference between space and place is meaning, language becomes the instrument within which to conceptualise the meaning of places. It also becomes an instrument through which places are called into being (Tuan, 1991: 686). Language becomes this instrument by forming metaphors or categories that can be deployed to describe our affective links with place, in which mental images or stimuli associated with place are mediated, transmitted and reconstituted (Lefebvre, 1991; Lynch, 1976). Lynch described the powerful ability of humans to recognise places and distil them as ‘mental images’ to which feelings and meanings are attached (1976: 24–25). According to Heidegger, this is part of the essential human process of dwelling, forming ‘the basic part of being’. Thus, human existence is inseparable from the spatial sphere, which is invested with images and narratives that form it as place. Yet, as Tuan (1991: 691) details, words go beyond images, directing attention to other sensory effects such as textures, sounds and fragrances, as well as articulating a temporal dimension around the moods and rhythms of a place. Language, then, functions as a means to both distil and re-create the images and narratives of place. Nietzsche defines language as ‘a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations’, which are ‘transposed and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical and obligatory to a people’ (Nietzsche, 1969: 179). Drawing on Nietzsche, Lefebvre defines the role of language as key in providing metaphors to understand a chaotic series of impressions and stimuli produced through interactions between people and place. Such a ‘metalanguage’, according to Lefebvre, is able to decode, to ‘bring […] forth from the depths not what is there but what is sayable, what is susceptible of figuration’ (1991: 138–139), which further illustrates the nuance and depth that words add to our understanding and perception. Lefebvre defines this mutually formative entanglement between language and place, noting that ‘language in action and the spoken word are inventive; they restore life to signs and concepts that are worn down like old coins’ (1991: 138). Here, words flesh out new dimensions to place.

Histories of urban heritage  69 For example, Garduño Freeman (Garduño Freeman, Beza and Mejia, 2020) specifically draws attention to this phenomenon in her explanation of Spanglish as a linguistic mechanism which bridges cultural divides through this ‘merging of languages’: concepts not present in one language or the other are made accessible and help to convey the meaning of a place. Implied within this example is that a variety of approaches can be used to develop lexical systems or scales that seek to interrogate sentiments relating to place. For example, Jones et al. (2012) discuss the use of antonyms as pairs of opposed objectives that form dichotomous ends of a scale. Kasmar (1988) and Green (1999) have both developed lexical systems using multiple bipolar word scales that have sought to understand subjective qualities that influence perceptions of places, and elements of places that may contribute to or detract from a desired local character. Both systems were developed using discourse analysis of established bodies of text and surveys of target communities to further refine the adjective pairs used. The use of word pairs depends on ensuring that selected adjectives denote elements that can be perceived, and that each adjective pair supports a dimensional comparison of places or objects to the degree that they possess particular properties (Jones et al., 2012). Other approaches have sought to use adjective–noun pairs as a means of uncovering emotional responses or sentiments to particular images. Borth et al. (2013) articulate an approach where these pairings are used to attach a strong sentiment to a noun, helping to ground sentiment towards a particular phenomenon. They then used this approach to develop a language bank of more than 3,000 terms and a tool that could be used to detect any of up to 1,200 adjective–noun pairs that describe the meaning of an image. In the case of lovability and place attachment, the language used to express emotion and experience frames perceptions of places through an emotive lexicon rather than a concrete one. In interrogating place attachment, a lexicon of emotion distils connections to place, mediating how relations between people and place might be understood and further created without pre-supposing what specific aspects they are linked to. Building on established connections between language and place, we propose that lovability, understood as place attachment manifested from social value, can be interrogated within textual data through a lexicon of emotion. The contemporary intention of lovability is to encompass divergent types of places and communities to help unravel place attachment insightfully. A lexicon of emotion offers an open methodological lens that can be applied at a variety of scales and over varying periods, operating more akin to a barometer rather than as a static measure of place.

Working with language The research presented here on Melbourne, Ballarat, Queenscliff and Sorrento is an initial foray into understanding how ideas about lovability and our proposed method can interrogate language to reveal distinctions in place attachment across three urban scales. Melbourne is a metropolitan region with a population of about

70  Ursula de Jong et al. 5 million people, sprawled over an urban agglomeration of about 10,000 sq km. Ballarat is a regional city with a population of approximately 100,000 people and covers an area of 343.6 sq km. In contrast, Queenscliff and Sorrento are small communities with populations of 1,315 and 1,592 respectively. The Borough of Queenscliffe covers an area of 10.5 sq km (the township is about 4 sq km), while Sorrento covers an area of 7 sq km. The data sets on the cities and towns were gathered within their own distinct projects, prior to our analysis here. Each project shared commonalities in methodology, in that open-ended questions were used in surveys, focus groups and interviews to identify and interrogate elements, images and experiences of place that form and underpin attachments. The data was analysed by identifying prominent themes and then exploring the context of the discourse in which they were used. The following sections outline the Melbourne Lovability Index, Ballarat Imagine and Sea Change Queenscliff Sorrento2 projects. Each of these three projects produced data which we analysed to build our proposed lexicon of emotion. Melbourne Lovability Index The idea of the Lovability Index3 was initiated by participants of a business leadership programme, the Future Focus Group, led by the Committee for Melbourne (Victoria, Australia). The participants of the Future Focus Group recognised a gap in the liveability discourse which largely ignores citizen perception. A pilot in the form of an online survey was conducted in 2015 by the Future Focus Group to capture the perspectives of a broad cross-section of Melbourne residents and to understand what they love most about where they live. The survey, designed in collaboration with Culture Amp, reflected the themes included in the Economist Intelligence Unit Liveability Index, namely: Culture and Environment, Employment, Stability, Healthcare, Education and Infrastructure. Rather than exploring these via a quantitative index, these themes were explored through a series of survey questions that asked Melburnians to rate their response on a Likert scale ranging from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’. The category of ‘lovability’ was then further explored via scaled-responses and open-ended questions. The survey received over 1,000 responses from across the Melbourne metropolitan region. The eight open-ended qualitative questions focused on drawing out the softer, more intangible qualities that people identify with Melbourne. To this end, the questions were suggestive of ways in which people use, relate to, identify and experience their city. Rather than assuming what aspects are central to Melburnians’ affection for their city, the research team wanted to find out more about people’s connections to their city, why they love their city, what was meaningful for them, what filled their senses – in effect, what constituted their attachment to the city (Garduño Freeman and Gray, 2015). Table 4.1 lists the questions used in this study. The data collected for The Melbourne Lovability Index was analysed for word frequency (content analysis) focusing on the adjectives used by respondents in the study as a way of understanding the qualities people recognise in places. Key words that highlighted particular qualities included adjectives such as old, local,

Histories of urban heritage  71 Table 4.1  Questions asked in the Melbourne study Questions asked in the Melbourne study •  What do you love most about where you live? • If you could improve one thing about where you live what would it be? •  The Melbourne I share with my friends is… •  My favourite experience in Melbourne is… •  My hidden gem in Melbourne is… •  In Melbourne I love to look at… •  When away from Melbourne, I miss… •  Th6e one thing I wish for Melbourne is…

vibrant, beautiful and diverse, to name a few. However, such direct quantitative analysis does not consider the contextual meaning of the word. A reference to ‘old’ might be connected to desirable sentiments or to the lack of maintenance of a valued place. The adjectives were then used to draw out selected statements from the data in order to discover their relationship to more concrete attributes and places. Ballarat Imagine Ballarat is the third largest city in Victoria, after Melbourne and Geelong, located 117 km north-west of Melbourne. The City of Ballarat Council (CBC) makes many decisions which affect the future of their community. In 2012 the CBC began a conversation with the 100,000 people of Ballarat to identify their thoughts in terms of growth for the city and how they saw Ballarat’s future. In 2013 the CBC launched Ballarat Imagine and collected more than 6,000 responses. The survey questions were designed to encourage respondents to consider elements of Ballarat that engendered place attachment in the present, before looking forward to consider aspirations and elements that should be preserved. The data was collected in various formats from postcards to social media, chalkboard events and written submissions, but collated as one dataset. Table 4.2 lists the questions used in this study. Sorrento and Queenscliff Sea Change study Sorrento and Queenscliff are two smaller coastal townships located either side of the Heads of Port Philip. The Sea Change project involved targeted cross-generational focus groups as well as in-depth interviews. While people Table 4.2  Questions asked in the Ballarat Imagine Survey Questions asked in Ballarat Imagine Survey • What do you love in Ballarat? • What do you imagine for Ballarat? • What do you want to retain in Ballarat?

72  Ursula de Jong et al. Table 4.3  Questions asked in the ‘Sea change communities: intergenerational perception and sense of place’ study Questions asked in the ‘Sea change communities: intergenerational perception and sense of place’ study Focus Group questions What word/phrase would you use to describe Sorrento/Queenscliff [S/Q]? What word/phrase would you use to say what S/Q means to you? What do you value in S/Q? Why do you live in/come to S/Q? What positive changes have occurred in S/Q in the past? What negative changes have occurred in S/Q in the past? What would you like future generations to still enjoy in S/Q? What do you think could threaten or jeopardise this? Interview questions What are five words that best describe sense of place of Sorrento/Queenscliff [S/Q]? What are five words that best describe the neighbourhood character of S/Q? What do you consider important contributors to sense of place in S/Q? What do you consider important contributors to neighbourhood character in S/Q? What changes (positive and negative) have you observed in S/Q? Who or what in your opinion are/have been the agents of change in S/Q? What were the key planning changes during your tenure/residency? What were the key planning debates during your tenure/residency? What were the key planning appeals during your tenure/residency? How effective are/were planning controls in protecting/shaping the sense of place/ character of S/Q? How effective are/were the following planning instruments in protecting/shaping the sense of place and/or character of S/Q? How effective is the planning system in respecting sense of place and neighbourhood character? (state/local) Thinking about the sense of place/character of S/Q, if you were the Council planner/ heritage advisor, what five actions would you take? What would you like future generations to still enjoy in S/Q? What do you think could threaten or jeopardise this?

of all ages were invited, only primary school-aged children and people in the age groups 50–64 and 65+ participated. Visitor focus groups were held in both towns; visitor ages were mixed. Twenty-two interviews were also carried out. The research asked: what does ‘place’ mean to people? The focus groups and interviews explored six themes: sense of place, neighbourhood character, planning, community, future vision, belonging and attachment. The relationships between people, community and place were revealed through stories, memories, connections, reflections and practice. Table 4.3 lists the questions used in this study.

Histories of urban heritage  73

Language and history All three study examples provided a rich pool of qualitative data that could be analysed through a lexicon of emotion to assess and understand the factors that form place attachment. While there was some specific local variation, all three case studies provided strong insights into the role of heritage places and historic environments in forming and underpinning bonds of place attachment. These are discussed in greater detail in this section. In both Melbourne and Ballarat, the built environment in older parts of the city was strongly foregrounded in forming bonds of place attachment, but the language used around these elements suggests a variety of complex processes at play that go beyond well-worn images of nineteenth-century architecture. In Melbourne, the idea of lovability was embedded in both the tangible and intangible, in the cultural traditions as much as in the urban laneways and natural parklands that surround the city. Lovability was also found to be influenced by people, as well as social and community connections, such as friends and shopkeepers, café owners and librarians. Melburnians associate lovability with the character and patina that the past evokes. The words old, history and historic appeared repeatedly in their responses to the qualitative question of the Melbourne Lovability Index survey. Overwhelmingly, the idea of ‘old’ was associated with architecture and buildings. Respondents described how to them parts of the city and suburbs offered a connection to the past and to a sense of history that can be felt in the present. While Melburnians centre the idea of ‘old’ in the built environment, they also extended it to other heritage elements, such as trams, laneways and older styles of shops (as opposed to shopping centres). They value the opportunity to take part in traditions such as a high tea’, or to be part of established or ‘old’ communities. They recognise the value that elements from the past offer in terms of creating an atmosphere of old-world charm. However, Melburnians are also concerned that these characteristics of their region and city might be lost. They recognise the complexity of maintaining built fabric from eras past: such buildings and heritage elements are not always easy to maintain and retrofit to meet today’s thermal comfort and sustainability standards. This reveals a number of dimensions in which historic places form and contribute to place attachment in Melbourne: •

•

Aesthetics of the built environment, including in the architecture, finer grain of urban design, tree cover and the city’s long-running tram network. While beauty was revealed as a particularly personal concept that engendered place attachment, it could manifest in the rustic – the city’s gritty bluestone laneways – or in more traditional notions of prized architecture. Either way, beauty, broadly conceptualised, was frequently related to the historic and informed by the patina of historic places. The stories and day-to-day rituals and spatial practices that historic places enable, such as attending events or casual encounters. In this way, the patina of history imbues place with familiarity and warmth and acts as an incubator for the deepening of place attachment.

74  Ursula de Jong et al. • •

•

The conjuring of memory and nostalgia. This includes a desire to preserve and protect, springing from a fondness that resulted in the agency of historic places to prompt memories, providing a particular depth to lived experience. Promoting wonder. The visibility of the historic invites Melburnians to ponder the past and imaginatively connect with places across time, such as through old shop-top apartments. This suggests the historic is a crucible of creativity and imagination, and language in these processes functions as a way of creating and imagining layers of history and change that further deepens place attachment. Promoting character and distinctiveness, which particularly manifests itself in the fondness for Melbourne’s trams and areas of the city with a finegrained architectural form. Diversity was seen as a crucial feature that supported place attachment in Melbourne: much of this is enabled by the range of historic places in the city with the visual identity created by their varied patina as well as the vernacular rituals that these places support.

In Ballarat, the lexicon revealed a much stronger focus on Ballarat’s materiality, in which the old was entangled with notions of the great, the public and (once again) the beautiful. These categories reflect the city’s establishment on the back of the 1850s gold rush, which brought about a major building boom, now recognised as comprising a significant collection of heritage buildings from the Victorian period. When we analysed the use of the adjective old for the data from Ballarat Imagine it was associated with (mostly) positive opulent imagery of place and historic tales of the gold-rush era. Old was strongly linked to architecture – houses, commercial buildings and the fine-grained street network that forms the city’s inner core. Attachments to the city’s gold-rush heritage were connected with Sovereign Hill, an open-air museum that recreates Ballarat in the 1860s. The adjective public focused on the importance of communal spaces, institutions and services that are seen to enrich city life, promoting a sense of accessibility, familiarity and community. Like the reference in The Melbourne Lovability Index to vibrant – the vibe or atmosphere – this tells us that social interaction builds place attachment and that access to the arts, nature and passive recreation are vital parts of the city’s urban commons, including libraries, the Botanical Gardens and the Ballarat Art Gallery. For both The Melbourne Lovability Index and Ballarat Imagine, beautiful was frequently used. In Ballarat it was connected to heritage, architecture and prominent green spaces near the inner city. In Melbourne the places described were often distant vistas or small moments of appreciation, such as a walk along the Yarra River. This suggests a heightened appreciation of aesthetic experience, at times underpinned by consistent conservation of Ballarat’s Victorian heritage and streetscapes. Beautiful was also used to describe a distinctly local aesthetic linked with the early elements of the city. Large exotic canopy trees in the city centre promote an intimate sense of scale complemented by Lake Wendouree and the town’s gardens with their identifying materials such as bluestone. The use of this aesthetic broadly aligns with the use of old in relation to Ballarat’s early goldrush boom.

Histories of urban heritage  75 In Sorrento and Queenscliff, the relationships evoked by place attachment were more grounded in interactions between the built form, the landscape and the rich layers of story and interaction that this supports. Interestingly, perceptions of neighbourhood character and sense of place were remarkably similar across the generations of respondents in the study. So too were the aspirations for the future of these townships. Respondents’ thinking about neighbourhood character elicited rich descriptors of these places. In Sorrento the coastal aspect is fundamental to its sense of place: it is dramatic and quiet yet an environmentally sensitive peninsula; meaning is brought out in the inter-relationships between natural and cultural features where moonahs and tea trees abound; the geology is legible in the historic limestone structures; and the linear layout of the settlement underpins local building typologies around holiday, leisure and recreation. In Queenscliff a small-town feel abounds: streets are laid out in a grid pattern; everything is within walking distance on this isthmus. Its setting is close to nature; this old seaside resort’s features include Swan Bay and its birds as well as proximity to the ocean. The town’s heritage and built environment offer a panoramic visual quality. It is a place of peace, solitude and beauty. The creeping in of change, the carelessness of losing a bit of the historic fabric here and there is also observed and commented on in both of these towns. Overwhelmingly, sense of place had to do with feeling, connection, family, belonging and experience of place – historic places here embedded in a meshwork of interaction with landscape and the natural environment. In Sorrento, emotional ties to the sea were linked to sensory elements like the smell of salty air and the depth of experience enabled by interaction with the natural environment: the Moonah forests; an ambling echidna; the crashing ocean, the movement of the waves. These experiences unlocked a depth of memory and sensations of tranquillity, but also inspired a connection to history through the culture of the place. In Queenscliff, the built form emerged as most important in forming the sense of place, but also the value that the community puts on that built form: the past is perceived as ever present, shaping place and identity and the rituals of a seaside family community that caters for all ages in a way that is nourishing and nurturing for the human spirit. Here, too, the importance of the historic environment in forming and enabling processes of connection and attachment to place are foregrounded, and the ensemble formed by the historic built environment and the timeless feeling of the natural environment and rhythms of the ocean is presented as a particularly evocative, nourishing experience that is key to lovability in these places.

Getting to the heart of things One of the key premises of the lovability research is that it seeks to understand the qualities people value in places rather than the resources of infrastructure, as many liveability projects do (see, for example, Economist Intelligence Unit, 2017, Victorian Efficiency and Competition Commission, 2008) (Gray et al., 2018). In this way the Lovability Index can accommodate the differences in urban and economic scale between large metropolitan areas, regional cities and coastal towns. A place

76  Ursula de Jong et al. is no less lovable if it has a population of 1,300 (Queenscliff), 2,500 (Sorrento) or 100,000 (Ballarat), than if it has a population of about 5 million (Melbourne). Indeed, historic places have key roles as repositories of attachment at all scales because of their role as storehouses of meaning, memory, interaction and imagination. What may be different between metropolitan areas, regional cities and coastal townships are the qualities people value about the place in which they live. Lovability argues that attachment, among other factors, should help guide the investment of resources. By focusing on describing the valued qualities, lovability can encompass change and side-step urban competitiveness whereby places are ranked against one another rather than appreciated for their different qualities. Heritage is part of the neighbourhood character and sense of place. It can be found as an element of lovability in all four study sites. In particular, the comments made by respondents in the respective sites suggest that the ‘character and patina’ of the past bring an important characteristic to place. These dimensions of heritage (i.e., character and patina) appear to lean towards abstract notions of the past rather than simply or solely representing physical place settings of today. In this sense, however, some connection with the past is remembered. That is, there were few romantic notions harking back to a better time; rather what is implied is a connection with the past which is made through a tangible or intangible form of culture. Where attachment and belonging are curated through caring for place, for example through communities such as local ‘Friends’ groups, heritage welcomes young and old as part of community. What is clearly revealed within people’s responses is that people understand their heritage contextualised in place. In Sorrento and Queenscliff history seeps into every aspect of place. In these small towns people expressed a holistic attachment to place, such that place nourishes and nurtures. In Sorrento, the historic nature of the town, the use of distinctive local limestone, the Continental Hotel and the high proportion of ‘historic’ places create memories and deep connections to heritage. In Queenscliff, heritage was referenced in numerous ways with respondents remarking on its historic streetscapes, the grand hotels and guesthouses, the water and seaside views, the almost rural town feel, the predominance of small [scale], and the number of trees and major parks in the centre of town – all of which leads to the legibility of the past. What these comments suggest, then, is that a sense of place in these settings represents an intimate knowing of place that results in a broader encompassing of the notion of heritage. Physical elements present a link to the past that are connected through sensing, experiencing and remembering: smelling, breathing, walking, meditating, touching, feeling, playing; the salt spray, the roaring wind; stillness, tranquillity. One feels the place.

What can a lexicon of emotion offer? A lexicon of emotion allows for the subjective or emotional aspect of heritage places to be linked to a pool of words that can be used to interrogate the nature of bonds between people and places. It does this through a linguistic system comprising adjectives and nouns that people specifically use to associate their

Histories of urban heritage  77 respective feelings. In our three case studies this included a metropolis, a regional city and two coastal towns. Hence, a lexicon of emotion is established through the connection of words to places generated and maintained by people’s experiences. This lexicon is therefore distinct and relative to different groups and/or to the individuals who experience a place. Language, as discussed in this chapter, is intrinsically connected to place and to the people that develop an emotional attachment to that place. Interestingly, the individual words and associations used by people also allow for deep meanings to be elicited about a place. For example, an ancillary element to heritage is the theme ‘old’. This theme appears to have a range of dimensions to it, as it leans more towards attachment with the physical qualities of a place. For example, Melburnians suggest that ‘old’ is a place trait linked to features of the built environment, such as those found in a city/town’s buildings or architecture. Additionally, in Ballarat the aesthetic of the town exhibited through its display of architecture depicting an early Victorian city also links ‘old’ with the physical attributes of a setting. Other comments made by respondents suggest that features of the city/town such as trams, laneways and older-style shops (e.g., arcades) are also linked to the concept of old. In Sorrento and Queenscliff ‘the past’ is everywhere – in the limestone, for example – adding character to place. In these instances, however, respondents specifically talk about ‘participating in tradition’ and remembering the past, which could be framed as nostalgia. But in this instance their comments relate more to an action-oriented or active association with place-trait elements. For example, Melbourne’s trams, laneways and arcades are best experienced by participating in their respective traditional activities. In terms of the arcade tearooms, the activity of high tea attracts queues of people to experience this ‘event from a bygone era’. Trams, on the other hand, allow for people to experience the mechanisms related to the mobility of a previous era but also serve the functional purpose of getting from one point in the city to another. Old and new trams operate side by side. Place attributes related to ‘heritage’ and ‘old’, as well as the others described above, are important elements within Melbourne, Ballarat, Sorrento and Queenscliff. They have been highlighted here to provide clear examples of associations between the nuances of language and place. However, they also demonstrate the complexity of association where textual data, when evaluated through qualitative means, can produce emotive and experience-based material that may allow decision makers to understand, value and honour the subjective and/or intangible qualities of a place. These elements can often form a city’s/town’s most important, yet undervalued, attributes and this chapter shows the importance of being able to dig deeper into pools of data to identify the connections not only between adjective–noun pairings, but also between groups of nouns (things) and the ambiences and experiences (adjectives) where they may converge (for example, buildings and trams both meeting with notions of the ‘old’). This chapter demonstrates that a lexicon of emotion is an analytical lens through which qualitative data generated by various methods can be examined for dimensions of experience and emotional connections to place. Focusing on the subjective

78  Ursula de Jong et al. via adjectives enables communities to highlight what is important to them in place attachment rather than assuming certain features/qualities will necessarily be meaningful. In this way this methodology honours people’s connections to place, and recognises that these can embody diverse views, regional scales and various economic levels. Future directions in this research could explore the application of machine-learning technology to analyse online data through, for example, social media. While technology such as machine learning may provide the means to engage with larger data sources, this arguably intensifies the importance of developing mechanisms to analyse data in ways that are attuned to the richness of local context and the co-constitutive relationship between language and place.

Notes 1 The Melbourne Lovability Index was a collaboration between Deakin University (Fiona Gray and Cristina Garduño Freeman) with the Committee for Melbourne’s Future Focus Group, a business leadership programme where participants are required to develop a legacy project for their city. 2 This was a Deakin University-led ARC Linkage Project, LP110200787, ‘Sea change communities: intergenerational perception and sense of place’, completed 2016. The Chief Investigators were Associate Professor Ursula de Jong (project leader), Dr Robert Fuller and Dr David Beynon, School of Architecture and Built Environment, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, 3217. 3 This publication is published jointly by Deakin University and University of Melbourne in collaboration. Lovability Index is a registered trademark of Deakin University.

References Beza, BB, Garduño Freeman, C, Fullaondo, D and Mejia, G 2018, Place? Lugar? Sitio?: Framing place and placemaking through Latin American contexts’, in J HernándezGarcia, S O’Byrne, A García-Jerez, and BB Beza (eds), Urban Space: Experiences and Considerations from the Global South, Pontificia Universidad Press, Bogotá. Borth, D, Ji, R, Chen, T, Breuel, T and Chang, S-F 2013, Large-scale Visual Sentiment Ontology and Detectors Using Adjective Noun Pairs, in MM’13, 21–25 October, Barcelona. Casey, ES 1997, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, University of California Press, London. Council of Europe 2005, Council of Europe Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (Faro Convention), http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/ Treaties/Html/199.htm. de Jong, U, Fuller, R and Beynon, D 2016, Sea change communities: Intergenerational perception and sense of place, a Deakin University led ARC Linkage Project, LP110200787. Devine-Wright, P 2009, Rethinking NIMBYism: The Role of Place Attachment and Place Identity in Explaining Place-Protective Action, Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, vol. 19, pp. 426–441. Dovey, K 2016, Urban Design Thinking: A Conceptual Toolkit, Bloomsbury, London. Economist Intelligence Unit 2017, The Global Liveability Report 2017, viewed 22 August 2019, https://www.smh.com.au/cqstatic/gxx1l4/LiveabilityReport2017.pdf. Garduño Freeman, C, Beza, B and Mejia, G 2020, The Urban Spanglish of Mexico City, in T Edensor, A Kalandides and U Kothari (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Place, Routledge, New York & Oxon.

Histories of urban heritage  79 Garduño Freeman, C and Gray, F 2015, Melbourne Lovability Index Industry Report, Deakin University and the Committee for Melbourne, Melbourne. Garduño Freeman, C, Gray, F and Novacevski, M 2016, Lovability: Restoring Liveability’s Human Face, viewed 20 August 2019. Gray, F, Garduño Freeman, C, Beza, B, de Jong, U and Novacevski, M 2018, Alternative ways of measuring the liveability of a city – A critical review’, in 11th Liveable Cities Conference, Melbourne, pp. 38–50. Green, R 1999, Meaning and form in community perceptions of town character, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 19, pp. 311–329. Hartley, L 2018, Lovability versus Liveability: What Big Data Tells Us about Our Neighbourhoods, viewed 20 August 2019, https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/ lovability-versus-liveability-what-big-data-tells-us-about-our-neighbourhoods. Heidegger, M 1971, Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper and Row, New York. Jones, S, Murphy, L, Paradis, C and Willners, C 2012, Antonyms in English: Construals, Constructions and Canonicity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Kasmar, JV 1988, The development of a usable lexicon of environmental descriptors, in J Nasar (ed.), Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 144–155. Lefebvre, H 1991, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford. Lewicka, M 2011, Place attachment: How far have we come in the last 40 years?, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 31, pp. 207–230. Lynch, K 1976, Managing the Sense of a Region, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Malpas, J 2018, Place and experience: A philosophical topography, Routledge, UK. Manzo, L and Perkins, D 2006, Finding Common Ground: The importance of place attachment to community participation in planning, Journal of Planning Literature, vol. 20, pp. 335–350. Mornement, A and Garduño Freeman, C 2018, Assessing and Managing Social Value: Report and Recommendations, Heritage Victoria and Heritage Council, http://heritagecouncil. vic.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/AssessingManagingSocialSignificance_FinalReportwebsite.pdf. Nietzsche, F 1969, Das Philosophenbuch/Le Livre du philosophe, Aubier-Flammarion, Paris. Norberg-Schulz, C 1980, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, Academy Editions/Rizzoli, London. Novacevski, M, Gray, F and Garduño Freeman, C 2017, Lovability: Putting people and the centre of city performance, Planning News, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 22–23. Relph, E 1976, Place and placelessness, Pion Limited, London. Schwartz, M 2016 (2010), Ecological Urbanism and the Landscape, in M. Mostafavi & G. Doherty (eds), Ecological Urbanism, Revised Edition edn, Lars Muller Publishers, Baden, pp. 538–540. Smith, L 2006, Uses of Heritage, Routledge, London. Tuan, Y-F 1991, Language and Place, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 81, no. 4, pp. 684–696. UNESCO 2003, Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible cultural heritage, Paris, viewed 29 November 2010, http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index. php?lg=en&pg=00022. Victorian Efficiency and Competition Commission 2008, A State of Liveability: An Inquiry into Enhancing Victoria’s Liveability, Victorian Competition and Efficiency Commission, Melbourne.

5 Emoji as method Accessing emotional responses to changing historic places1 Rebecca Madgin

Understanding why historic places matter emotionally is the aim of this chapter. Accessing emotional responses to historic places has traditionally been a challenge; partly methodological and partly because the theory and practice of conservation in the Western world is rooted in a belief that we can attribute significance based on a set of rational principles. This chapter primarily engages with the first challenge as it outlines the use of emoji-based methods as a way to access how and why residents in conservation areas in Scotland respond emotionally to historic places. However, the chapter also seeks to open up a dialogue concerning the wider relevance of the ways in which this kind of methodological approach and the knowledge it produces could be incorporated within evolving theories and practice of conservation. Emoji-based methods are an emerging methodology based on the incorporation of emoji commonly used in social media and messaging platforms. As will be discussed below, the use of emoji as part of research methods is relatively new and is mostly based on an analysis of emoji that are in existing circulation e.g., through social media. The approach taken in this chapter is to consider how the use of emoji could be combined within a more traditional workshop environment and by using qualitative methods such as photo-elicitation to enable a focus on how people feel about historic urban places, signified both by their choice of particular kinds of emoji such as 😀 or 😤 and their reasons for selecting the emoji. Debates surrounding the role of emotions in historical and contemporary society continue across academic disciplines from the natural sciences, the social sciences and the arts and humanities. At the heart of these debates is a key question concerning whether it is possible to accurately access people’s emotions and, if so, what kinds of emotions can be identified. Within the arts and humanities and the social sciences, researchers have devised several approaches to interrogating the role of emotions within time and in space (Wetherell, 2012; Rosenwein and Cristiani, 2018; Smith, Wetherell and Campbell, 2018; Tolia-Kelly, Waterton and Watson, 2017; Smith, 2020). The debates are as much methodological as they are epistemological, as they explore the primacy of text, practices and visual data in interrogating what emotions are, how emotions can be expressed and what emotions can do (Reddy, 2001; Scheer, 2012; Deitz et al., 2018). The chapter is located within this tradition of scholarship, as it seeks to understand how emotional responses to changing historic places can be captured through the use of emoji-based methods.

Emoji as method  81 The chapter examines the ways emoji have been used to understand emotional responses to change within conservation areas in Scotland. This research was designed to develop existing visual methods such as photo-elicitation in ways that could focus on emotional responses to historic places. Foregrounding emotion was achieved both through the use of emoji and through building a narrative of change into the research design. Incorporating ‘change’ was a crucial aspect of the research design for two reasons. First, it is often only during times of change that we notice what is important to us, and second, heritage management is built to support change and thus change is an inescapable aspect of practice. To the best of the author’s knowledge there is little scholarly work on emoji and heritage, so this chapter first outlines the rise of emoji in popular culture before bringing in emerging work on emoji as method in other fields. The chapter then moves on to outline the approach taken by describing each of the four methods used and discussing how this approach helps us to develop a better understanding of the reasons why people respond emotionally to changing historic places. Finally, the chapter concludes with some reflections on the future development of emoji-based research in the context of heritage theory and practice.

Emoji culture: describing emotional states and stimulating emotional responses Emoji are ubiquitous within society. We use them during public and private communication through messaging apps, emails and social media, and we encounter them offline as we move through public spaces in which we are asked to rate the quality of our food or healthcare or airport security by pressing an emoji icon on a button. Consistent throughout is the way in which emoji are used to implore us to express an emotional response, be that as a reaction to a friend’s message, or eliciting our view of our experience of airport security en route to the departure lounge. A signal that emoji had arrived in mainstream society came with the decision by Oxford Dictionaries to designate 😂 its ‘word of the year’ in 2015. Oxford Dictionaries stated: ‘Emoji have come to embody a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate’ (Steinmetz, 2015). This chapter is concerned with two aspects of emoji culture, and specifically with their ability to (1) convey emotional responses and (2) provide an insight into the emotional intensity of a person’s relationship with historic places. Emoji are not a fleeting contemporary phenomenon, having developed from historical lineages in America, Europe and Japan. The relationship between graphic signs and emotional responses was said to have been invented by Harvey Ross Ball, who created the smiley face as a way of raising morale within the State Mutual Life Assurance Company in 1963 (Stamp, 2013). The company printed Ball’s smiley face across different paraphernalia as a way of encouraging its employees to smile more and supposedly, in line with Hochschild’s critique, to internalise the emotion provoked by a smiley face and thus feel happier at work (1983). This early example shows the ways in which emotions ‘work’ and how they are not passive but a central element of workplace productivity (Ahmed, 2014). The theme of what

82  Rebecca Madgin emotions can do within a corporate culture was taken further by French journalist Franklin Loufrani as he trademarked the smiley face in 1971 and later, with his son Nicolas, created the Smiley Company (Crockett, 2019). Through the work of Ball and the Loufranis, the commercial potential of graphic icons that conveyed and stimulated emotional expressions was realised. The next wave of development broadened out the range of emotions that could be graphically captured and was signalled through the development of emoticons in the early 2000s. This word is claimed to be a portmanteau – joining together emotion and icon and so linguistically demonstrates the power of graphical representations to demonstrate emotions (Collins Dictionary). The origins of emoticons are contested but have been attributed to Scott Fahlman in the early 1970s. Fahlman, a computer scientist based at Carnegie Mellon University, devised a smiley face in the form of an emoticon that could be read by the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Fahlman developed this as a way for people to overcome the problem of recipients not understanding humour, sarcasm and/or irony within the burgeoning use of virtual written communication. Fahlman recalls: This problem caused some of us to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously. After all, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-of-voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone. Various “joke markers” were suggested, and in the midst of that discussion it occurred to me that the character sequence :-) would be an elegant solution – one that could be handled by the ASCII-based computer terminals of the day. So I suggested that. In the same post, I also suggested the use of :-( to indicate that a message was meant to be taken seriously, though that symbol quickly evolved into a marker for displeasure, frustration, or anger. (Fahlman, 2002) The smiley face has thus been used within workplace culture as well as within a commercial market for decades. Common across each domain is the desire, as Fahlman points out, to be a symbol or marker of an emotional response and, in this case, negative as much as positive. Thus, the use of symbols both to describe people’s emotional responses and also to influence their future emotional responses developed from Ball’s smiley face into a range of emoticons. The emoji that currently circulate within everyday culture and communication practices are a newer phenomenon. They were developed at the end of the twentieth century by a Japanese telecommunications worker, Shigetaka Kurita, and commercialised through various platforms, most notably through Apple’s use of emoji in their iOS 5 update in 2011. However, unlike emoticons, their etymology is not related to emotion but rather to the joining together of e = picture and moji = word (Collins English Dictionary). In terms of their linguistic origin, they therefore have no direct connection to emotion. Damesci believes that emoji, partly due to their ubiquity across cultures, represent a different writing system in that they ‘have both pictographic (directly representational of objects) and

Emoji as method  83 logographic (word-replacement) functions’ (2016: 4). Emoticons and emoji have an ability to act as an emotive or, rather, have a capacity to ‘portray one’s state of mind’ (Jakobsen, 1960 cited in Damesci, 2016: 21). However, they differ from the smiley face as they are designed to both convey and stimulate a range of different emotions dependent on person, place and context. Emoji and their antecedents, therefore, have a long history of being used to express how people feel and to stimulate emotional responses in others. It was from this cultural premise that the idea for emoji-based research into historic places started to develop into a methodological approach.

Emoji research: a nascent field While the cultural basis of graphical-based communication is well established, academic research on emoji in the form of articles, books and conferences has only recently started to appear (see Bai et al., 2019 for a review). Damesci’s 2016 work The Semiotics of Emotion remains a rare example of a book-length study of emoji. This short review of the literature will highlight three particular areas of emoji-based research to consider how emoji have been used within existing work, predominantly within the social sciences. First, much of the published work within the social sciences sees emoji as an existing data set to be collected and analysed, with a sub-set seeing emoji as a way to create new data. The majority of this work is derived from a variety of social media sites such as Twitter (Huesch et al., 2017; Kralj Novak et al., 2015), Instagram (Highfield and Leaver, 2016) and Facebook (Rodrigues et al., 2018). Research then focuses on how emoji are being used as a form of communication or even as a way to measure the relationship between the use of emoji and evaluative judgements on a particular product or service (Jaeger et al., 2017). The potential of using emoji to provide instant online feedback on services, feelings and products is a central element of emoji-based research. However, other research has started to use emoji as a way to collect information face to face or digitally. This is seen with Fane et al. (2018), who used emoji as a visual research method in order to better understand young children’s experience of well-being. Fane et al. (2018) are also part of the second area of emoji-based research, which seeks to examine how emoji are defined by different people (Kralj Novak et al., 2015; Rodrigues et al., 2018). Consistent across this research is the sheer diversity of responses to individual emoji which in turn demonstrates that emoji elicit multi-layered interpretations across people and cultures. This complexity is supported by the descriptions of emoji within software platforms. Apple prefer to give a description rather than identify an emotion. For example, 😍 is called ‘smiling face with heart-shaped eyes’ and 😀 is ‘grinning face’. The lack of alignment with specific emotional responses enables users to generate their own meanings and in so doing create their own ‘emotional communities’ (Rosenwein, 2006) with their intended audience. Kralj Novak et al. (2015) take this one stage further through the creation of an emoji sentiment lexicon called an Emoji Sentiment Ranking, in which they try to move beyond definition to understand the

84  Rebecca Madgin extent to which emoji are used to convey positive, neutral or negative sentiments and so give some certainty to their usage and user definitions. Third, in line with their origins in Ball’s work on the smiley face, the use of emoji as an expression of hyper-capitalist commercialisation is an emerging strand of work. For example, Stark and Crawford considered the ways in which emoji can be seen as a ‘conduit for affective labour in the social networks of informational capitalism’. They conclude that the ‘emancipatory potential of emoji is restricted by their industrial and commercial limitations’ (2015: 1, 8). The commercial potential of emoji in the form of their ability to instantaneously convey sentiment, feelings, emotional responses and collective/individual opinion is readily apparent. Overall, emoji-based research is in its infancy and is mainly focused on mining big data from social media networks. Some innovative approaches have been taken and the explanatory potential of emoji is recognised. However, this is far from a mainstream approach, and there is a paucity of research that could indicate how and why emoji might be of use for critical heritage studies scholars and practitioners.

Emoji as method(s) The material that informs this chapter is drawn from six different workshops held during 2018 and 2019. The workshops were held in urban locations of varying sizes in Scotland and were chosen because they had received Conservation Area Regeneration Scheme (CARS) funding from Historic Environment Scotland (HES), who were also one of three partners for the larger academic project within which this research is situated. CARS provides a ‘grant of up to £2 million to support cohesive heritage-focused community and economic growth projects within Conservation Areas across Scotland’. In addition, CARS are expected to deliver a combination of larger building repair projects, small third-party grant schemes providing funding for repairs to properties in private ownership, activities which promote community engagement with the local heritage and training for professionals in traditional building skills, all of which will contribute to sustainable economic and community development within the Conservation Area. (https://www.historicenvironment.scot/grants-and-funding/our-grants/ conservation-area-regeneration-scheme-cars/) A narrative of ‘change’ was woven into the research design and used as a mechanism to access emotional attachments to historic places. Accessing why people respond emotionally to historic places is, as this book highlights, a difficult task. Conventional methods have not yet foregrounded emotion the way they do with key social sciences themes such as power and governance. The narrative of change was thus built on the belief that the meanings that people attach to places ‘tend to remain implicit and unexpressed…so long as there is no suggestion of

Emoji as method  85 change, no perception of threat’ (Miller, 2003: 209). The tradition of using ‘crisis moments’ as a way to understand broader societal change is well established. Fried, for example, was able to convey the feelings of grief as a result of changes to the west side of Boston, whereas Lynch articulated the almost ‘pathological attachment’ to the remaining built environment during periods of ‘widespread upheaval’ (1960: 42). Similarly, Madgin (2021) has demonstrated the range of emotional responses that were provoked as a result of the cumulative redevelopment of Glasgow. These three examples demonstrate how large-scale urban change affects the emotional register of individuals and communities. However, relatively little work has been carried out on the relationship between less disruptive forms of urban change and emotional responses. The changes administered through CARS were subtler than the urban renewal initiatives of the 1960s and thus provide examples of change at a different scale and intensity. The narrative of change thus provided the conceptual framework for the research project and directly shaped the choice of methods. The workshops used a combination of emoji-based methods and lasted, on average, two hours. The number of participants in each workshop ranged from four to sixteen and contained a mixture of gender and age, along with a number of long-term residents and those people who had moved more recently into the conservation areas. Emoji-based responses were built into four different methods: 1. 2. 3. 4.

photo-emoji elicitation; historic maps; aerial photos; ‘do-it-yourself’ plaques.

These methods were informed by the narrative of change by bringing longer and shorter time spans into conversation in three ways. First, through the chosen images in the photo-emoji elicitation exercise and the use of historic maps and aerial photos which enabled the visual display of longer time period. Second, shorter time frames were included through the use of photographs of buildings and spaces which were at different stages of repair and particularly those ‘before’ and ‘after’ restoration projects resulting from CARS funding. Finally, the future of historic places was not explicitly drawn into the methods by, for example, using computer-generated imagery (CGI), but was present in the discussions, particularly around the future of buildings/places that had not yet been restored and re-used under CARS funding. In these ways the notion that historic places are always undergoing change was built into the methods.

Photo-emoji elicitation Recognising that ‘visual approaches for studying place meanings and attachment have been under-utilised, relative to their potential contribution’ (Stedman et al., 2014), this study developed the technique of photo-elicitation (Collier and Collier, 1986) to capture the ways in which changes to conservation areas provoked an emotional response. Accordingly, photographs were accompanied by a set of

86  Rebecca Madgin pre-defined emoji. This developed a method earlier initiated in Parkhead, Glasgow whereby the current author, along with Lisa Bradley and Annette Hastings, used photography to understand place attachment to recreational spaces (Madgin et al., 2016). The key difference between this approach and the earlier method was that each photo was accompanied by a set of pre-determined and pre-defined emoji. A set of PowerPoint slides containing photos of historic places and accompanying emoji, and a written description of the meaning of the emoji next to them, provided the basis for the photo-emoji elicitation exercise. In total six slides containing six different images were shown to the participants. The photos were selected according to five different criteria: (1) a ‘conventional’ heritage asset such as an abbey or cathedral; (2) a ‘before’ and ‘after’ photo of a building repaired using CARS funding; (3) a less obvious heritage asset such as historical narratives woven into the public realm; (4) a building or space under threat; and (5) left open to respond to the particularities of place and included historical photos, a street scene or a particular decorative feature. Thus, each workshop responded to local circumstance within a common framework than ran through the selection process. Accompanying the photos were emoji and words for seven responses: 🙂 = happy; 😃 = very happy; 😢 = sad; 😭 = very sad; 😤 = angry; 😠 = furious; 😐 = neutral. These emoji were selected in line with three of Paul Ekman’s (1992) basic emotions: anger, happiness and sadness. This was to ensure that the research could start to unravel the immediate emotional response to buildings and places as well as the intensity of that response. Other approaches were considered, in particular Plutchik’s (1962) eight basic emotions which he grouped into pairs of polar opposites: joy–sadness; anger–fear; trust–distrust; and surprise–anticipation. However, the approach taken focused on emotional intensity rather than on polarity. In these ways the research was able to consider why, for example, participants considered themselves happy rather than very happy and, through the discussion, to try to identify the factors that enabled the expression of a more conventionally positive or negative emotion. In addition, the validity of Plutchik’s framing of the polarity of emotions was evident within the ensuing discussion, as participants demonstrated an ability to oscillate between supposedly opposite emotional responses such as happy and sad. The responses were analysed from the perspective of a singular emotional response and a secondary deeper stage which focused on the type, nature and intensity of the emotional response. The photo-emoji elicitation followed a three-stage process: 1. Participants were given the sentence ‘When I see this building/place I feel…’ and then asked to click the button on an electronic response pad that most closely corresponded with their feelings: e.g., button 1 for 🙂 = happy. 2. A instantaneous graph containing participant responses was projected on to the screen. 3. Participants then discussed both their individual and collective responses to the image.

Emoji as method  87 The point of pairing the photos with emoji was not to elicit statistically significant quantitative data. Whether 90% of participants agreed that they felt ‘happy’ when they saw a particular photo was not the object of the exercise. Rather, the emoji acted as a way to discuss what people felt about the heritage assets and often an expansive and wide-ranging discussion ensued. Within this process, participants discussed the reasons why they had chosen a particular emoji and often the discussion turned on which emoji participants would have chosen if they could choose any, and how the collective discussion had caused participants to change their minds. In these ways the emoji provoked both individual responses and collective accounts of the same historic places.

Historic maps and aerial photos While the photo-emoji elicitation process was researcher led in terms of the choice of photo and the range of emoji, the exercise with the maps and photos was designed to be more participant led. Researchers provided relatively recent aerial photos along with historical maps that showed the conservation area and its surrounding locale. On both the historical map and aerial photo participants were encouraged to identify anything that was meaningful. Post-it notes and emoji stickers containing a range of emotional responses such as shock, love, embarrassment and surprise were used to facilitate this exercise. Here participants were free to write down, draw and use the stickers, and space was made in the workshop if participants wanted to report back on what they had chosen and why. This was very much a collective exercise as participants often worked with each other to identify and share meaningful places, stories and feelings.

DIY plaque The creation of a DIY plaque enabled participants to express their thoughts and feelings. In this exercise participants were given sheets of paper containing blank blue plaques and asked to identify anything they felt was important to them. Participants often wrote or drew a descriptor of place, person, event or practice and accompanied this with a free choice of emoji from the stickers. The use of a plaque to denote a historically significant person, place and/or event is well established within British culture and, indeed, the origin of these plaques dates from 1886 when the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) decided to mark significant events and people within place. The RSA’s work was taken up by English Heritage who now ‘link the people of the past with the buildings of the present’ (https://www. english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/). Commemorative plaque schemes are run by Historic Environment Scotland and by a range of local organisations such as civic societies and residents’ associations. As such it was believed that the plaque is a well-understood cultural trope that participants could respond to. Participants created their own plaques which were often of socially and locally significant places and contained less well-known stories and events. Space was also made within the workshop if participants wanted to share their blue plaques with the group.

88  Rebecca Madgin The different methods enabled the participants to work at different scales – from the individual buildings to the larger geographic area – and to foreground different types of heritage – from architectural masterpieces to local folklore. As a result of this, emotional responses to a range of different places, practices, people and events were captured within the workshops. The four methods produced a range of emotional responses to historic places and also generated discussion about why historic places matter within contemporary society. Rather than just focus on the stories of what happened within spaces, the emoji-based methods enabled a discussion of how these events, practices, places and changes made the participants feel about the historic environment and any changes that may influence the degree of attachment between people and historic place. The workshops saw in-depth conversations about historic places, the full richness of which cannot be captured in a short chapter. Instead, the chapter now focuses on three connected themes that emerged from the emoji-based methods to demonstrate how the method can help us to develop a better understanding of why historic places matter emotionally.

Place and time A connection between place and time ran throughout the workshops as participants constantly referred back and forward in time. Common reasons for voting ‘happy’ or ‘very happy’ related both to the visual and lived experience of the building which was typically rooted within a temporal continuum. For example, some participants recalled childhood or teenage years spent within a place, whereas others considered the beauty of the recently restored building or were happy to think that the place could again fulfil a function for the community. Similarly, the temporal dimension also affected the choice of whether participants were ‘sad’ or ‘very sad’ – often these emoji were selected to represent the emotional responses to buildings that had not yet been restored and showed heritage assets in various states of disrepair – although sometimes these responses turned into anger or fury. Often responses were framed by the memory of what the heritage asset had been in its romanticised ‘heyday’, whereas anger/fury often came from the perceived failure of the guardians of the site to protect it from further decay. Sadness was also evoked in the context of imagining what the building/ place could be in the future as participants discussed how the potential of the building was not fully recognised or respected. In this way the research found that the recalled places of the past, the felt places of the present and the imagined places of the future all stimulated responses and acted as reasons to justify the types, nature and intensity of emotional responses to historic places. While participants were only allowed to choose one emoji for each place, their vote often acted as a conduit into discussing other kinds of emotional responses. So, for example, the decision from all workshop participants to vote either ‘happy’ or ‘very happy’ at the sight of a retained cinema stimulated a discussion concerning the pride that participants felt when they used the cinema or even just walked past it. Here the value of history came to the forefront. Participants felt happy and proud that the building was known to be the oldest example of its type

Emoji as method  89 and so the discussion often focused on the historic value of the building. In emotional terms the historic value of the retained and restored cinema made the participants both happy and proud. However, the emoji responses opened up conversations about the complex interplay of time and place in their feelings of happiness and pride. This was not just restricted to the cinema, and indeed throughout the workshops a common trope emerged: the materiality of place was recognised as important but it was also the social experiences that the building afforded and enabled that caused participants to feel happy, proud, excited, sad or angry. Stories were told both of first-hand experiences of visiting the cinema or the place of worship, and of received stories that had, over time, been passed down the generations. Crucially, the emojis enabled participants to discuss their emotions in the context of not just the look or experience of place but also the feel of place as they recalled how they felt seeing particular buildings in a state of disrepair, behind scaffolding, rehabilitated and/or re-opened. Tales of sadness at a familiar landmark being hidden behind scaffolding or the sense of dislocation and unease at the newly cleaned stone point to the importance of understanding how the process of change is felt and received emotionally by residents in ways that disrupt traditional narratives around progress and change. Crucially, the workshops demonstrated that emotions were not fixed within an individual’s perception of time and place. Occasionally participants changed their instinctive responses to the photos after having listened to the collective discussion. Some participants changed their minds based on how others had interpreted the picture: participants sometimes responded to the site from childhood memory, or from its present-day condition or even projecting forward into what the place could be. These personalised responses were then often mediated through collective discussion in which the expression of different layers of lived experiences of the same historic place produced a more nuanced response. One common example of this came with the sharing of knowledge about how a restored place would be used. For example, a discussion concerning access, expense and opening hours opened out into a discussion concerning who the development was for. Changing notions of felt ownership and the extent to which participants processed the reality of using the place in the future rather than just responding to how it looked now caused participants to suggest that they would have changed their vote from a conventionally positive emotion such as ‘happy’, perhaps because of the building’s restoration, to a more conventionally negative emotion such as ‘angry’ if, for example, the new use for the building was perceived as being exclusive. In these ways the emoji-based voting process opened up an expansive discussion that was capable of shining a light on the complexity of shifting emotional registers. The range and complexity of emotional responses produced within the photo-emoji elicitation were replicated in the other exercises. For example, the ‘DIY blue plaque’ and historic maps/aerial photos also saw a variety of emotional responses as participants were enabled to impart their own agency onto both their emotional responses and the kinds of places, events, practices, stories and people that they felt were meaningful. Some participants talked of their excitement

90  Rebecca Madgin about planned changes, whereas others used a range of different kinds of smiley faces including 😁😆 to express their attachment to their town. Here the theme of ‘love’ came through strongly. For example, ‘I love this town’ was written on post-it notes and accompanied by 😍 and emoji. Discussion and analysis demonstrated that ‘love’ was multi-faceted and both embedded in the history of the place and connected to what the participants wanted the place to become. For example, participants mentioned that they would ‘love’ the place to become recognised on a tourist trail in the future. In these ways ‘love’ acted as both a descriptor of an existing (or historical) state and as an imperative to develop the economic potential and external image of the place. Furthermore, the different temporal periods represented by the historic maps and more contemporary aerial photos often acted as a prompt to recognise what had been lost from the historic landscape. Participants were able to simultaneously hold an emotional register of both absent and present places and often sought out the ‘lost’ places they remembered from previous years in line with the ethos captured in ‘Lost’ or ‘Past and Present’ social media posts and pages (see Gregory, this volume). The future was still captured in the map/photo/DIY plaque methods but was perhaps more downplayed than in the photo-emoji elicitation exercise. Together, the four methods demonstrated the importance of acknowledging the temporal continuum of emotional responses to historic places and revealed that the attachments people held for places were constituted individually and collectively and informed by a sliding scale of past, present and future.

Emotions and heritage management A key theme that emerged from each of the different methods was the interdependency between conventionally positive and negative emotional responses. The distinction between positive and negative emotion was fluid and dynamic and demonstrated that participants did not see emotions as fixed in time and place. Binary responses such as ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ co-existed in the same way as ‘happy’ became ‘very happy’. Rather than seek to essentialise time and space through fixing heritage value in a static temporal and spatial container, the emoji-based research brought to the forefront the dynamism of the historic places in the emotional register of the participants, and how their responses to these places were not just bound up with the past but rather constituted through the past, present and future. Strong emotional responses within the urban development process are often characterised as conventionally negative. Anger, for example, is sometimes associated with campaigns to prevent demolition. However, the workshops revealed that while conventionally ‘negative’ emotional responses such as sadness, anger or fury might dominate at a particular point in the development process, they were actually underpinned by a strong and positive emotional attachment to a threatened historic place. Crucially, these positive responses were often rooted in historical conceptions of what the place was, and it was the unease at the present-day dereliction of the site or the uncertainty over how it could be developed that ensured the instinctive emotional response was negative. Choosing to focus

Emoji as method  91 solely on the eruptions of anger and sadness, for example, misses the layers of positive attachment that often hide beneath the surface and have been built up over a period of time. Changing the look, feel and/or use of place is liable to provoke intense emotional responses that manifest as conventionally negative emotional responses. However, the positive relationship between people and historic place that underpins this eruption could be teased out through collective discussion and potentially be used to help guide future decision making. The extent to which framing the emoji methods within the narrative of change influenced these findings is a hypothetical question. No doubt the use of ‘change’ brought out certain kinds of emotional responses as participants evaluated buildings based on what they had been, were currently and could be in the future. Within this framework the past was not always romanticised nostalgia and the future was not always seen as a worrying prospect. Rather the workshops demonstrated that emotional responses were complex and bound up with both the social and physical characteristics of historic places. However, ‘time’ within the context of historic places was also crucial to understanding why historic places mattered to the participants. The emoji-based methods worked effectively to draw out how emotions change (1) over time, (2) between people and (3) in space and served to highlight the fluidity of responses to historic places. Fixing places in time through attributing historic value does not freeze the accompanying emotional response but rather the ongoing management of the places informs the extent to which people form emotional attachments and the ways in which they respond emotionally to historic places as they change over time.

Conclusion The emoji-based approach was a first for the author. There are lots of opportunities and challenges inherent within the methods adopted. For example, the affective responses of the participants were not analysed: different methods may be able to use emoji to bring together the affective and emotional dimensions of heritage (Smith, Wetherell and Campbell, 2018). Time constraints also meant that participants were only given one vote per historic place; space constraints meant that only seven emotional responses were legible on a PowerPoint slide. The choice of five slides worked well for the workshops with four to six participants, as it enabled a depth of discussion, but the discussion felt more constrained when the group was larger. Moving forward, the exercise could be taken online to enable a larger range of emoji to be included, and to enable the potential for digital methods to empower participants to attribute emoji to historic places in their own time and at their own pace. A caveat with using digital methods would be to ensure that free text boxes or spoken responses explaining the choices could also be recorded, as it was the discussion rather than just the emoji which enabled understanding. Using a range of different emoji could offer a more expansive understanding of why and how people respond emotionally to historic places. Other researchers with different epistemological positions and disciplinary traditions may seek to be solely participant led or may use emoji-based storytelling as

92  Rebecca Madgin a way to consider emotional responses to historic places within critical heritage research and practice. To conclude, the use of emoji served as a way to foreground emotional responses to historic places. Some of the entrenched tensions surrounding the validity of emotions were teased out through the emoji-based methods. Participants may have expressed an emotional response through the choice of an emoji, but this was followed by a rational discussion of why that response was chosen and by default why that place mattered to them. The simplistic distinction between emotional and rational was therefore broken down within the discussion. Emotional responses were recalled, felt and imagined. Overall, in terms of developing knowledge about the value of historic places, emoji-based methods demonstrate that emotional responses are not fixed within a particular place but rather are fluid and dependent on time as much as place. The significance of heritage assets may be fixed through documents such as statements of significance and listed building descriptions, but emotional responses to these assets are not fixed in time or place. A future stage could be analyse the extent to which this shifting emotional response can be considered a valid aspect of heritage management and, if so, the ways in which this could be factored into decisions surrounding the future of historic places.

Note 1 This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/P007058/1). The author would also like to thank all those at Historic Environment Scotland who helped to design the methods, deliver the workshops and shape the analysis.

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94  Rebecca Madgin Stedman, R. C., et al. (2014). Photo-based methods for understanding place meanings as foundations of attachment. In L. Manzo & P. Devine-Wright (Eds), Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications, Abingdon: Routledge. Steinmetz, K. (2015). Oxford’s 2015 Word of the Year Is This Emoji, Time, https://time. com/4114886/oxford-word-of-the-year-2015-emoji/ (accessed 11 November 2019). Tolia-Kelly, D. P., Waterton, E., Watson, S. (Eds) (2017). Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures, London; New York: Routledge. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding, Los Angeles; London: SAGE.

Weblinks https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/ (accessed 11 November 2019). https://www.historicenvironment.scot/grants-and-funding/our-grants/conservation-area-­ regeneration-scheme-cars/ (accessed 11 November 2019).

Part II

Neighbourhoods

6 Narrating places – blurring boundaries Co-creating digital histories of place Sarah A. Dowding

Open-access digital history and heritage websites are changing the way urban histories are formed, narrated, circulated and applied. They exhibit tensions between ‘authorised’ and ‘unauthorised’ heritage discourse. This chapter is concerned with the challenges encountered by the historians of the Survey of London as we have sought new ways to access the diverse histories of Whitechapel, East London. It will contextualise our own use of experimental digital research and dissemination methods, considering how a new online platform designed for the making of history blurs boundaries between the sorts of people engaged in place-based research initiatives. I suggest that projects like the Survey’s Histories of Whitechapel allow ‘professional’ historians to pay especial attention to the voices of people staking a claim to the future of urban areas currently experiencing large-scale change, positively unsettling assumed roles in the negotiation between official and unofficial histories. In bringing together a wide range of contributions from people with widely varying relationships to Whitechapel, the Survey’s project therefore has the capacity to be read as a source for emotion, revealing the personal and communal value of local sites. The Survey of London is a historical research project purposed to record London’s built environment and communicate this to a wide audience through accessibly written publications. As a long-running public history project tracing its origins to 1894, the Survey’s recent incorporation of digital methods has been shaped by its own particular practices and passion for place. All of its work, spanning over a century, is grounded in the sensibilities of its founder, C. R. Ashbee, the Arts and Crafts designer, architect and social reformer. He pleaded that ‘the object of the work we have before us, is to make nobler and more humanly enjoyable the life of the great city whose record we seek to mark down; to preserve of it for her children and those yet to come whatever is best in her past or fairest in her present … and to stimulate amongst her citizens that historic and social conscience which to all great communities is their most sacred possession’ (Ashbee, 1900: xxv). Survey traditions have evolved over time and continue to do so, with the adoption of digital methods for the construction and communication of research enabling far greater public access to the making of its histories than before. The potential for this history to at once reveal and strengthen present-day attachments to place has increased. Although ‘capturing’ emotion is not within the formal

98  Sarah A. Dowding remit of our task, affects and emotions are always present in the work we do. Aiming to be geographically balanced in its treatment of London, the Survey had been engaged in writing discrete building histories of East London parishes or individual sites, now in the borough of Tower Hamlets, seven times in its history prior to the Whitechapel project, which began in 2016 with three-year funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Each of the East London volumes represents a subtle shift in the historians’ relationship to citizens experiencing substantial, imminent change in their immediate built environment. From closely observed illustrations of everyday street scenes, to veiled hints of the responses of locals to change, and emotive quotations from observers, the publications are diverse in the ways and extent to which they convey the lived experiences in, and emotional attachments to, place. The Whitechapel project marks a departure, however, for it obliquely brings out into the open complex meaning-making processes which previously happened ‘behind the scenes’. The ‘fire-fighting’ tradition in the Survey is a strong one, and the selection of which areas to address, in what order, has been heavily influenced by the degree to which change, architectural or social, was impending. Begun at a time when many historically significant buildings in East London were under urgent threat of demolition, the Survey published its first monograph, a record of the Trinity Almshouses in Mile End Road, in 1896. The Survey produced full volumes on Spitalfields and Mile End New Town in 1957 and two volumes on Poplar, Blackwall and the Isle of Dogs in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Sheppard, 1957; Porter, 1994) when eighteenth- and nineteenth-century building fabric in these areas was increasingly endangered or actually disappearing before the eyes of historians. In 2019, Whitechapel was in the throes of an unprecedented transformation of its built environment, with new skyscrapers obliterating historic street patterns and building scales. In the midst of this change, in the wider public realm and media, the perspectives of residents, in all their variety, tend to have been muffled by vast quantities of unrepresentative tales of place circulated by outsiders, an unfairness only accentuated by online conversations and clickbait revolving around Jack the Ripper, ‘no-go’ areas of Sharia law and the Whitechapel fatberg. Drawing on a narrow range of historical narratives and stereotypes, many have spoken into Whitechapel. Histories of Whitechapel seeks to enable those of Whitechapel to speak out about their experience on the ground and their relation to the multifarious pasts of the area, in order that the expertise and place attachments of local stakeholders in Whitechapel is recognised and given value. The role of the public historian has therefore expanded beyond simply the production and communication of history, to include a participatory approach at the research stage, factoring in the development of new methods of outreach, such as the creation of publicly accessible digital spaces. The Histories of Whitechapel project is centred on a map-based website – an experiment for the Survey. The publication of ‘traditional’ Survey volumes will follow, shaped by the material gathered via the website, which is of especial concern here, for it represents a significant innovation in our methodology. Every building in the parish of Whitechapel as of 2016 has been represented in plan form on a map, with the capacity for draft texts, notes, photographs, videos, quotations,

Narrating places – blurring boundaries  99 oral history transcripts and drawings all to be fixed to these sites. Notably however, the website collects and disseminates documents submitted not only by the Survey’s historians, who are the website editors, but also by the public. The range of submission options allows for different tenors of emotion and lived experience to be registered, giving agency to contributors and respecting their preferred means of communication. The content of each site has been intended to develop over the three-year lifespan of the project; contributions from the public on any aspect of Whitechapel’s history have been welcomed. Now, after three years, the website has officially closed, and the process of editing the full range of its content down into a couple of ‘standard’ format Survey volumes has begun. The Survey has always been careful to avoid the rhetoric and tone of ivory-tower history (Guillery, 2018) and has been doing what we now regard as ‘public history’ effectively since its inception. Previously associated to the London municipal authorities and English Heritage, since 2013 it has found a home in a public university, University College London, with a UK government Arts and Humanities Research Council research grant expanding the Survey’s capacity to include a broader range of voices in its histories. Experimentation with digital methods has been made more possible because of its new institutional home, allowing for the website to be developed in partnership with the College’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. The Survey seeks to produce histories that can be accessed and read by the broadest possible audience, with the caveat that it is a sort of ‘official’ history given its lineages, reputation and affiliations. At a time when parts of London are experiencing ‘super-gentrification’, the combination of voices and authors brought together in the Histories of Whitechapel project reflects a desire to wrestle with and acknowledge change in the built environment, marking down individual and collective responses (Butler & Lees, 2006). This chapter begins by looking back at the Survey’s historiography in relation to urban regeneration in East London. Recognising that Histories of Whitechapel is one of a number of recent online projects that invite participation in relation to the built environment, it sets out the particularities of the present project within the Survey’s trajectory of iterative change, positioning it as the most significant shift in our methodology to date. The second part of the chapter critically reflects on the digital methods we have used as public historians and their ability to reveal individuals’ attachments to historic places. The website is considered here as an archive, invoking the practical and theoretical complexities of that endeavour. The chapter posits that digital history, heritage research and dissemination methods have the power to reveal place attachments and specifically emotional relations to place, while also subverting traditional hierarchies of historical knowledge.

Locating protest Beginning as a personal project of conviction, the Survey’s first publication was authored principally by C. R. Ashbee and was strongly inflected with his Romantic socialism. In support of his cause, he mobilised a group of volunteers to document the architecture and social life of the Trinity Almshouses, located just outside the parish of Whitechapel and then under threat of demolition. The

100  Sarah A. Dowding tone and character of the resulting publication reflected Ashbee’s sensitivity to the communal value of buildings and his strength of feeling towards the unique qualities of the Almshouses themselves. He admitted, ‘There is a peculiar, and, in many cases, a personal interest in the variety of objects that at present form this little living museum on the Waste’ (Ashbee, 1896: 18). Ashbee saw embodied within the Trinity Almshouses expressions of charity and sociability of national importance, a view that brought him into conflict with the commercial and financial forces he saw as dominating his time. He was also a citizen-historian and active campaigner. Although the core of the publication was presented as an ‘objective’ record of Whitechapel, a sense of protest was woven throughout the short volume, exemplified most clearly in the emotive language used by Ashbee and his circle. Yet the voices of those actually living in and alongside the Almshouses were absent, even if many local people were thoughtfully rendered through illustrations (see Figure 6.1). The conservation campaign proved a success: the Trinity Almshouses still stand today. In 2018, however, a 28-storey tower was proposed for the area which would visually dominate and physically overshadow the historic Almshouses if approved. The Trinity Almshouses study focused on one individual building, but the mainstay of what was to become known as the Survey of London lay in its assessments of the built fabric of whole parishes. The first of these, Bromley-by-Bow, was published soon after the Almshouses had been saved from the wrecking ball. The volume re-asserted the Survey’s affection for ‘the great East End’, with the issue of housing conditions for the urban poor a top priority (Ashbee, 1900: xiii). It also suggested that although ‘the public should be first consulted when any question arose that affected the history or dignity of London’, decisions for the future

Figure 6.1  General view of Trinity Almshouses in Mile End Road, illustrated by Matt Garbutt in 1896. Source: Ashbee (1896).

Narrating places – blurring boundaries  101 of the parish should ultimately rest with the London Country Council, the London-wide local authority in place from 1889 to 1965 (Ashbee, 1900: xxv). A focus on the mechanisms of municipal governance was not the intention of the Survey, and even when association to the LCC was codified in 1910, its formal connection to the structure of local government did little to draw those involved into a directly campaigning role. This institutional context placed the Survey more conclusively within the realm of ‘official’ history, positioning it in closer proximity to decision makers with power over planning, but informing rather than directing them. The Survey’s early endeavours reflected how a select group of specialists sought to respect the history of the areas on which they were working. By the middle of the twentieth century, when it returned to East London to examine Spitalfields and Mile End New Town, the Survey had shifted significantly in how it articulated large-scale urban change. Writing in 1984, architectural historian, John Summerson (1985: 4) looked back to his discovery of the Survey of London some 60 years earlier, considering that ‘since those early days there has been a profound movement, both intellectual and emotional, in the relationship of Londoners to their city’. Summerson understood that conceptual developments in architectural history as well as physical changes in the postwar post-Blitz city were substantial, and he identified the Survey as an active participant in the negotiation of these shifts. His comments support the view that urban historians began to move away from a near exclusive focus on the rational to embrace the power of emotional responses to place. Influenced by historian H. J. Dyos (1961) and his work on nineteenth-century built fabric, the Survey busied itself with buildings of a more everyday nature and the ‘ordinary’ agents of change aligned to this. Although this was an important innovation, the sense of radical urgency in Ashbee’s opinionated writing was left behind. The objective reporting tone of Survey publications may have led readers to assume that historians stood personally aloof from the significant developments they were observing, even though greater numbers of sites, increasingly recent in build date, were being examined more comprehensively than before. The tendency to privilege a rational and dispassionate analysis and communication of sources was in keeping with wider disciplinary traditions of the ‘academic historian’, generally uncomfortable with the idea of emotion as a legitimate theme. In spite of this, it was evident that Survey staff were in fact closely engaged with the circumstances of residents and other stakeholders on the ground; the preface of Volume 27 gratefully acknowledged the kindness of ‘all those other persons, too numerous to mention individually, who have placed their time, their papers or their property at the disposal of the Survey’ (Sheppard, 1957, preface). But only the faintest implication of any emotional attachment to place entered the published text, the focus being on observation and description of the material facts of destruction and rebuilding, as well as surveying historic documents produced or held by local authorities and building owners. The everyday interactions between people and the built environment were depicted in accompanying sketched illustrations rather than in the Survey text itself (Sheppard, 1957: 266). Volumes 43 and 44, which addressed a vast swathe of the industrial docklands ear-marked for significant commercial redevelopment in 1982, maintained

102  Sarah A. Dowding a similar restraint to that of 30 years earlier. A sense of the experience of the historian as a living, breathing person was, however, intertwined with some more objective descriptions. Moreover, in a sort of revival of Ashbee’s practice, emotive quotations of the distant and more recent past were once more integrated within the text, allowing for a greater range of voices to be worked into the historical record (Porter, 1994: 518–528). Indications of the angry protest of residents were acknowledged, but the constraints of volume length resulted in the voices of those living there being grouped together and summarised, so that their potency and pointed critique was less pronounced. Since the Spitalfields and Poplar volumes, the number of buildings recorded by the Survey has continued to increase, but alternative perspectives on those buildings have been given minimal attention. The Survey’s recent approach to Whitechapel has been led by the ambition to write about every existing building in the area, no matter how cursorily. It has sought to partner with as many organisations and people as possible in describing Whitechapel’s built environment and giving it meaning. The online platform is critical to this endeavour. Our research and public engagement activity have been centred on the specially developed map-based website, reflecting hundreds of sites in the area as they stood in 2016. Surveyoflondon.org does not prioritise one building over another in presentation, and in pursuit of a more active agenda of co-creating urban history, it aims to give voice to many rather than to a singular authority, and so generate a multi-vocal record of Whitechapel’s streets and buildings. Due to its contested histories, Whitechapel is an especially appropriate place to invite this sort of participation and to think about emotional responses. We have often found that sites have been redeveloped between three and five times over the centuries, and that is not to mention the adaptations and extensions made to these constructions. The shift in scale of buildings adds to the density of potential stories relating to any one site, and to the difficulty in their recovery and placement. On the western extremities of the parish, for example, monolithic office blocks and, increasingly, residential towers have replaced a multitude of three- and four-storey houses and businesses, frequently obliterating whole streets. Not only is the new landscape somewhat disorientating to historians attempting to thread hundreds of years of history together on sites that no longer bear any resemblance to what came before; the change is almost inevitably more disorientating for residents and stakeholders with memories of what came before. Opening out the historical project to invite the contributions of a wider group of researchers, contributors and users presents fresh opportunities to fairly portray Whitechapel’s diverse past in the context of its present. In different forums, many local people are seeking to make sense of their experience of this rapidly transforming place, often speaking through an emotional register. In sharing such observations in the context of our project, historians and participants work out their emotional responses to past and present Whitechapel through dynamic digital and ‘real-life’ relationships.

Collaborate or perish Responding to the challenge of attending to ‘history from below’, some historians have felt unsettled as they have sought to engage with new outward-looking

Narrating places – blurring boundaries  103 research methods. Writing in 1989, Peter Burke claimed that ‘Remembering the past and writing about it no longer seem the innocent activities they were once taken to be…Neither memories nor histories seem objective any longer’ (Burke, 1989: 98). Considering public participation in 2011, Jorma Kalela was doubtful whether historians could ‘cope’ at all with what she termed ‘social history-making’ (Kalela, 2011: 2). Others have characterised history as a house with many rooms, where some academic historians claimed rights to either the whole house, or at least the principal room, ever fearful of squatters (citizen-historians) breaking and entering (Ashton & Hamilton, 2010: 8). More optimistically, Raphael Samuel suggested that re-framing historical research as an activity, rather than a profession, would legitimise the work of a legion of practitioners (Samuel, 1994: 17). In the twenty-first century, the potential for democratisation of history through participatory digital methods is widely recognised by scholars and heritage organisations, reflecting a broad-ranging disciplinary re-alignment which seeks to give a platform to a larger range of writers of history. One university-based scholar recently observed that history in the digital age is no longer shaped by the traditional mantra of ‘publish or perish’ but instead ‘collaborate or perish’ (Foster, 2014: 12). Critical to this endeavour is flexibility in means of expression, for the norms and codes of the academic world can prove a barrier to those unfamiliar with them. In terms of emotional attachment, different voices will only be drawn out and brought together if there are multiple means of expressing the value of embodied pasts for historic places. Participatory methods which initiate and support new relational connections allow for a positive premium to be placed on diversity, creating potential for better understandings of place attachments. The Survey of London’s move into the digital is not quite as divergent as it might seem, for it has always collaborated with the public, even if not foregrounded in the final volumes. For decades, members of the public have contacted us by phone, letter and email with corrections, enquiries and research tips, and shared their own databases, photographs and such. Further, borough and estate archivists have been critical to our orientation within the documentary terrain of particular areas. The Whitechapel website brings into the open what often happened (and happens) in the Survey office, in archives or out on site. But the Whitechapel project positively extends the invitation to participate in the making of history beyond these ‘usual suspects’. The collected body of material reflects the complexity of emotional attachments to place, for every one of the stories, memories and entries of historical research is unique, in either the what or the why of its emotional register. As public submissions are published online, the order of research undertaken by Survey historians can be led by the timing of contributions from the public, dialogic exchanges serving to bind historian and contributor together in discussion and attachment to place. The breadth of sources which will underpin our final publication is given new value and recognition. The gradual development of the website’s content represents a gentle unsettling of our default practices, for it allows for a visualisation of these sorts of expected soft collaborations, as well as establishing new links with people who otherwise might not have encountered the Survey or imagined we were interested in their stories.

104  Sarah A. Dowding The addition of research from the Survey and from contributors ‘in real time’, uploaded as it has been produced or submitted, has meant that the website has grown in a piecemeal way, representing a partial, uneven history of Whitechapel for the duration of the project. Over the course of the three years of its operation, the orange colour which indicates that information for a building is available has spread as more content has been added. With over 60,000 users, the project has garnered over 500 discrete ‘born-digital’ submissions from the public to date, with outputs stemming from the oral history programme, which has run alongside our digital engagement, an important addition to this number. But even as the website closed to contributions in 2019, some buildings on the map were defined only by an orange boundary line, the interior fill remaining a white void to signal effective silence on that site (see Figure 6.2). Contributors too can remain shadowy, choosing their moniker or electing to appear anonymously if they wish, submitting their site-specific contributions online for review by Survey historians/website-editors. Once approved, submissions are not ordered on the basis of the role or expertise of the contributor but by information type, placed under tabs such as research, notes, memories and images. Survey contributions therefore sit alongside or even underneath the research and writing of other contributors, enabling the website to be ‘read’ as flatly as possible. Survey historians have routinely been involved in processes of acquiring, classifying, cataloguing and preserving historical documentation, through the production of their own research notes and the collection of copies of primary source documents, though in ‘editing’ the website these apparently mundane acts

Figure 6.2  Map of surveyoflondon.org as it stood in July 2019. Creating an archive, recording lost voices.

Narrating places – blurring boundaries  105 have taken on new meaning. Each submission from the public is reviewed in relation to quality and type by the Survey’s historian-editors. While it is in its intent democratic and egalitarian, the Whitechapel website is ultimately formed by the choices made by the Survey, the gate-keepers of the website. On the other hand, the historian-editors can only be responsive to what is received, limited by the degree to which the website is known about ‘out there’ and responded to. There may well be a legion of history-practitioners working on Whitechapel but only those who choose to engage in this communal project are ‘agents of the archive’ (Osborne, 1999: 52). A decision to contribute a submission to the website requires a certain humility and also trust in the Survey itself, for submissions can be developed, modified or nuanced when placed in combination with other narratives, producing a sort of historical assemblage over which no one contributor can have control. This rich body of sources, where multiple and sometimes conflicting interpretations of place can overlap, challenges historians to step outside their default categories of analysis, often allowing for unexpected connections between the past and present to emerge. The website has been structured in such a way as to allow a delicately balanced web of connections and inter-relations to materialise, enabling individual contributors to vary how they talk about place and their relationship to it. Navigating the website, visitors do uncover individual voices, but submissions work together cumulatively to tell a collective, ever-changing story of place which allows for the blurring of traditional boundaries. For example, those working in allied fields to history have given insight into their mindsets as they encountered Whitechapel’s built environment, rather than factually reporting on their findings. Theatre historian John Earl evocatively recalled his on-site experience of surveying the now demolished Whitechapel Pavilion Theatre (Earl, 2017), Clive Raymond detailed his conservation work at the Eastern Dispensary (Raymond, 2018) and photographer David Hoffman offered his reflections of living in Black Lion Yard, remembering that ‘because we were young dope smoking, squatty types, lefty, long-haired, flares, the other jewellers hated us, pretty much all the other residents didn’t like us at all’ (Hoffman, 2017). In these contributions, modes of professional operation merge with the personal. Our institutional context requires us to adhere to ethical codes and regulations that mean that any engagement with the public is carefully explained, assessed and logged – unlike open social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Regulated by different local people, threads on these sorts of sites often accommodate a range of emotive, mostly nostalgic, discussions of Whitechapel and its past, connecting individuals with shared memories of place, but these conversations are ephemeral, inaccessible to a wider public, and with no real potential to contribute to the longer-term historical record. Nostalgia in such forums frequently lapses into discontent with the present and scorn with regard to the future. Overlap between our own social media activity and our website has been minimal, with little of the righteous protest implicit in local voices on social media present on our website. As contributions go through a short editorial process before they are posted on our website, the immediacy of response, connection and relocation found in spiralling Facebook threads is lost, disrupting the

106  Sarah A. Dowding collective way in which history is socially discussed there. For better or worse, the building of momentum and the cumulative effect of heightened emotions in written outbursts is not possible on the Histories of Whitechapel website. Only an extremely small number of submissions have been rejected for inclusion. Perhaps the very prospect of being ‘edited’ by the Survey has served to filter out the sorts of discussion and protest unsuitable for replication due to their deliberate distortion of historical fact. Contributors to our website tended to be self-censoring in their submissions, toning down their felt emotional intensity to more obviously match the tone set in Survey accounts. A perceived gravitas is seen to be appropriate when self-consciously setting down a story for posterity (Quadi, 2019). Whilst we by no means seek neutrality from our contributors, accounts submitted appear to have been affected by our own internal culture of history writing, in which an authoritative and objective Survey ‘voice’ is adopted. This shared voice points to an earlier tradition of history writing which may have been affected by the belief that, according to Lowenthal, ‘to hear an author’s [personal] voice would taint an account’s veracity and erode its authority. To claim omniscience, history must be anonymous’ (Lowenthal, 1996: 106–107). Yet the collective institutional ‘voice’ that emerged after Ashbee’s early volumes allows for a diverse Survey team to flexibly work together, maintaining a consistency of approach and presentation that is rare for a group of researchers.

In Real Life (IRL) Reflecting on the effects of extending participatory culture into the digital realm, Foster argues that historians will find their position ‘more fluid and hard to define’ (Foster, 2014: 12). Certainly, Histories of Whitechapel has required of Survey historians a wider range of modes of working. Specifically, the role of website editor, of liaising with individuals, is key to drawing out submissions, whilst formulating and creating the sense of coherence and quality that is the ambition of the website. We have also proactively sought out those people who may feel their point of view or information is irrelevant to the Survey. Many potential contributors who we come into contact with have needed to be convinced that their voice is important and wanted in the context of our project. Often we have found that those with ‘ordinary’ stories of life in Whitechapel question the value of their testimonies. Working adaptably, and sometimes across communication media, we have partnered with such contributors to reassure them of the importance of their stories. Conducting over 50 oral histories has been critical in building local rapport and accessing emotion, directly recording certain under-represented voices, extracts of which are edited for the website, or uploaded as sound files, and shared with the interviewee. One interviewee noted, ‘I think the fact that you’ve come and you’ve asked me [about Whitechapel] I feel quite honoured that I can actually [be a] voice for vulnerable people’ (Ahmed, 2016). In another interview, one long-standing trader at the Petticoat Lane market reflected on the decline of the market, ‘It is scary. I hope somebody comes out and says, “Look, we want to keep some of the heritage”’ (Haq, 2016).

Narrating places – blurring boundaries  107 We have found that real-life relationships foster digital engagement and vice versa. Personal individual connections between Survey historians and members of the public have been principally established through community group workshops, the snowballing of oral histories, and the Survey-initiated Whitechapel History Fest. ‘Danny’, who grew up in Whitechapel in the 1960s and 1970s, first encountered Histories of Whitechapel online, and, coming across the website, he ‘knew it was something I could work with’ (McLaughlin, 2018a, 2018b). Discussions over email and in person whilst walking around Whitechapel with Danny have increased a sense of shared purpose and understanding with him. He has submitted over 30 of his own historical photographs (see Figure 6.3), all carefully labelled, and written two lengthy contributions, one about his Mum’s workplace, and one about what his housing estate means to him. Of the labour exchange he recalled, …this building was where I went to ‘sign on’ to claim unemployment benefit. My memories of that time, and what I felt then too, was that entering the building, joining the queue and signing on was as if you were being transported in a time machine back to that 1930s depression era. (McLaughlin, 2018b) In many ways the submissions can seem low key, but that is to misunderstand the importance of the everyday as evidence of the implications of local power dynamics (Osborne, 1999, p. 59). But, if we take it that ‘good’ archives produce ‘good’ history, we must undoubtedly be aware of the ways in which ‘power drives which events become records, which records become archives, which archives become narratives, and which narratives become histories’ (Caswell, 2014: 36). Everyone who makes a submission to the website is making a statement about what they think should be included in the history of Whitechapel’s built environment, claiming their right to speak about the past: an emotional demand. Submissions like Danny’s are, in important ways, anti-sensationalist histories of place, reinforcing attachment and identification with the local area. Personal connections encourage citizen-historians in the importance of co-creation.

Authority and the survey Aiming to reflect the spirit of Whitechapel’s diverse stories and voices, the next phase of work for the Survey is to consider how each individual story can be related to a larger historical narrative of urban change. The resultant Whitechapel volumes will reflect a further evolution in how the Survey tells stories of place, integrating material gathered on the website with ‘conventional’ Survey building histories. Whilst the Histories of Whitechapel website includes more than it excludes, the publication will necessarily take the opposite approach, for we hold that a ‘catch-all’ digital project does not negate the importance of the ‘coherent’ analogue narrative. The two act in different, complementary ways, one dependent on the other for the Survey of London’s intention of stimulating the ‘historic and social conscience’ of citizens to be fulfilled. Difficult editorial choices are critical

108  Sarah A. Dowding

Figure 6.3  Rose McLaughlin, originally from Inishowen, Co. Donegal, walking past warehouses at 120 Leman Street (now demolished) in the 1980s.

Narrating places – blurring boundaries  109 to formulating a narrative of historical change that bears witness to the reality of places and can be deployed in service of the widest range of people with all sorts of place attachments. Public historians must be willing to make limiting judgements about which representative stories serve as the best guides to places, based on their specific expertise and preferences. While Histories of Whitechapel overturns established hierarchies in the creation and editing of the online platform, it should be acknowledged that Survey historians know this digital archive very well, and in all likelihood, best, supporting a sense of their authority. Any sort of collaboration is not without its frictions and failures. Though three years is not an insignificant length of time for a project concerned with a relatively small geographical area, to local people, many of whom feel embattled as the construction of monolithic office blocks and expensive housing erode their sense of belonging, the Survey’s presence and engagement in Whitechapel can seem fleeting and has on occasion been met with suspicion or disinterest. More generally, I attended an event organised by a local resident and historian, who presented her project with the note that she would not ‘extract information and disappear’; another long-standing resident told me she had been ‘consulted to death’ in recent years as authorities and developers had contact with only a few well-known local voices in relation to changes happening in the area (Cat of Aldgate, 2018; Celeste of ‘Off the Wall Players’, 2018). If collaboration and participation is to be sincere and constructive (and received as such), it is clear that outputs of projects must benefit both parties. For several months during the Whitechapel project, the Survey was able to engage two Whitechapel-born interns, initially to undertake oral histories with their own contacts, focussing on middle-aged and older Bengali women, but expanding in scope. One of the interns, Tanha Quadi, feels her approach to places, and indeed her career, changed significantly as a result of her work on the Survey. She reported that ‘I found out more [about my area] because I was on the project, it changed the questions I asked… The Survey didn’t require a certificate for me to take ownership of my own project…You shut out a lot of community voices if you stick with…a traditional [academic] structure’ (Quadi, 2019). But she did encounter the tension of being personally invested in Whitechapel as a resident, with an intimately close place attachment to the area, while at the same time working for an ‘outside’ organisation capturing the situation on the ground as it stood. Tanha remembers one Whitechapel business owner who ‘made me feel like I was on the other side, and I wasn’t sure if I was’. He warned her, ‘Tanha, you need to understand, you might think you’re doing good but remember that you’re on the other side now…you need to think about the best interests of the community and where does this research go and how does that benefit this space, how does it affect us?’ For Tanha, work with the Survey embedded her more closely in the lives and personal situations of her interview subjects in the present even as they reflected on the past. She noticed a growing awareness of the connection between people, place and space. Such an experience can be read in accordance with Laurajane Smith’s assertion that heritage is ‘a process of remembering that helps to underpin identity and the ways in which individuals and groups make sense of their experiences in the present’ (Smith, 2006: 276).

110  Sarah A. Dowding

Conclusion Public history in the twenty-first century requires collaboration. The Whitechapel website serves to foreground and endorse ongoing practices of collaboration and participation, to a greater extent revealing how the Survey’s ‘official’ history of the area is being constructed. One consequence of opening up the research stage, and publicly representing ‘our’ developing archive of sources, is that the haphazard, uneven nature of the way history is made and imbued with personal meaning is made clear. In either setting up such a project or in choosing to participate in it, a degree of humility is needed. As Survey historians, we have had little control over the messy non-linear process of collecting content, nor the way in which the source material is read. For the contributor, trust in the Survey as a group of individual historians ‘on their side’, who will not misrepresent them in the way their submission is handled and positioned on the website, is required. This has been made easier by the Survey’s pre-existing reputation for producing ‘fair’ and objective records of London’s varied built environments, yet this reputation dissuades others from engagement. In spite of this, it can be argued that the new digital methodology has inclined the Survey to engage more deeply with residents and stakeholders on the ground in Whitechapel. Specifically, it has prompted a shift in the way the role of the historian is conceived, where proactive engagement and communication with people and groups outside professional or scholarly circles is as valuable and fruitful a use of time as solitary work in archives or writing up notes which will come to form more traditional building histories. Indeed, in setting down their own histories, publicly and online, local participants implicitly or explicitly stake a claim to the past, sometimes emotively, and therefore also envision a future identity of the area. Historians too are shaped by their own mixed agendas, personal experiences of place and relationships. Judging that successful urban historiography is reliant on the integration of official and unofficial histories, our project aimed to provide a framework to hold all sorts of discourses, associated with all kinds of place attachments, together. What emerges is the complexity of the relationship between history and heritage and between historic places, people and attachment. On reflection, it is clear that boundaries of many kinds have been, and should be, necessarily blurred in pursuit of a more nuanced and democratic history of place.

References Ashbee, C. R. (Ed.) (1896). Survey of London Monograph 1: Trinity Hospital, Mile End. London: Guild & School of Handicraft. Ashbee, C. R. (Ed.) (1900). Survey of London Parish Volume 1: Bromley-by-Bow. London: London County Council. Ashton, P., Hamilton, P. (2010). History at the Crossroads: Australians and the Past. Ultimo: Halstead Press. Burke, P. (1989). The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–89. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, T., Lees, L. (2006). Super-Gentrification in Barnsbury, London: Globalization and Gentrifying Global Elites at the Neighbourhood Level. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31(4), 467–487.

Narrating places – blurring boundaries  111 Caswell, M. (2014). Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight Against Symbolic Annihilation. The Public Historian, 36(4), 26–37. Dyos, H. J. (1961). Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Foster, M. (2014). Online and Plugged In? Public History and Historians in the Digital Age. Public History Review, 21. 1–19. Kalela, J. (2011). Making History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lowenthal, D. (1996). Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. New York: The Free Press. Osborne, T. (1999). The Ordinariness of the Archive. History of the Human Sciences, 12(2), 51–64. Porter, S. (Ed.) (1994). Survey of London Parish Volumes 43 and 44: Poplar, Blackwall and the Isle of Dogs. London: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England. Samuel, R. (1994). Theatres of Memory, Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso. Sheppard, F. H. W. (Ed.) (1957). Survey of London Parish Volume 27: Spitalfields and Mile End New Town. London: London County Council. Smith, L. (2006). Uses of Heritage. Oxford: Routledge. Summerson, J. (1985). The Survey: A Long View. London Surveyed 1894–1984. London: Greater London Council.

Conference papers Davis, N. Z. (2015). ‘Failure in the Archives’, University College London, Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, 31 October. London. Guillery, P. (2018). ‘The Survey of London’s approaches to the history of East London’, European Association of Urban Historians, 29 August to 1 September. Rome.

Interviews Ahmed, R. (2016). Interviewed by Shahed Saleem, 26 February. Accessed: https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1048/detail/. Cat of Aldgate. (2018). Interviewed by Sarah Dowding, 15 June. Celeste of ‘Off the Wall Players’. (2018). Interviewed by Sarah Milne, 21 July. Earl, J. (2017). Recording the Whitechapel Pavilion in 1961, accessed 21 June 2018, https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1468/detail/#story. Haq, B. (2016). Interviewed by Shahed Saleem, 30 September. Accessed: https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/340/detail/#bilal-haq-talks-about-the-changes-on-petticoatlane-since-the-1980s Hoffman, D. (2017). Living as Long-Haired Lefties in Black Lion Yard, accessed 21 June 2018, https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/284/detail/#living-as-long-hairedlefties-in-black-lion-yard. McLaughlin, D. (2018a). Interviewed by Sarah Dowding, 2 August. McLaughlin, D. (2018b). UB40, accessed 4 December 2019, https://surveyoflondon.org/ map/feature/760/detail/#story. Quadi, T. (2019). Interviewed by Sarah Dowding, 10 October.Websites Raymond, C. (2018). Conservation and Restoration 1997, accessed 21 June 2018, https:// surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/16/detail/.

7 Living in and Loving Leith Using ethnography to explore place attachment and identity processes Hannah Garrow

Introduction Leith is a densely populated urban district in Edinburgh, Scotland which has experienced sustained physical and socio-demographic change over the last century. Its development has seen it grow from a fishing village to an internationally significant port town; from a prosperous, independent burgh to a deprived post-war neighbourhood at the heart of Edinburgh’s plans for comprehensive redevelopment; and, most recently, from a stigmatised post-industrial area to Edinburgh’s ‘hippest hangout’ as the Scottish capital’s trendy, creative quarter. The latest census report, produced by the City of Edinburgh Council (2014), presents a picture of an area marked by its high population density, lower working-age population, and ethnic and cultural diversity. Although some areas of Leith are still experiencing social and economic disadvantage, the neighbourhood has seen a growth in young professional and family households and a reduction in elderly, post-retirement households in the last decade. Despite all this change, it has retained a strong and very separate sense of outward identity with a legacy of historic townscape, traditions and narratives and is home to a high concentration of self-identifying and attached groups and individuals. This chapter draws on research carried out in Leith which set out to understand the different types of place attachment experienced by the neighbourhood’s diverse residents, and how these bonds affected their responses to urban change and their behaviours in terms of active involvement within the community. Its primary aim is to demonstrate how the ethnographic method employed in the research helped to shed light on questions about how and why attachments manifest, and about the temporal aspects of belonging, including memory and mobility, that are often overlooked in the place attachment literature (Lewicka, 2011a; Garrow, 2020). The chapter argues that for more nuanced theories of place attachment to emerge, researchers need to consider people–place bonds within the specific socio-political and historical contexts of ‘place’ (Manzo and Perkins, 2006) and with respect to residents’ own ‘life-place trajectories’ (Bailey, Devine-Wright and Batel, 2016). As such, it also engages with the theme of the urban historic environment by illustrating how heritage – defined here as built remnants and narratives of the past – was employed and deployed within the different practices of belonging in Leith, as residents drew on stories of their own and the neighbourhood’s pasts in defining their identities with and attachments to it.

Living in and Loving Leith  113

Understanding the ‘meaning-making’ process Although ‘place attachment’ may seem a relatively self-explanatory ­concept – describing an emotional bond between a person and an aspect of their ­environment – the term is used and understood in a variety of ways across the social and applied sciences, with no firm definition or understanding having yet emerged (Lewicka, 2011a). From research in the social sciences, we know that ‘place’ is more than just a bounded, geographic entity. It is ‘space’ that is imbued with meaning (Relph, 1976) by individuals as they interact with their cultural, social, physical and institutional environments. It is thus a deeply personal concept which arises as a result of experiences, actions and memories and is shaped by our social identities and relationships (Cresswell, 2014) as well as by the socio-political environment around us (Massey, 1993). Belonging has been considered widely in sociology as it relates to the experiences and emotions of different groups and individuals, but studies generally lack a rigorous or consistent conceptual framework (Antonisch, 2010), resulting in a relatively dispersed body of literature and claims that it remains largely under-theorised (Yarker, 2017). By contrast, environmental psychologists have led the way in developing systematic and empirical approaches to the study of people–place bonds. They have tended to focus their efforts, however, on identifying the constituent dimensions of attachment and describing its relationship with related concepts, such as place identity and place dependence, as a means to develop standardised models for measuring and predicting it (Trentelman, 2009). While these quantitative studies are useful in identifying correlations between different place-related concepts and conditions, despite roots in the philosophical perspective of phenomenology – the study of structures of experience, consciousness and subjective response (Tuan, 1977) – they often fail to acknowledge that ‘place’ is not a static, ubiquitous locus of attachment, but a centre of meaning – shifting, multi-layered and complex (Williams, 2014a). Questions, then, that are missing from much research on place attachment are ‘why’ and ‘how’ (Lewicka, 2011a). Why are we attached to certain aspects of a place and how do these attachments develop? It was these questions that were at the heart of my research in Leith, which sought to understand the different processes of meaning-making that occurred within the community and their implications for residents’ values and responses to change. Following Williams (2014b), I decided to pursue a qualitative study which would enable fuller interpretation and understanding of the underlying processes of place attachment. For precedents, the sociological literature contains examples of research projects which demonstrate the merit of adopting qualitative approaches to understanding the diversity of human experience, or the different conceptualisations of belonging, that exist within a single community or neighbourhood. Mike Savage’s work, for example, is frequently cited when thinking about how different groups of individuals sustain different practices of belonging. He draws a distinction between the nature of place relationships and behaviours of middle-class incomers, who ‘elect’ to belong, and the working-class experience of ‘just-being’ in place (Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst, 2005). Cole (2013), however, argues that place relationships are more complex

114  Hannah Garrow and contradictory than many theorists, including Savage, have accounted for, often relating to specific historical contexts and development paths of the geographic area in question rather than to class orientations alone. Lewis’ (2014) ethnographic study of living through urban change and regeneration in the East End of Manchester, similarly, argues that conceptualisations of community are developed and defined around a number of axes, including social class, ethnicity, perceptions of risk and narratives of the past. As noted above, owing to the methodological traditions and positivist nature of the discipline, environmental psychologists have been slower to adopt qualitative methodologies in wider place attachment research. More recently, however, responding to calls to move theories forward (Manzo and Devine-Wright, 2014), some examples of qualitative studies have emerged, principally from sociologists adopting the framework of concepts and theories offered by the discipline (Trentelman, 2009). Those studying pro-environmental behaviours, for example, have used biographical interviewing and auto-ethnography to determine how moments in a person’s life have contributed to their behaviour change towards more sustainable practices (Manolas, Hockey and Littledyke, 2013). With regard to place relationships, Cross (2015) combined semi-structured interviews with a content analysis of related newspaper articles and essays about place meanings and attachments to develop her interactional framework of place attachment processes. The framework, which builds on early qualitative work by Low (1992), considers how attachment is formed through the process of meaning-making and a person’s interactions with the physical and social aspects of their environment. Devine-Wright has similarly recognised the benefits of qualitative methods in his growing body of work looking at the role that place identities and attachments play in community responses to environmental change. His research suggests that the nature of residential bonds and a person’s ‘life-place trajectory’, used to describe their place attachments across the life-course, could predict the likelihood of acceptance and opposition to new developments (Devine-Wright, 2013; Bailey, Devine-Wright and Batel, 2016). The literature thus demonstrates how situating a study within the context of both the ‘place’ and the ‘person’ can help to shed light on the nature of residential place attachments.

Ethnography, auto-ethnography and walking in place In this section I move on to discuss my own approach to researching place attachments in Leith. Drawing on the flexible, organising framework for place attachment proposed by Scannell and Gifford (2010), it is possible to see how attachment can be understood as comprising different dimensions and should be recognised as both a process and an end product. To explore the nature of attachment, then, we must first develop an understanding of the ‘place’ as it is experienced and understood by the ‘individual’ within the context of their own biography and history. Ethnographic approaches derived from anthropological research traditions are used broadly across the social sciences in subjects such as sociology and human geography, as a means for researchers to observe the lived

Living in and Loving Leith  115 experience of participants within their natural context. Studies rely on the results of a deep investigation of relevant phenomena through the immersion of the researcher in the field and the production of detailed observational evidence and descriptive cultural accounts. Within the broad ethnographic approach, there are a number of constituent methods available, each promoting direct interaction with participants, where the researcher can listen to or observe their feelings and perspectives, resulting in data that has a deep, narrative quality. Unlike interviews or focus groups, the ethnographic approach takes particular account of the setting in which data collection occurs: the ‘real-world’ environment in which participants live and act. This enables the researcher to explore what the participant ‘does’ rather than just what they ‘say’, promoting a more holistic understanding of the phenomenon and avoiding risks of participants seeking to give the ‘right’ answers or presenting themselves artificially. Ethnography, understood here as comprising other forms of immersive research such as participatory action research, walking interviews, non-participant observations and auto-ethnography, thus offered me the opportunity to get ‘under the skin’ of both person and place. For the 18 months of my study, I lived and worked in Leith, observing and interacting with the community, attending events and volunteering for ‘place-based’ projects. I kept detailed field diaries noting reflections on events, meetings and conversations. Relevant press articles, flyers and documents produced during the fieldwork were collected. In fact, I had lived in the greater Leith area for five years before commencing my research, so was already broadly familiar with aspects of the physical environment. I knew comparatively little, however, about the history or development of the neighbourhood beyond some of the more established stories and what I could decipher based on my knowledge of planning and architectural history. Moving to the neighbourhood had been a pragmatic and calculated decision, driven by the practical, amenity and aesthetic ‘pulls’ that Schlichtman and Patch (2014) associate with ‘gentrifiers’. I enjoyed living in Leith, but was indifferent to the wider place, experiencing what Hummon (1992) and Lewicka (2011b) might refer to as place relativity. I did not expect that I would stay in the area in the long term and, in this respect, although I recognise that I had the capacity to choose, I did not set out to ‘belong’ or to grow a sense of attachment to Leith. Despite not feeling like a Leither, my presence in the area did help me to gain the trust of my interviewees and the ‘right’ of access to the community-led projects and initiatives with which I volunteered. This active involvement in neighbourhood affairs developed my relationships with fellow residents, including local politicians and decision makers, giving me a clearer understanding of the socio-political structures operating in the neighbourhood. It also developed my own attachments, particularly to the specific individuals with whom and projects in which I was involved. This is all relevant because an important aspect of ethnography is that the researcher often draws on their own personal experiences in their account. It is this subjective positionality, however, that has also driven criticisms of the method which focus on the objectivity, representation and reflexivity of the researcher. As well as the ‘problems’ associated with verifying or validating the information that is gathered (Gifford, 2016), concerns have been raised that the

116  Hannah Garrow researcher is too often presented as an emancipatory force who knows ‘how the world works and power operates’ and that, by implication, the research subjects do not (Hytten, 2004: 96). Assuming that the researcher is explicit about their own positionality, however, the method can offer much to the study of people–place bonds. Alongside the non-participant observations and participatory action research, at the heart of my study in Leith was a series of walking interviews conducted with ‘attached’ residents, and some ex-residents, to explore their relationships with the neighbourhood, how and why they had come to live there, and their views of urban change. The routes of the walks were determined by the interviewees and the content of the interview was, likewise, unstructured – a ‘hands-off’ approach intended to empower the interviewee. When compared to traditional interviews, including those using visual representations of place such as photo elicitation, walking interviews were felt to better reflect the fluid, dynamic interpretation of place and place relationships which sat at the heart of the research project. In their comparative study of traditional and mobile interviews with the same participants, Evans and Jones (2011) found that responses given to the latter generally provide richer narratives of place. From a psychological perspective, Stevenson (2017) has argued that discussions that occur in the field can provide rich autobiographical accounts as memories are not simply contained in the physical environment, but brought about through our experience of it. As a result, the interviews took quite dramatically different courses – some participants rose to the challenge and had organised personal guided tours of the area, taking me around notable locations either for Leith’s history or in their own lives. Others met me somewhere familiar, usually near their home, and struggled to think of places to go, ending up walking in circles around relatively localised areas, or standing chatting in public spaces. As well as promoting an intimate, yet informal interaction between the researcher and participant, walking in place with residents was also useful in helping me to become familiar with the environment and illustrating the multiple ways in which the geography of a place can be understood. From the description provided in this chapter’s introduction, it is possible to identify for Leith – as with any neighbourhood, town or city – an established narrative or description drawn from secondary historical sources and changing demographics. What this explanation does not account for, however, is the personal understandings of ‘place’ that exist within this broad interpretation, information that is not available from census reports or written histories. The oral histories provided by residents during the interviews added a personal depth to those in secondary sources and archives, particularly the perspectives of women or others who might not find their way into written accounts. Echoing Cole (2013), they also emphasised the contested nature of many of the established narratives, particularly in terms of their responses to aspects of the historic environment and the values conferred on the physical assets. We can look to the literature for an explanation of why this might be the case. Williams (2014a) proposes that there are four layers of meanings associated with ‘place’ occurring at different ‘depths’: from personal ‘identity-expressive’ meanings, through socio-cultural and instrumental meanings, to ‘inherent surface’ meanings. The latter draw on the tangible aspects of a place – for example, its

Living in and Loving Leith  117 population or physical characteristics – and are widely shared regardless of cultural perspective: for example, ‘a port town’, ‘an historic place’, ‘a creative place’. This further illustrates the importance of residents’ own contexts in determining the nature of their relationships with place (Bailey et al., 2016) and implies that those with different place relationships may attach to place by different processes or pathways, those who have not had experiences ‘in’ place being more likely to draw on physical aspects of a place or elements of its ‘authentic’ heritage to define it and their identities with it.

Place, identity and the past Walking with residents in Leith, it was possible to see how different interpretations of the geographical or spatial dimension occurred, as ‘shapes on the ground’ became loaded with social and cultural significance (Savage, 2014). It was important to the methodology that the physical aspects of Leith did not overshadow its social dimension, and so I had chosen not to ascribe specific boundaries to the study area. One of the first residents to come forward to speak to me was a community journalist who took me around what he called Leith’s ‘contested borderlands’. In fact, his was an ‘inside-outsider’s’ view of Leith. Although he lived within the current geographic area of Leith, he did not define himself as a Leither. He was attached to the land, but not to the ‘place’. He spoke of the importance of history in defining the area. My objection, shared by a few people, is that … we have no objection to mixing with people from Leith … but it’s the Council boundaries for how they divvy up the city. The Leith district goes all the way up to London Road and all the way down to the other side of St Marks Park to sort of Goldenacre way … so that spread of Leith is, I think … just wrongheaded and it has no historical basis. I mean Pilrig Street has always been the boundary between Edinburgh and Leith. It was not just the physical environment to which different meanings were ascribed by interviewees. It was clear from both the interviews and wider ethnographic observations that there were a number of different identities around which people drew their relationships in Leith, demonstrating the various ways in which history, both of the place and person, were used to define attachments and the ‘right’ to belong. In particular these identities drew a distinction between those who had been born in Leith and those who were new to the area. I see this site as a distinction between Leithers (and honorary Leithers who understand but weren’t lucky enough to be actual Leithers), and the modern immigrants (rich and poor) who talk knowingly about how they “love Leith” but don’t go beyond the Malmaison and the modern bars and flats. Through discussions with residents, online observations and the series of interviews, it was clear that being a ‘Leither’ was an indicator that a person felt attached to or ‘in place’ and that the neighbourhood somehow reflected their personal identity. However, delving deeper through discussions, it became evident

118  Hannah Garrow that by prefixing the Leither label with a descriptor, residents could explain or make a clearer statement about the nature of their different relationships. Through the research data, four types of attached resident were identified, each responding to the different life-place trajectories of the residents and each utilising the social and physical environment, including the heritage of Leith, in distinct ways. The following sections take a closer look at the different categories. Auld Leithers The term Auld – or Old – Leither was used to describe residents who were born in Leith, had experienced the neighbourhood prior to its post-war reconstruction, and had subsequently moved away, now belonging from afar (May, 2017). In general terms, these individuals were more likely to have affective bonds associated with ‘old Leith’ as defined by the historical boundaries of the original burgh prior to its amalgamation with Edinburgh. Their attachments to the neighbourhood were supported by their ancestral links to Leith and had developed through experiencing historical events over the course of their lifetimes, enabling them to attach personal meaning to the spaces around them and supporting their sense of continuity with the past. I was born in the Kirkgate right above the Gaiety Theatre … in our house there was my granny – my nana as we would say – my mother and a bachelor uncle. In the bottom flat was my other uncle. In the next stair was another auntie and her family and another uncle with his family. And that’s how it was … until the time you got married. Then your mum would go to the landlord and ask if there was any houses because you were getting married. The Auld Leithers toured me around the neighbourhood using the places where they had lived and worked, their families’ houses, businesses and entertainment venues, even the hospital where one of their sons had been circumcised, to tell me stories about their lives in Leith. Some of the narratives were familiar, such as the post-war redevelopment and changing nature of community, but to these they added personal reflections and memories of their lived experience. It was clear from many of their comments that their attachments were not so much to Leith in its present form as to a past version of it, to spaces of their memories. After we got married, we bought a wee house in Henderson Gardens. This would have still been going up [points at surrounding buildings]. There was none of this [points again]. There would still all have been shops. Crikey, I don’t know if they have made an improvement here or not. You know, you kind of think ‘oh’. Because that was all houses. We had Woolworths of course, the old Woolworths and we could walk along Laurie Street here, that took you through to the Links. Woolworths, one of my aunties worked in Woolworths and, at that time, it was nothing over sixpence. And they were the very first that used to be able to go in and buy your easter egg and they’d write your name on it.

Living in and Loving Leith  119 Although many had lived through a period in Leith’s history which, looking back, may be considered negatively, their memories were largely positive and mostly associated with the social rather than the physical environment. It was called sunny Leith because the people were sunny … they were … you always got a smile. Everybody spoke to you, let on to you. There was just that community. We used to leave our key in the door all night and all my in-laws they used to come into my house because it was their mother’s house … It was just different. Even if they no longer lived in Leith or had returned after a period of absence, they described a feeling of belonging, indicating that their attachment was something innate, unquestioned or, at least, not consciously considered. That they were no longer present in Leith did not affect their bonds, which in some cases had even been strengthened if their new home was different in settlement type or was assessed less favourably than Leith. I moved out in 1976 and I moved down to Redhall which is Kingsknowe bottom of Lanark Road and I tell you I hated it. I absolutely hated it. I cried and cried because here, if [husband] was away, you could be out all day you know … [husband] kept saying “What’s wrong? You’ve got a lovely garden” and I was like, “I know, but I’m sitting in it by myself!” Real Leithers Closely related to the group of Auld Leithers were those who referred to themselves as Real Leithers. Also born in Leith, but usually more recently, and still resident in the neighbourhood, these individuals were equally at ease with their belonging which was implicit and did not need to be earned or promoted. They found it difficult to describe or articulate the nature of their relationships with place. Most had not ever considered leaving Leith or were still dependent on the neighbourhood. They simply accepted their environment in its physical, social and institutional forms and were largely ambivalent about change. They were, however, aware that the relationships new residents had with Leith were different to those they possessed. That’s what happens. You stick in your own bit … everyone sticks because they feel comfortable. But it’s not until you get older that you realise that there’s more to life than your own wee bit. I think now, in general, with all the media stuff, everyone wants what they hear about. Years ago as long as you had the same as what your neighbour had it didnae matter. Like many Auld Leithers, Real Leithers frequently used their length of residency, birth and ancestry, as well as their historical understanding of Leith’s geography, to draw distinctions between themselves, as the ‘true heirs’ to Leith, and what they referred to as incomers or ‘interlopers’.

120  Hannah Garrow Yeah I have friends in lochend who say there from leith and am like nah pal it’s not quite the same lol [sic] Despite their strict adherence to Leith’s historical boundaries, Real Leithers did not appear to be emotionally attached to Leith’s physical environment. One interviewee who still lived in Leith, having moved into his childhood home with his wife when his mum went into a residential care home nearby, took me to the house where his grandmother had lived. The 1960s maisonette, part of Leith’s post-war reconstruction, was due to be imminently demolished to make way for a new development of social homes. Despite having spent a lot of time there while he was growing up, and despite his fond memories of the space, he was indifferent about its future. So how do you feel about them knocking down your granny’s house? Ah it’s just going to happen eh? It wasn’t the best looking so they are obviously coming away. I’ve not been here for yonks. In fact, most Real Leithers were largely ambivalent about the physical remnants of Leith’s and their own pasts, suggesting that their attachment was more functional than symbolic, a result of their material dependence and time served, rather than an ideological commitment. Unlike Auld Leithers, they had little interest in an ‘authentic’ or consumable history of Leith, did not talk about its maritime past or acknowledge many features of the architecture or built environment. Like Auld Leithers, though, their feelings were shaped by their own life stories and experiences, rather than through established historical records or local histories. Having grown up during a more stigmatised period in Leith’s history, their embodied experiences often conflicted with external narratives of the place. One interviewee told me about life in Leith in the 1980s when the area was suffering from social and economic deprivation. There are lots of things that have happened, people got killed here and it gets in the press. A man found in Leith and automatically it’ll be a drug related, that’s what they’ll say and people outside will think that. But you name a port in this world that wasn’t seedy. Every port is seedy. I think people who don’t live here have a different idea of what Leith is. They think Leith is a little bit rough and I suppose it is in bits, but in general most people are very pleasant. Despite this defence of Leith, there was still an underlying insistence in the narratives that Leith had been ‘better in the past’, calling on the same ideas employed by Auld Leithers of a tight-knit community, now dispersed, of old Leith with its heart ripped out. Showing me the old Kirkgate area which had once been the thriving centre of the burgh, one interviewee told me: But when you walk past some of the shops, they’re not… it gives you a … people used to come here. I swear people used to come here from everywhere

Living in and Loving Leith  121 to do their shopping in Leith. It had great butchers, great fruit shops, it had everything fresh and people came here to shop and now they don’t. When they spoke about Leith in this way, however, the stories were often prefixed with statements like ‘my granny used to say’ indicating that the narratives had been passed down through the generations rather than developed through their own experiences. Adopted Leithers The term Adopted Leither was frequently used by residents who had moved to Leith, either through a conscious choice or accidental decision, and had now lived in the neighbourhood for more than three decades, choosing to make their home there and to ‘belong’ in Leith. In doing so, they had made that long-term commitment and had since established their own personal roots, converting their early surface attachments into something deeper as they built up historical attachments to the neighbourhood over a sustained period. Despite not being a Leither in the ancestral sense, these residents felt strongly that they had become part of the community and were now Leithers in their own right. Their attachments were self-professed and strong, sometimes even over-emphasised. Yes honestly, as I said, I get a nose bleed if I pass John Lewis’ I cannae get back to Leith quick enough! As a result, they were self-conscious in talking about their lives before Leith, preferring instead to tell me stories about Leith’s buildings and history. They were thoroughly familiar with the historical development of the townscape, despite mostly having moved after Leith’s 1960s redevelopment and, in some cases, after the closure of the docks. I was born in, well I was brought up in Corstorphine, yes [quickly looks around]. This was Nimmo the printers so that’s quite interesting. And over there that’s a beautiful Georgian house there. Most Adopted Leithers saw Leith’s identity as connected to its industrial and ­working-class past. They seemed to feel a sense of kinship with the community and used the stories of its history to tell me about its development and their own place within it. Over the years many of these residents had actively involved themselves in civic projects and local heritage initiatives of which they proudly showed me the results: mural projects remembering old Leith and the modern resurrection of the Leith Gala Day which dated back to the 1950s. Despite this apparent connection to ‘Old Leith’, they were positive about more recent changes in the environment. Yeah positive, very positive because what it has done for Leith, it has brought families here again … Leith’s becoming a good shopping area and you know

122  Hannah Garrow if the families weren’t here to spend their money then the shops wouldnae be here either. In fact, many had moved on the promise of Leith’s regeneration following a stateled investment programme in the mid-to-late 1980s. Although they demonstrated a sense of nostalgia for some of the places they had been familiar with that had now changed or disappeared – particularly the pubs – they were generally pragmatic and unemotional about Leith’s development. I asked one interviewee how she felt about the future of the historic pub that she had managed, which had recently changed hands. While she remembered her time there fondly, she acknowledged that changes were signs of Leith’s economic improvement and growing prosperity which she saw as more important than her own personal story or attachments. Well Hannah it’s a pub. Pubs as I knew them even 8–10 years ago are all different now. And is that because people change and want different, you know, places to go. For the … bar you could never make it somewhere you could… There was no kitchen space, so you couldn’t do food. I mean in actual fact the pub was a boozer … I’m not sure boozers work anymore and we’ve got a lot of them in Leith anyway. New Leithers The term New Leither was mostly used to describe those who had moved to Leith in the last ten to 15 years. This group were, largely, more self-conscious about using the ‘Leither’ label, aware that they may not be entitled to it because they were not born in the area or because they lived outside the historic boundaries of the original burgh. They got around this by defining Leith according to a much larger geographic area, in keeping with current administrative wards rather than historical boundaries. In some cases, they even described it as a ‘state of mind’ rather than a location. I would but I don’t think I’m allowed because of the … this is the boundary here isn’t it … but I do, I say I’m a Leither but yeah people go “where do you stay? uh no you’re not you’re Edinburgh” so … but because I am in and around this area, I do feel more like a Leither. As with Adopted Leithers, in the absence, at least in the first instance, of familial ties and embodied experiences, the New Leithers’ attachments are more reliant on symbolic and surface meanings of place; drawn from aspects of the place image, dominant historical narratives and their place identities particularly as they relate to continuity of settlement type or shared place traits (Garrow, 2020). Despite having moved to the area on the promise of change or regeneration, Leith’s industrial and working-class roots and heritage were an important aspect of their place identities and affective bonds. Many talked about the ‘raw’ or unpretentious ‘edge’ associated with the post-industrial neighbourhood as something that attracted them to it, and which reflected their own senses of self. They compared

Living in and Loving Leith  123 it favourably to Glasgow or to other post-industrial neighbourhoods, docks or industrial towns where they had lived previously, and they drew distinctions between it and Edinburgh which was characterised as ‘stuffy’, ‘pretentious’ and ‘conservative’. There is lots that those places have in common, Dundee and Leith. Like here is a whaling harpoon, I mean maritime industrial heritage is common to both, sense of humour is common to both, people and then people make a place… In comparing previous residence places to Leith, New Leithers often attempted to connect themselves through their mutual characteristics to Leith’s history. A couple of interviewees had even managed to find an ancestor who had lived in the area which they exploited as evidence of a direct connection to the place and rationale for having chosen to live there or their right to belong. I just paused here along the shore which is a famous landmark, but for me it is a nice connection to timber bush where I had a relative who worked and set sail to the new world or whatever. He wrote this big tome called the book of occurrences, a grand name, but he is most proud that he started off in humble beginnings here and ended up this wealthy sea merchant living in the west end. And I’ve chosen to be here. Without the benefit of genealogical ties, New Leithers often resorted to researching, writing and telling stories about Leith’s past and involving themselves in projects and organisations in the area including community arts and environmental projects. Like the Adopted Leithers, their affective bonds appear to have developed through a conscious effort to adopt and understand Leith’s past and to fit themselves within the neighbourhood’s story by actively involving themselves in the community and thereby justifying their right to belong. Leith’s ‘heritage’ was thus critical to their place attachments, but, unlike Auld and Real Leithers, they did not look at that past in a personal way. Rather, shaped by their contemporary knowledge and perspectives, they looked back with objectivity, not afraid to compare Leith to other places they had visited or lived in and to identify ‘improvements’ that could bring it more in line with their place ideals. I have a love-hate relationship with Leith, I think that’s fair to say. I really like the community, I like the people, I like some things about the environment. I think there’s a lot of things that really drive me mad that never seem to get any better…

Discussing attachment to, and through, places, identities and pasts The research findings provide further evidence to support theories in the literature that there are different types or forms of attachment that will be experienced by residents, developed through distinct processes as they variously

124  Hannah Garrow interact with, and add meaning to, their environment. This emphasises a more complex and dynamic understanding of place attachment than that which tends to be adopted in the environmental psychology literature and could explain the difficulties that researchers relying on quantitative studies have had in producing a single, definitive model to convey and measure the concept (Garrow, 2020). At a broad level, the research identified a distinction between the attachments of those who ‘discovered’ Leith and had elected to live and put down roots there, and those who ‘inherited’ Leith through historical or ancestral ties (Lewicka, 2011b). This same distinction has been drawn in both the environmental psychology and sociological literature – albeit characterised in different ways – as dwelling and elective belonging in the work of Savage et al. (2005) or as traditional and active attachments in Lewicka’s typology (2011b). Unlike earlier attachment typologies (see Relph, 1976 or Hay, 1998) which tended to promote the outdated assumption that deep attachments will only develop through time spent in a place, such theories recognise that there are different pathways to belonging and that deep emotional attachments can exist for those moving into an area, albeit different in their nature. Within the broad categories, however, the research shows that an individual’s length of residence, level of residential mobility, age and cultural background or social identity could all be seen to impact, either directly or indirectly, on how and why they identified with Leith, and to which manifestation of Leith they were attached. These more nuanced processes are accounted for within the different life-place trajectories put forward by Bailey et al. (2016) and are also reflected in the different descriptions of ‘Leither’ identified in this research. It was equally evident that the changing nature of the environment in terms of its physical, social and institutional components contributed to shifting patterns of belonging. This supports claims by Cole (2013) that the historical context and specific development path of a neighbourhood will define people’s experiences and identities. Place itself is not fixed. It has its own place-life trajectory (Garrow, 2020). We can see, for example, that social networks and sense of community were important aspects of contemporary attachments, but due to socio-demographic changes in Leith the networks to which different individuals were bonded possessed quite different characteristics. This is also true of the ways in which they defined the values or traits associated with being a Leither – from simple, straight-forward and hard-working Auld Leith to the multi-­cultural, green and creative new Leith. Likewise, Leith’s ‘heritage’ played an important role in shaping the attachments of the different groups, but was employed or drawn on differently by individuals depending on their life-place trajectories. Auld and Real Leithers developed their attachments through experiencing historical events in place over the course of their lifetimes, enabling them to attach personal meaning to the spaces around them. This influenced the aspects of the physical environment on which they conferred meanings which were more likely to be valued because of a specific story from their own past than any broader ‘historical’ relevance. Auld Leithers tended to look back with nostalgia at Leith prior to its post-war redevelopment and post-industrial decline. The buildings and remnants of ‘old’ Leith, particularly those associated with the docks, were important to their family stories and

Living in and Loving Leith  125 place identities, while Leith’s post-war reconstruction was associated with the destruction of Leith’s community and urban environment which had left families and the community dispersed, representing not continuity, but a break with the past. For Real Leithers, whose own lives had often taken place within that postwar environment, this caused some conflict between their personal attachments, stigmatised narratives of Leith and the values they bestowed on the physical environment. Auld and Real Leithers’ attachments, however, were predominantly social and personal in nature, meaning that they did not place particular value on the physical remains of the past. Given the change that has taken place in Leith over the years, with many of the buildings altered and functions lost, the sense of continuity that they offered had already been diminished, leaving these residents to attach meaning to spaces within their memories, rather than to aspects of the current townscape. For those who had left the neighbourhood, or for whom it had changed so significantly that they could no longer identify with it, ‘remembering’ old Leith through living memory and oral history projects allowed them to maintain their person–place bonds as they sought to belong from afar (May, 2017). Adopted Leithers, having lived in Leith for most of their lives, had also begun to build historical attachments to the neighbourhood associated with moments and experiences in their own lives. To facilitate this, their attachments had been developed through a conscious process of actively connecting with the history and stories of the place; using their acquired knowledge to add symbolic meanings to the environment and drawing on characteristics of the place to define their identities and place ideals. In this respect, they were more likely to draw on ‘established’ or ‘authentic’ histories or narratives about Leith’s past but, equally, they looked positively on recent place change. They presented themselves as heirs to ‘old Leith’, promoting their roles in the revival and rediscovery of the strong community and independent spirit associated with that narrative. As a result, they were protective of aspects of the historic built environment dating from this period, threats to which were interpreted as threats to their own place identities, compromising the sense of distinctiveness and character through which they had developed their attachments. This was also true of New Leithers, whose identities and attachments to Leith were built around its creative and bohemian image. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this group was the most attached to present-day Leith, including the physical environment, and tended to characterise change, particularly recent change, as a threat, out of step with Leith’s raw and independent edge. This did not mean, however, that the past was not still relevant and important. They still celebrated aspects of Leith’s story, particularly its more recent stigmatised past and, of all the groups, they were most likely to assess Leith’s post-war environment as part of its ‘heritage’; an attempt, perhaps as Matthews (2015) suggests, to improve the place image or to reconstitute histories associated with this period. Without familial ties to Leith, New Leithers, like Adopted Leithers, used narratives to link their own personal stories to those of the neighbourhood to promote a sense of belonging or continuity. This can be seen in the efforts by participants to find common ideals or pasts that connected them personally to Leith’s story, be it an ancient ancestral connection, a link through similar place ‘type’ or a shared place trait.

126  Hannah Garrow

Conclusion By considering attachment both as a process and a product we can see how pathways and moments in people’s lives can lead them to develop experiences that will result in different forms of person–place bond (Garrow, 2020). This supports definitions and conceptualisations of place as dynamic, shifting across space and time (Seamon, 2014; Massey, 1993), and endorses arguments that individuals can transition from one form of attachment to another as their circumstances and experiences change. It was evident that ‘heritage’ – particularly when seen as performative, as a way of (re)enacting and mobilising past(s) in the present (Meskell, 2015) – played an important role in the development of local place attachments, both through the sense of continuity that it promoted in those with ancestral attachments and because of its associations with local distinctiveness which enabled those moving to an area to develop their identities with the neighbourhood and embed themselves within it. The different ways of experiencing place – as ancestor and incomer – could thus also be seen to influence how physical aspects of the environment were assessed by residents and which narratives were used in determining what constituted ‘heritage’. This illustrates how affective values placed on physical aspects of the past are often ignited by, or related to, specific contemporary events and experiences and underlines the difficulties of taking emotional relationships built on attachments which are fundamentally social, dynamic and shifting, into account in the identification and preservation of aspects of the historic urban environment. The complex system of cognitions and emotions from which attachments are developed underlines the need for research which takes an embedded approach. Quantitative studies simply cannot capture the different interpretations or understandings of attachment that can exist within any given neighbourhood and do not offer enough explanation of the reasons why and the processes by which individuals develop bonds with their environment. By contrast, immersing oneself within a ‘place’ and building relationships with residents and other actors, in this instance, enabled a deeper, richer understanding of the different pathways by which place bonds were developed, demonstrating that attachment is, like place, multi-layered and personal. Speaking to Auld and Real Leithers, it was evident that their embodied experiences and backgrounds had shaped their attachments slowly over time, both feeding into and challenging established histories of Leith. From the stories of Adopted and New Leithers, and from my own experience, it was clear that attachments can also be formed through a process of actively engaging with place, involving oneself in the neighbourhood’s affairs and learning about its past(s). In this respect, the research challenges attachment typologies that suggest that a deep or ‘authentic’ sense of place can only be experienced by those with longer roots in place (Hay, 1998), following Gustafson (2009) in acknowledging that those who are more mobile or transient are often able to develop attachments to place quickly as the nature or focus of their attachments is different. The ethnographic approach, in particular the walking interviews, was critical to revealing the varied responses and relationships of Leith’s residents, but it also highlighted the individual, plural and fragile nature of those

Living in and Loving Leith  127 relationships which, while representative of this moment in time, will continue to evolve with person and place, creating challenges for those working to create a common value associated with the built environment.

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8 Re-creating memories of Gulou Three temporalities and emotions Florence Graezer Bideau and Haiming Yan

Introduction: re-enacting the Bell and Drum Towers tradition The recent controversy about the transformation of Gulou in the historic core of Beijing reveals the intertwined relations of space, memory and emotions. The local government’s project to re-enact the secular tradition of ringing the bell and drumming for opening and closing the doors of the Chinese capital city generated strong emotional reactions from Gulou residents and beyond. Revitalising these sounds, which emanated from the Bell and Drum Towers built in 1272 during the Yuan dynasty, aimed to recall a past tradition (Jiang, 2010). The project failed as it did not sufficiently consider the impacts of urban change on local residents: for example, changes to their daily rhythms and the everyday emotions they experienced in the streets and lanes of Gulou. The management of change in Gulou could be understood from the Historical Urban Landscape (HUL) perspective (Bandarin and Van Oers, 2014; Sokonly, 2017; UNESCO, 2011). However, we argue that the approach could be enriched by taking into consideration the importance of both memory and emotions. We will show how time and space in Gulou are re-shaped by both the memories and the emotional attachments of a range of different stakeholders. In so doing, the chapter demonstrates how memory and emotion combine to produce attachments to historic places that are central to the everyday lives of the residents. Located in the north-east of the Forbidden City, Gulou is part of the Shichahai area near the natural lake of Beihai and comprises a well-maintained network of courtyards (siheyuan). For decades it was considered a place where the living traditions of Beijing were organically perpetuated for generations, since it bears witness to urban change of successive historic periods. Gulou contains temples, historical royal mansions from Imperial China, and a commercial and cultural centre that includes a market, tea houses and public institutes (exhibition hall and library) from the Nationalist government. During the Mao Zedong era (1949–1976), manufacturing premises, industries and work units (danwei) were built in Gulou and traditional (familial) courtyards were transformed into mixed housing (dazayuan) (Bray, 2005; Sit, 1995). During the Deng Xiaoping era (1979–1997), the area witnessed a change in the profile of its residents as those whose could afford to move into modern apartments rented their homes to new migrants looking for construction work in Beijing (Tomba, 2014; Graezer

130  Florence Graezer Bideau and Haiming Yan Bideau, 2018). Gulou was designated a ‘historic and cultural district’ during the early 2000s and the area quickly became a scenic spot for day and night tourism, business and cultural exchanges. The transformation of the urban fabric of Gulou caused a shift both in the demographic profile and in the use of the heritage of the area (Graezer Bideau and Yan, 2018). Walking through Gulou evokes a tension between the nostalgia of a golden age – when the area sheltered a quiet and cosy, though poor, community with interactive and harmonious neighbour relations – and the afterglow of the ‘Disneyfication’ of the area as it has transformed into a flourishing cultural place. The collateral effects of this on the socio-spatial dimensions of Gulou are many. Buildings have been demolished, residents have been relocated and social ties have been disrupted due to the ongoing process of social segregation. Gulou residents are acutely aware of this tension: ‘everyone in the community knew each other, even gossiping about family affairs, which made the area feel more like an extended family’, (quote from interview on 13 January 2016) said one resident. In contrast, another resident said ‘the temporary migrant workers are not liked by old residents. They only want to earn money and don’t care about neighbours … Their presence has brought about more trash and noise’ (quote from interview on 13 January 2016). A further resident added: ‘the past has gone’ (quote from interview on 13 January 2016). The Gulou controversy started in 2010 when the local authority (Dongcheng district) tried to implement a project to develop the Beijing Time Cultural City on a 12.5-hectare site. The project included the enlargement of the public area between the Bell and Drum Towers, and the widening of streets in order to improve the quality of residential life. It also aimed to build a new cultural institution, to be called the Time-telling Celebration, comprising a museum, shopping mall and underground car park, upgrading the area with new leisure and recreational activities for visitors and residents (Jiang, 2010). This ambitious project rapidly attracted criticism. The first came from a historic heritage preservation NGO who, with the help of international media coverage, publicly denounced the demolition of traditional houses and cultural properties and the relocation of their residents to the outskirts of the city. After this, protests came from the residents themselves, who rapidly organised and resisted the destruction and displacement of their community. After a few months of protests, the official development project was suspended (Yang, 2010) which coincided with a change of the local political administration in which two districts, Dongcheng and Chongwen, merged to form a new and combined Dongcheng district government (Figure 8.1). In 2012, the local government proposed a revised project and rational decisions were taken that focused more on the tangible than the intangible cultural heritage of the area. The main change was to reduce the size of the area to be transformed from 12.5 hectares to 0.47 hectares, and to limit the number of historic buildings affected by the urban transformation. Consequently, the revised plan affected a smaller population of residents who were mostly located around the square between the two towers. As a result, more than 100 households living in 66 traditional courtyards around the core zone of the project (the public place between

Re-creating memories of Gulou  131

Figure 8.1  Plan of the 2010 Beijing Time Cultural City project (red-circled area) and plan of the 2012 Drum and Bell Tower Square Restoration project (green-circled area). Source: tianditu map, boundary lines drawn by the authors, derived from zoning maps released by the local government, open-source base layer.

the Bell and Drum Towers) were relocated (Wei and Guo, 2012). The social and cultural traditions of ringing the bell and drumming also disappeared in the second project. Indeed, it made no sense for local residents to perform ­centuries-old traditions that had nothing to do with current everyday life in Gulou.

Memory, space and emotional attachments In the 1930s, the French historian Maurice Halbwachs argued for the importance of collective memory in understanding the continuing relationship between individuals and their local community or social groups (Halbwachs, 1925). Halbwachs (1950) insisted on the role played by the spatial location and the social use of it by the residents of a neighbourhood in time. When ­Halbwachs was translated into English in the 1990s in the wake of the memory turn in the social sciences, his notion of collective memory went beyond the circle of architectural theory and urban conservation debates (Falser and Lipp, 2015) and entered the field of international urban studies (Olick, Vinitzky-­ Seroussi and Levy, 2011). Now considered a useful tool for studying conflicts in urban environment, ­Halbwachs’ seminal work helps when observing how residents can mobilise local memory in the face of neighbourhood transformation. Usually based on emotions, this can take the form of popular reactions or complementary strategies to challenge the current or past alteration of historic landscapes officially recognised as being of high value or of ordinary urban settings (social housing, local markets, specific streets, etc.). In the case of ordinary urban settings, remembrance is often embedded and perpetuated in everyday practices relevant for its inhabitants (Scott, 1990). Regularly threatened with gentrification processes, residents of neighbourhoods have to acquire skills or tactics for inhabiting, occupying and appropriating these ‘ordinary’ spaces (de Certeau, 1990). These tactics help them

132  Florence Graezer Bideau and Haiming Yan survive such urban changes and nurture local memories with which they can identify as a social group, enabling them to better face the present situation and plan for the future (Benjamin, 1926; Traverso, 2016). Spatialising memory within urban environments is not a neutral process, even less so when it carries emotions. Developed, morphed or appropriated over time according to specific memorial references, space needs to be analysed in the light of heritage dynamics, including tangible and intangible forms of patrimony and the thickness of emotional attachments, which together progressively unveil the palimpsest of the city (Corboz, 1983). Continuing urban change leaves physical and social disruptions, often rousing emotions among local communities. Fragments of this palimpsest reflect overlapping layers of memories containing as many official dimensions as subaltern forms of history (Boyer, 1994). This is particularly the case when the perception of the landscape and its representational forms are collectively shared (Connerton, 1989), but is sometimes ignored by urban planning initiatives within the city. This chapter argues that the study of such visible or invisible fragments (Marot, 2010) is crucial to understanding emotional attachments to neighbourhoods, and the way the territory is perceived by a range of different stakeholders (Veschambres, 2008). The implementation of an architectural or urban project that valorises traces from the past demonstrates a position of power in the city. It reflects a form of symbolic or physical appropriation. The use of historical traces has given rise to the legitimisation of particular historical periods through their recognition as a form of ‘official heritage’. In Beijing, the activation of a specific memorial layer and institutional traces has profoundly changed the city’s current landscape and generated displacement processes (Broudehoux, 2004; Hsing, 2010; Zhang, 2001, 2013). The renewal of historic urban districts around the Forbidden City and along the north–south central axis, such as Shichahai, Dashilan or Qianmen, are illustrative examples. The tangible signs left by residents in the environment such as artefacts and mnemonic practices and products have the power to activate memories and elicit strong emotions (Olick, 2010). We argue that these traces play a fundamental role in empowering citizens as they encourage them to resist what are perceived as insensitive planning and heritage policies (Huyssen, 2003). In Gulou, the identity of the neighbourhood has been re-imagined and re-created not only physically through the local authorities’ project of renovation, but also emotionally through the negotiations between different stakeholders engaged in the process of transformation. This chapter thus starts from the premise that memories and emotions should be a central concern within urban development strategies. We designed a methodology that enabled us to explore how we could (1) access memories of and in place; and (2) consider the relationship between memory and the formation of emotional attachments to Gulou.

Methodology: ethnography and the analysis of emotions How should we understand people’s emotions in relation to their articulated memories? And how do the narrative claims of different stakeholders reflect the social dynamics within historic urban landscapes in China? To address these

Re-creating memories of Gulou  133 questions, we conducted ethnographic research (Colleman and von Hellermann, 2011; Falzon, 2012; Yin, 2003) in the Gulou area, mainly in 2015 and 2016. We collected data from the three principal groups of stakeholders: officials, preservationists and locals. We planned to conduct interviews with all three groups. However, neither officials nor the chief designers of the project – the ­Boston International Design Group (BIDG) – accepted our request for interviews. As a result, we analysed the official discourses by thematic reading of policy documents and media reports produced by local government and Chinese news agencies. The analysis of the preservationists and the locals was based on in-depth interviews, observations and media reports. We collected the memories and emotions of the preservationists’ claims through interviews and the websites of NGOs and voluntary groups. To investigate locals’ opinions, memories and emotions about the project, we conducted ethnographic observations and interviews. More than 30 local residents were interviewed. In addition, we interviewed other stakeholders such as local business owners. Given the importance of memory in our conceptual framework, we ensured that it was a central topic in the interview questions. This enabled us to see how locals used memory to make sense of the redevelopment project, and to see how the redevelopment impacted on their everyday lives. Moreover, memories are often expressed with emotion, and sometimes the two are mutually reinforced. To explore the relationship between memory and emotion, we developed a semi-structured interview in six parts that sought to understand locals’ memories and attachments to the Gulou area. We started by exploring the respondent’s biography and then followed with a series of questions: (1) Name a place within the Gulou area that to which you have the closest emotional/mnemonic attachment; (2) What do you think about the renovation/relocation project?; (3) How do you define your role in the project?; (4) How do you see the neighbours in the community?; (5) How much do you know about the courtyards and their history/ culture/architecture?; and (6) Do you think it’s valuable that they are preserved? In the main, the preservationists – who were supposed to answer the last four questions more fully – showed strong emotional attachment to the area. In contrast, the local residents tended to focus on question 4 and complain about the waidiren (non-Beijing native). We did not strictly follow the structure of the interview, as we allowed the interviewees to concentrate on what they really wanted to express. We found that the topic that they focused on the most was usually where their emotional attachment was most deeply felt. We then analysed the data using discourse analysis by coding the material for memory and emotion. This form of interpretation enabled us to see that both groups demonstrated strong emotional attachments to Gulou but in different ways. An interesting contradiction was evident. Whereas the preservationists showed a close and passionate tie to the place, the locals felt more detached from their own space. To borrow a concept proposed by sociologist Arlie Hochschild (2016: 135–151), the locals could be seen as ‘strangers in their own place’, while the preservationists could be called the ‘spiritual owners of the other’s place’. H ­ ochschild’s sociological approach to understanding emotion is instructive for our analysis, in particular of those who feel detached from their home. For example, Hochschild’s in-depth

134  Florence Graezer Bideau and Haiming Yan interviews with Tea Party supporters in the southern United States revealed what she called the great paradox: there are people who simultaneously deny the existence of climate change and refuse the Environmental Protection Agency while being deeply plagued by industrial pollution. Hochschild suggests that emotion plays a crucial role. It is the ‘deep story’ that drives people to make seemingly irrational decisions based on their emotional attachments. The concept of deep story provides an insight into the relationship between humans, space and memory. For the analysis of the Gulou case, we sought not only to understand the attachment between human and place, but to also explore how participants’ expressions and emotions are shaped by social relations. It is the social relationship, or in a more accurate sense, the felt social relationship, that sets up the basis for people’s view of the area. Therefore, we not only pay attention to how the interviewees talk about the place, but equally importance is given to how they talk about other people. Is there a similar ‘deep story’ of the local residents? How do the preservationists see their own attachment to the place and the locals? In these ways we privilege both the physical and the social as well as memory and emotion within the process of data analysis. With this perspective, we identified three groups of stakeholders: the officials – authorised owner of the place; the preservationists – spiritual owner of the place; and the locals – strangers in their own place.

Memories around the Gulou Project: understanding temporalities and emotions The Gulou case study shows three distinct but entangled memories expressed in the discourses of the three groups of stakeholders – the officials, the preservationists and the locals – that will appear in the analysis as less homogeneous than we first imagined. Based on the claims of their respective intentions, the memories of these three groups refer to different temporalities, emotional attachments to the place and objects embodying spaces. As a polysemic tool, memory unveils power relations, reveals emotions and challenges the legitimacy of the urban transformation of Gulou. Officials: authorised owners of the place, history to be restored and designed Using the lens of memory, our data analysis revealed that the official discourse sought to re-create a historic image of the area dating from Imperial China with a strong focus on the public square between the Bell and Drum Towers. This renovation project is an integral part of Xi Jinping’s grand initiative for restoring the historic centre of Beijing. The morning bell and evening drum tradition in Gulou is one of the most unforgettable memories of old Beijing that local authorities want to be revived, both to rouse past emotions and to arouse new affective attachments among residents and visitors. To legitimise its project, the local government used a historic map supposedly sketched more than 200 years ago during the Qianlong reign of the Qing Dynasty (1735–1796). With no intention of necessarily maintaining current

Re-creating memories of Gulou  135 Gulou lifestyles, this map became an urban icon to be reproduced perfectly, even if it did not truthfully represent the materiality of the area itself. The renovation project clearly reflected an intention to restore history to a selective and singular memory. To this end, the 2012 project significantly reduced the area of urban renewal in Gulou in order to make ‘reference to maps of the Qing and early PRC [People’s Republic of China] to restore the square, and maintain the natural and multilayered fabrics and landscape. The restored space will be used for public culture services’ (Qi, 2012: 7). To implement its vision of the historic city based on a singular memory, the local government bypassed the public bidding procedure and selected an international design company – the BIDG – to develop the project. This choice engendered much concern and criticism from preservationists and the public because of BIDG’s past interventions in historic communities, especially the transformation of Yuehu into a commercial area, which saw the relocation of all residents in the historic and cultural city of Ningbo, Zhejiang Province (Wu, 2012). The official decision arguably awakened suspicion and negative emotions among local populations, as the name of BIDG was associated with a feeling of being dispossessed and an appropriation of inhabitants’ memories by local authorities in the name of cultural economy. In the case of Gulou, ironically, the restoration of a Chinese historic zone was undertaken by an international company mostly composed of Western-educated Chinese architects, rather than a local firm. The recreation of the Chinese past apparently required a modern project that was mostly planned and ‘designed’. Most of BIDG’s design ideas were eventually adopted by the investor, Beijing Dongcheng Historic City Preservation and Construction Ltd., a state-owned developer group in charge of implementing the project. To restore history by planning and designing is a common process in China, especially as articulated in the newly issued Beijing Urban Master Plan in 2017 (Beijing Municipal Commission for City Planning and Land Resources Management, 2017). The plan aims to ease the problems of the city by restructuring its layout into a central city area, a sub-centre, two axes and ten suburban areas. In general, the plan intends to disperse the ‘non-capital functions’ of the capital city. According to the plan, the central, or north–south, axis, plays a crucial role in establishing and maintaining the layout of the city: ‘it is like the backbone of Beijing’s urban spatial structure’, said Beijing historian Li Jianping (Xinhuanet, 2018). The plan highlights the central axis as the representative area for the cultural pride of the capital of a grand nation which conveys the essence of traditional culture. In these ways the axis is seen to have potential for World Heritage status. Fourteen historical places along the axis – including Qianmen, the Forbidden City, Jingshan Park, the Drum and Bell Towers, Chairman Mao Zedong Memorial Hall, the Monument to the People’s Heroes and Tian’anmen Square – have been identified as key heritage sites. As stated in the Master Plan, to nominate the central axis for World Heritage status, and to conserve the traditional characteristics and landscapes of the central axis, a comprehensive treatment needed to be implemented in the Bell and Drum Towers area.

136  Florence Graezer Bideau and Haiming Yan However, the proposal for World Heritage nomination of the central axis received some negative responses, especially among heritage scholars. One reason is the inclusion of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, which is seen as too revolutionary and difficult to integrate with other components in terms of narrative. Another hesitation concerns Qianmen. The Qianmen-Dashilan area used to be a prosperous commercial and cultural district formed as early as the mid-tolate Qing dynasty. The municipal government completed a full restoration project around 2008, when time-honoured stores were replaced by international fashion shops because of the high rents and, to accommodate this, the existing residents were relocated. Over the past ten years, many people in Beijing, including scholars and locals, have considered this a failed restoration project (Evans, 2020). Traditional social and cultural heritage fabric was lost, while new businesses could not economically compete with other fashionable zones in the eastern part of the city, such as Sanlitun. Most local Beijing residents continue to show little interest in visiting this area (Bell, 2014). This situation may change again as a result of the 2018 urban renewal of Qianmen area designed for leisure and recreational activities, recalling past emotions in an entirely new physical context. Preservationists: spiritual owners: history to be recorded and maintained The official discourse based on a selective and singular memory is not entirely accepted by the public, especially those engaged in heritage preservation. To them, the official claim about the history of the area is a representation of a static sense of time which ignores the historical values that are derived from later eras. Plural memories of the historic place compete with the singular version presented by the official discourse. The preservationists showed a contrasting temporality that stressed the importance of the present value of history. Their emotions, as observed in interviews, are tied to the place. They see the place as something to care about and to cure. We will discuss two groups of preservationists taking action in the Gulou case. One is an NGO with very strong individual influence, Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Centre (CHP). The second is a less organised, more multi-disciplinary team. Both have placed themselves in the position of ‘spiritual owner’ of the place, strongly advocating the protection of the courtyards. Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Centre In 2010, the first phase of the project, CHP published a series of articles on its website concerning its objection to the Gulou project. One widely circulated article was a public letter: ‘A Better Future for Gulou – CHP’s Views on the Planned Redevelopment’ (CHP, 2010). In this letter, CHP criticised the planned relocations and demolitions as something ‘crude’ that would eventually lead to a triple failure: destruction of cultural heritage; destruction of social fabric; and destruction of commercial potential. CHP made an alternative proposal: the Drum and Bell Towers rejuvenation project. This proposed that rather than demolishing and relocating, the same funds be used to renovate rundown housing and rezone the commercial area in order to avoid a ‘pseudo-historical’ neighbourhood.

Re-creating memories of Gulou  137 This objection was largely initiated by CHP’s founder He Shuzhong. He is not a Beijing local, but comes from Shanghai. He attended college in Beijing, where he became aware of and actively engaged in cultural heritage preservation. In 2003, he registered CHP through the Beijing Bureau of Civil Affairs as an NGO. Interestingly he was, and still is, an official at the State Administration of Cultural Heritage. As a law scholar, He’s original goal was to promote the engagement of heritage conservation by civil society. He knew that a small NGO could not get involved in large issues. Rather, he aimed to advocate conservation ethics for ordinary people. It is not surprising, therefore, that CHP put so much effort into discussing and objecting to the Gulou project. Despite his Shanghai background, He is acting like a Beijing resident to protect the Gulou area. His interest in Gulou may echo Mike Savage’s seminal concept ‘elective belonging’, that refers to a middle-class sense of attachment to a place that has nothing to do with the actor’s personal living experience (Savage, 2010). This may also explain the passionate involvement in the area of the other group, Gulou Preservation Team. Gulou Preservation Team In 2012, a team of young heritage preservationists was formed to object to the Bell and Drum Towers redevelopment. They called themselves the Gulou Preservation Team. The team created an interactive Internet platform, a webGIS website, to call for public participation. On the website, everyone could add comments about particular courtyards. The interactive website, http://archlabs.hnu. cn/bj, is now inaccessible but, in contrast to the official discourse, which shows little emotional and experiential attachment to the site, the information on this website showed that the team’s claims are more sentimental. The team showed a range of responses in terms of their emotional associations with the site. Some showed very strong feelings about the protection of the site, whereas others had comparatively moderate views. The leader of the team was an urban designer whose Weibo account was named Wepon. His stated purpose was not to stop the project, but rather to reveal the facts: ‘I didn’t want to make changes. I got involved too late. My point is to reveal the facts and raise questions, without any bias’ (phone interview conducted 1 December 2016, by project coordinator Zhang Lin). Wepon tried to maintain a neutral and rational position during the process, avoiding any aggressive acts that might provoke negative responses from the officials. He believed that the local residents were not given full information about the project and it was the professionals’ responsibility to reveal the facts to them. In fact, though Wepon acted in a rational way, he did show emotion, a kind of objective, scientific and calm emotion, which maintained his leadership in the team. In contrast to Wepon, another team member, XJ, was extremely emotional about the case. XJ had little sense of historic protection until she joined the team and she became one of the most active preservationists. Unlike Wepon, she saw stopping the current project as the priority, no matter how many conflicts would be generated against the government or the locals: ‘I was fully against the word Redevelopment if someone talked about it, because I was fully aware of the

138  Florence Graezer Bideau and Haiming Yan historic values preserved by these buildings. There was the name of workers on each brick’ (phone interview conducted 27 November 2016, by project coordinator Zhang Lin). XJ’s discourse reflects a passionate, even romanticised, emotion towards local memories, although paradoxically, she did not experience them herself, but rather imagined them. To a large extent, XJ saw herself as a spiritual owner of the place, in particular of the courtyards. And her emotional reaction to the project was a way she could consolidate this position. The three preservationists discussed above have shown three different emotions. For He, whose hometown is historically and culturally different from ­Beijing, the Gulou case gave him a chance to explore his emotional engagement in the establishment of civil society; for Wepon, a Beijing local, his emotional attachment to the place is revealed, and even maintained, in his professionalism; for XJ, a local landscape designer, the emotional acts against the government and those who tried to keep neutral are ways to claim her activist identity. Spiritually, although, none of them grew up in Gulou; they felt they were spiritual residents of Gulou. Interestingly, their emotional attachments to the area are not based on embodied memories but rather on a conceptual, intellectual and objectivised local memory that had to be preserved. Local discourse: strangers in their own place, history to be remembered and forgotten The local discourse discussed in this chapter comprises Gulou residents. These residents have memories of Gulou from their childhood or from visiting close relatives there. Perhaps they attended primary school in the area, used to play or cycle in the lanes, bought food and drinks at the local grocers’ or spent time in the small restaurants. As one resident said, ‘before, every summer I would love to sit in the cool shade of the trees on the side of the road, or skip rope with my friends’ (CHP, 2010). However, the quiet and clean past of the locals’ recollections has been replaced by a noisy present. As the quote continues, ‘just look at it now! I almost never go outside, people and cars are everywhere. You try living such a noisy, anxious life. The wonderful past that I remember no longer exists’ (CHP, 2010). This sensory memory reflects exactly what Hochschild calls ‘strangers in their own land’, as locals feel betrayed by the government and displaced by the present. They see the past, as well as the place, as part of their own property. And the present is something they feel has been stolen by the non-Beijing people (waidiren). According to the locals, the area used to be a lively and clean neighbourhood. It was the mass tourism boom and the influx of waidiren that turned the area into the chaotic place it is today (Zhang, 2001). An old man who had lived in the hutongs for over 60 years consistently complained about waidiren during his interview: ‘you see those three-wheelers? Guess how many of them are Beijingers? None! They come here to earn money, bring all the family here. They park the three-wheeler wherever they want. In the past, a truck could easily drive through. Now even the duck-cart gets struck by the junks’ (quoted and observed from an interview on 13 January 2016).

Re-creating memories of Gulou  139 Daphne Berdahl (2010) has examined the post-Socialist nostalgia in former East and West Germany, which has generated Ossie/Wessie labelling and discrimination. Gulou residents have similarly felt the categorisation between native and stranger. In fact, our analysis of the locals’ narratives shows that they use memory as a tool or rationale in order to earn good money from the relocation fee, even if they manifest strong emotional attachment to Gulou. Moreover, the feeling of being threatened in their current circumstances is stronger than the commitment to their neighbourhood, from which they sometimes have the impression of being pulled apart; local memory and attachments to the area can be easily forgotten when the future is at stake. Are the waidiren ‘line-cutters’, to use Hochschild’s term? Our analysis shows that the two are not necessarily the same. For the southern United States, there are certain policies with the affirmative act that give priorities to the felt line-cutters, whereas in Beijing it is not the case. However, because the deep story here is not the story about truth, but that about the felt truth, the local Beijing residents ascribe a similar sense to the waidiren as the American southerners did to the line-cutters. It is the emotion, bolstered by memories, that shapes the social fabrics of the present Gulou. Local memory and emotional attachments to Gulou have been forgotten by many households who made the decision to relocate. We interviewed some of those residents displaced to the Shaoyaoju neighbourhood. Three buildings were allocated for relocated Gulou residents, who were mostly removed and resettled at the same time as their Gulou neighbours. When we interviewed the relocated residents, we expected similar responses to those of the residents who had stayed in the Gulou area. Surprisingly, however, they refused to accept our interview requests: they were reluctant to even talk about the event; ‘it’s meaningless to talk now, everything has passed’ (quoted from an interview on 13 December 2016). After the relocation, the physical settings for the deep story in the Gulou area have been replaced by a new social context. The locals’ feelings of priority have given way to a sense of equality between social groups in the new area, because the new residential area does not provide historical memory, and because the neighbourhood was originally not for Beijing residents, but for residents living in Beijing. Beijing residents and waidiren are equally represented. Thus, the soil in which the emotions of unfairness and displacement arose has gone.

Conclusion: time, memory and emotion The relationship between memory and heritage is complicated (Yan, 2018). We have analysed three groups of stakeholders of the Gulou restoration project. All of them used memory, either lived and experienced or imagined and received, as a tool to legitimise their claims. The officials insisted that the map showed the heyday of the area and that a clean-up would restore the perfect order of history. The preservationists argued that collective memory should not be institutionalised at one particular time, but should include ongoing experiences that enrich the value of the place. Local residents claimed that their memory and emotions were ignored.

140  Florence Graezer Bideau and Haiming Yan A more interesting finding here is that all three groups of stakeholders agreed that the area is valuable, although the value is understood in different dimensions. For the officials, the value is fully historical and the past should be restored. For the preservationists, the value is based on the physical remains between the past and the present, which should be maintained. For the local residents, the value lay in their communal dynamics and harmony in their personal life. In other words, the official discourse is primarily associated with time, the preservationists with space and the locals with life. All have different senses of time within the principal value ascribed to the project and what it means. In the official view, the history derives from over 200 years ago. For preservationists the view is closer to 100 years. For the residents, however, the meaning of the place did not exceed their own life span; say, 50 years. In addition, the focus on memory and emotion in the design of both data collection and analysis has revealed the differing ways in which the three groups responded to the redevelopment project. We observed that the preservationists showed stronger and more emotional enthusiasm for the protection of the place than the locals. The latter expressed their attachment to the area, but had no desire for heritage protections. Some preservationists acted as spiritual owners of the place, whereas many locals, though complaining about the loss of past, cared more about personal interests and the future of the neighbourhood. In this way, recollections and emotions are equally important for an understanding of how memories are shaped over time in changing circumstances. The relationship between memory and emotion takes different forms for the three stakeholder groups associated with Gulou. The official narrative relies on rational emotional attachments to this historic urban place, in connection to the urban redevelopment agenda of the local government which intends to add economic value to Gulou. The stronger emotional register of the preservationists can be conceived through both theoretical and empirical practices related to heritage conservation in a context of growing awareness of memories of built and living cultural heritage. Voices of inhabitants’ memories speak for embodying emotional attachments to the historic place although they will not, paradoxically, remain resident in Gulou for various reasons. Therefore, we argue that emotional attachments to historic places are highly dependent upon the contexts in which groups of stakeholders express and recollect their experiences and feelings.

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9 Visual research methodologies and the heritage of ‘everyday’ places Steven Cooke and Kristal Buckley

Place attachment in heritage practice Australian heritage practice is notable globally for its early inclusion of the dimension of ‘social value’ as a means of illustrating the cultural significance of places (Avrami et al., 2019). The co-evolution of the Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance (Burra Charter)1 with statutory frameworks within three spheres of government included the possibility of the intangible dimensions of place attachment being formally recognised from the 1970s. Despite this, contestation concerning heritage values is currently high, particularly in urban contexts that are subject to rapid transformations through the processes of globalisation, gentrification and other demographic shifts, and the economic importance of positioning, branding and liveability. Among the contested cases are a growing number of places comprising seemingly ‘ordinary’ architectural fabric and unremarkable histories – places such as local pubs, public housing, streetscapes, public spaces and community facilities. In the face of imminent change or loss, the heritage of these places often becomes a rallying point for community action, posing difficulties for decision makers. It seems that approaches to the evaluation of ‘social value’ do not meet community expectations of how ‘their’ local heritage assets will be considered when weighing up proposals for change. Australia ICOMOS has responded by providing an additional Practice Note on Intangible Cultural Heritage (Australia ICOMOS, 2017); and in Victoria – where the cases described in this paper are located – the state’s Heritage Council has been challenged by such cases and has recently released new guidance on how social value should be considered (­Heritage Council of Victoria, 2019). This guidance acknowledges the diversity of the reasons why places might meet heritage significance thresholds for their ‘social value’, based on the strength of attachment to today’s communities (which can be variously constituted). Importantly, the guidance also suggests possible transformations in the gathering and assessment of evidence in relation to social value. In other words, improvements in the recognition and articulation of values suggest new and more effective methods. The call for community-driven involvement in heritage practice is not new and has been advocated through a number of key texts and case studies examining not only its successes, but also the pitfalls and limitations of grass-roots

144  Steven Cooke and Kristal Buckley participation. Critique has focused on the framing of notions of ‘community’, and on how expertise is constituted and performed (see, for example, Waterton and Watson, 2013a; Crooke, 2007; Selman, 2007; Logan, 2016). Emerging critical theoretical frameworks for heritage studies therefore challenge the effectiveness and ethics of participatory practices. Part of this is an understanding of what Beilin (2005: 59) calls ‘everyday interpretation’, the ordinary, often banal ways in which we experience place. This follows a long tradition of research in a variety of academic disciplines and in professional practice about how people make sense of place (Relph,1976; ­Malpas, 2008; Davis, 2011; Jive’n and Larkham, 2010; Hawke, 2012; Forsyth et al., 2013; Manzo and Devine-Wright, 2014; Adams, 2017). Further, new questions are being asked about the relationships between technical knowledge and historical and heritage expertise, and about how social and popular media forms can be harnessed to find new ways of engaging communities around heritage places and issues. Such engagement is cognitive, emotional and behavioural (Ponzetti, 2003 in Smith, 2017) as well as multi-sensory (Crang and Tolia-Kelly, 2010). This raises issues related to the ability of traditional ‘talk only’ methodologies to understand the complexities of these engagements (Middleton, 2010). In this chapter, we critically examine two recent research projects in Victoria (Australia) that have used visual research methodologies (VRM) to understand emotional engagement and ‘everyday’ sense of place (Cooke and Buckley, 2020; Cooke and Constantinidis, 2019).2

Two Australian examples Our first case study is the regional city of Ballarat in Victoria’s Central Goldfields region. Situated within the Country of the Waddawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung Indigenous Traditional Owners, the city is approximately 100 km north of ­Melbourne. Its nineteenth-century urban heritage – a legacy of the rapid boom in wealth and globalisation following the discovery of gold in the 1850s – forms a key part of place promotion and tourism activities. This is reflected not only in images of its central business district, but also in the best known of Ballarat’s tourism attractions – the recreated gold mining town of Sovereign Hill. Ballarat is a place that sells itself on its heritage. Heritage protection in Ballarat is not new. The city has well-developed regulatory processes that have been progressively implemented over the last 50 years. This means that more than 10,000 heritage buildings, sites and places are listed and afforded protection under the local planning scheme (Buckley and Fayad, 2017). However, the expected rapid expansion of the city’s population over the next two decades – by an estimated 60% by 2040 – has raised concerns within the local community and the city council about the impact that this might have on the city’s urban fabric, including heritage places (City of Ballarat, 2015). As a response, Ballarat became the first municipal government to join a global pilot programme for the implementation of UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) in 2013 (UNESCO, 2011; Buckley et al., 2016).3 Participatory processes and methods, and online engagement tools (Fayad and Buckley, 2019), have been central to

Visual research methodologies  145 this implementation. However, while the HUL has successfully been used as a guiding framework for the city’s strategic plan, the city council was also keen to test whether these methods could help guide regulatory schemes at a more granular level. One suburb of the city, Ballarat East, was identified as a useful pilot to test this approach. Ballarat East was chosen because the ‘heritage character’ of the suburb is typified as more diverse, everyday or ‘ordinary’ (Atkinson, 2007, 2008), in contrast with the architecturally significant central business district with its grand nineteenth-century buildings that have long been valorised through heritage processes. While this distinction has been the focus of extensive academic and professional critique, residents considered that the sense of place created through the experience of this ‘ordinary’ heritage landscape was potentially under threat through redevelopment and the need to accommodate the projected increase in the city’s population. To help guide the planning process in Ballarat East, the city council instigated a community consultation exercise, Imagine Ballarat East, which was based on the process that had been successfully used for the whole-municipality strategy (City of Ballarat, 2018). As well as a range of cultural mapping tools, Imagine Ballarat East provided an ideal context for experimentation using visual research methods (VRM) to explore community attachments and associations with place. Our second case study explores the relationship between community-driven heritage approaches and interpretive opportunities afforded by new social and popular media forms. This was part of a larger project which aimed to critically examine ideas of citizen heritage and digital technologies (Lewi et al., 2016). This included the development of a website optimised for mobile phone usage, to which anyone with an interest in an area could upload content (images, video, audio) or post questions. They could also simply use the website to learn more (http://pastport.com.au/citizen/). The focus of the study was Port Melbourne, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne (Victoria’s capital and Australia’s fastest-growing city) situated within the traditional lands and waters of the Kulin Nation. Port Melbourne has a diverse past and present-day community. It has a significant industrial history associated with port functions, and the arrival and migration histories that have massively shaped the Melbourne of today. It has been subject to rapid and recent gentrification, transforming the local topography and architecture. Material evidence of Port Melbourne’s histories can be found throughout the suburb, which the website aimed to augment through a form of digital heritage interpretation. PastPort aimed to be a digital guide that could illuminate and animate the material landscape through access to both the historical archive and the personal memories of those that live and work in the area. The website contained both curated content uploaded by the project team and material uploaded by users. The majority of content was unstructured, although some individual sites were linked together by specific themes to form tours. Users were thus able to engage with the content in different ways depending on their motivations and interests. Both of these studies had place attachment as a key concern. As we have argued elsewhere (Cooke and Buckley, 2020), the concept of place attachment

146  Steven Cooke and Kristal Buckley has been critiqued from a number of perspectives. Places – even if well known – can of course be exclusionary (Cresswell, 2015) as well as places of comfort. But this distinction also relies on a moral distinction which privileges depth over surface, a distinction critiqued by Yu Fu Tuan (1989), who argues that much of our engagement with places happens on the surface. Tuan argues that this distinction is based on a Western conception of experience that privileges intellect over sensory experience. However, the moment of aesthetic appreciation is the moment when we are not actively thinking about the past. In a city, the past is not only what we know about in a structured or analytical way, but what we can see (Tuan 1989: 234) but also hear, smell, taste and touch. This approach has been taken up within the affective and mobility ‘turns’ in the humanities and social sciences, which have foregrounded the multi-sensory engagement with heritage places and the idea that heritage can be ‘felt’ (Crang and Tolia-Kelly, 2010) and can form particular ‘landscapes of attachment’ (Kikuchi et al., 2014; see also Waterton and Watson, 2013b). At the same time, recent reconceptualisations of urban heritage have complicated the dualities of bounded and permeable sites and landscapes (Buckley et al., 2016; Hayden, 1995; Castells, 2010; Amin and Thrift, 2002) ‘through which sites are seen in dialogue, are mutually constitutive, and where the movement between places is part of the attachment to place’ (Cooke and Buckley, 2020: 170). The question arises, then, how traditional qualitative and quantitative research methodologies in the humanities and social sciences such as interviews and surveys can evoke this affective, often fleeting ‘surface’ engagement with place. Further, how might this information be included in planning regulations and heritage processes that often exclude non-traditional forms of evidence (Porter, 2006)? To answer these questions, two recent research projects investigating heritage and place attachment have incorporated visual research methodologies (VRM). VRM is the collective term for a set of methodologies that include visual material in research, either as a subject of the research or as part of the research process (Banks and Zeitlyn, 2015; Pink, 2007; Rose and Tolia-Kelly, 2012; Rose, 2014). Following these authors, we argue that VRM have the potential to explore the multi-sensory engagement with place that is sometimes obscured by ‘talk-only’ interviews, revealing the sometimes taken-for-granted in everyday life. In addition, VRM foregrounds the discussion between researcher and participants, being ‘inherently collaborative’ (Rose, 2014: 29). One common approach has been the use of photo-elicitation interviews, where research participants are asked to take images of places which are then discussed with the researcher (Beilin, 2005). However, the use of wearable digital video cameras also provides the opportunity to record movement through space. The increasingly common recording and sharing of daily activities (‘life-logging’) provides the ability to record the ‘in-­between places’ (Paulos and Jenkins, 2005), moving the focus from individual sites to landscapes. Such an emphasis on movement, particularly walking within and through urban environments, brings to mind the work of Henri Lefebvre where ‘urban

Visual research methodologies  147 walking enmeshes the body within a complex assemblage of timings and spacings, regulations and urban scripts, banal architecture and movement-styling apparatus such as traffic lights and pedestrian crossings’ (Yi’En, 2014: 218). Wearable technology has the advantage over handheld video cameras in that it allows participants to have their hands free during the research and may allow more ‘natural’ movement. Digital wearable technology can also record both audio and visual inputs, and therefore evoke other sensory information, particularly sound, that the participants experience during the research. This can be external – the sounds of passing cars, conversations with passers-by, the wind or bird song – but also the sounds of mobility: footsteps, breathing – occasionally laboured depending on the fitness of the participant and the terrain. Video recording thus provides a ‘vital, affective, fleeting and sensuous intensity’ which exceeds the visual realm. It might better be thought of as a sensory method, not simply because it blends what we see with what we hear, but because it evokes a sense of feeling – a feeling there and a feeling for the spaces and people, the animals, things, relationships, and practices that we seek to understand in our research. (Bates, 2015: 1) While some research has successfully used GoPro digital video cameras (­Witcomb and Mulcahy, 2018), participants in these studies were asked to wear audio-visual (AV) recording glasses as they engaged with the areas of study. This was for two reasons. Firstly, AV glasses move with the head of the wearer and so track where the participants look, whereas GoPro cameras often are placed centrally on the chest of participants and therefore may miss this information. Secondly, the AV glasses chosen – Pivothead4 – were not particularly recognisable as recording equipment and we considered that participants might be more comfortable wearing them. In both of these studies we gave participants the choice of where and when to meet. After a brief introduction to the research and to the technology, we asked participants to walk around the research area for approximately one hour. Most chose to do this on their own, although one did bring their partner. As part of the collaborative approach to the research process (Rose, 2014) we did not prescribe a route but did suggest an end point where we would meet them and collect the AV glasses. Some participants chose to return to the starting point, others chose to meet us at a different location. For the Ballarat East case study, the participants were asked to think about the three Ballarat Imagine consultation questions – What do you love about Ballarat? (values and attributes), What do you imagine for Ballarat? (future scenario) and What do you want to retain in Ballarat? (limits of acceptable change) (City of Ballarat, 2013) – and then to imagine that they were showing us their place. For the PastPort study, participants were given an internet-enabled smartphone with the browser already loaded to the PastPort site. They were then asked to use PastPort to guide their walk. At the end of the hour, we met the participants and collected the AV glasses. We then watched the films and transcribed them. They were analysed using a

148  Steven Cooke and Kristal Buckley grounded research approach (Creswell, 2013) and then coded. Follow-up interviews with participants were arranged and a mutually convenient and quiet time was agreed to watch the recording of their walk together with the researchers. To mitigate social desirability bias, we used the zoom research methodology (Pamphilion, 1999) as adapted by Philip Schorch (2015). This is a three-stage process where the participants guide the research conversation rather than the researcher leading with a set of prepared questions. Within the mutually agreed one-hour interview format, participants in both studies were first asked to describe what they were seeing on the film (‘tell us what’s happening here’). Any themes that were identified during this phase were used to develop follow-up questions. Finally, the themes identified during the initial coding of the films by the researchers were used to develop a final round of questions. This conversation was also recorded, transcribed and analysed by coding. Participants were offered the opportunity to receive a copy of their film. A number of themes emerged during both of these studies which have been explored in detail elsewhere (Cooke and Buckley, 2020; Cooke and Constantinidis, 2019). However, we would like to briefly provide an overview of these, before we use them to critically reflect on our VRM approach.

Multi-sensory engagement with place The VRM provided a very rich and intimate description of engagement with place. This included more commonly understood conceptions of heritage and the traces of the past in the present. For example: [Looking at a house being renovated] So here’s a beautiful one getting a bit of love. It’s like in that unique Ballarat style. And you can see up there the milk shop, which is another sort of thing from the past which seems to continue on in some form. [A] This participant talked almost constantly to ‘us’ while walking around Ballarat East. For them the sound of wind or bird song, the splashing of feet in puddles or rain on umbrellas and raincoats provided aural cues through which they could share the joys and frustrations of their place: And its rai-ning [‘raining’ in sing song voice]. Ballarat is known for its chilliness. I don’t actually mind it today. Although I would like some sunshine. There is a bus that runs along here that I’ve never caught…. Lovely hotted up cars. And the beautiful bird sounds, I love sitting in my backyard listening to all the birds, singing of Black Hill. And the wattle has come out too. Listen to those birds lovin’ the rain [A] Smells were also important:

Visual research methodologies  149 So there’s almost kind of a country feel to these back streets which I love, and lots of different kinds of people. You can smell smoke [sniffs]. People have got their fires on its so cold. And it’s almost October, but I suppose that’s the way it goes. Ohh puddle [walks/jumps in puddle] did I really want to do that? Good idea in theory. Now I’ve got wet feet. [A] For this participant, the embodied experience of showing us their place was also an adventure: transgressing literal boundaries was a way of expressing a shared pride in place. Climbing a closed gate to get to a particular view that they wished to share with us, they described and reflected on what they were doing. Aww. Now, there’s actually no way through here [whispers]. Perhaps if I can climb…Look at the blossom here. Definitely a sort of pride I think in people’s homes and gardens. Right we are going off road [checking glasses]. Yeah [climbs over gate]. We’ll climb over here. It’s a bit easier if it wasn’t wet…. Maybe I’m actually on private property. Yeah, I don’t think I can go through there [laughs]. Anyway, you’ve got a little peek over there [whispers]. Ok, let’s go back over. [A] In addition to what has been termed the ‘authorised’ heritage (Smith, 2006) that is included in the local planning schemes – the synagogue, the historic fire station, bluestone paving or renovated houses – the VRM provided the participants with the ability to show a multi-sensory engagement with place. This ‘everyday’ heritage (Atkinson, 2007) is constitutive of place attachment. While a number of participants in the Ballarat East study used the exercise strategically to critique council policy, others noted that fabric that was sanctioned as ‘heritage’ via official recognition was also part of the joy in the surfaces of everyday experience (Tuan, 1989). A blue plaque on a nineteenth-century house was discovered during the walk. This ‘official’ heritage status seemed less important than the aesthetic qualities it provided to the backdrop of daily rhythms: That bluestone building over there is quite beautiful. I don’t know what it is. I haven’t had occasion to stop there. Maybe I’ll go across now. [M] In the Port Melbourne PastPort research the focus was on bottom-up conceptions of heritage derived from community engagement with place (Lewi et al., 2016). Much of what was uploaded to the app, either by participants or by the researchers, took the form of representations of tangible fabric. Nevertheless, the use of the app revealed through the VRM reinforced the importance of everyday heritage. Some participants used PastPort as a tour guide, others used it as an invitation to wander. The desire to share stories of place, a ‘dialogic insideness’ (Cooke and Constantinidis, 2019) was revealed through the

150  Steven Cooke and Kristal Buckley multi-stage VRM process used. For example, during one walk the recording showed the participant lingering at a road junction, spending time exploring the information contained in the app. When we watched the recording, we wondered what was so interesting about the information relating to this particular location, or indeed whether they had been having difficulties with the user interface of the app. The episode was coded as such. However, the multi-stage research process – both the recording of the walk and the watching it back with the researcher – allowed this coding to be challenged. When we watched the recording with the participant, they told us that this was the location of an imaginary conversation with a resident that enabled them to feel comfortable in place. What was particularly interesting was the kinds of information that they wanted to share. Rather than relating specialist historical or architectural significance, they imagined themselves sharing intimate stories of place. Rather than become an insider themselves, they (the participant) wanted the resources to begin a conversation, one that they thought would be more easily started through stories of local people than through facts about the formal heritage of the area. Watching the recording allowed for critical self-reflection by the participant and a collaborative approach to the research. Each of the examples in this chapter also continue to unsettle defined categories of ‘heritage’ and ‘historic’. Such everyday encounters with urban landscapes point to the valuing of transitivity, rhythms and footprints (Amin and Thrift, 2002), an urban imaginary evoked through VRM. Indeed, given the multi-­ sensory engagement animated by these methods (Vannini, 2015) it is more appropriate to think in terms of sensorial research methodologies (SRM) rather than visual research methodologies (VRM).

Concluding remarks: pitfalls and opportunities In the two cases presented in this chapter, we have sought to go beyond looking, seeing, analysing and writing text to consider the geopolitics of ‘embodied, material encounter and engagement’ (Rose and Tolia-Kelly, 2012: 3). Based on these two cases, we consider that VRM evokes – at least in part – the experienced multi-sensory mobile engagement with place that may be missing from talk-only interviews. It is a very intimate process, and a privilege for the researcher to join the participants, however vicariously, in their place and share some of their meanings. The smell of wood fires, the sounds of traffic, of wind in the trees, of occasional rain pattering on the hood of a coat – these provide a nuanced, evocative understanding of sense(s) of place. As Tuan argues: ‘Objects and places are centres of value. They attract or repel in finely shaded degrees. To attend to them even momentarily is to acknowledge their reality and value’ (Tuan, 1977: 18). VRM does provide a way of recording and sharing the micro-interactions with our everyday ordinary heritage landscapes. The two VRM projects also provide a basis for articulating important dimensions of place attachment that are not generally captured by conventional heritage surveys routinely conducted at the municipal level. Such surveys form the basis of statutory protection schedules in the local planning schemes administered by

Visual research methodologies  151 local councils. When places are ‘missed’ by these surveys – or their recognition is limited to their architectural, aesthetic or historic values – the legal frameworks can fail to reflect community attachment and expectations. Better recognition of the experience of place attachment – including these small details of sensory engagement and the experience of movement – are potentially of substantial practical value. However, the methodology does have a number of drawbacks. It is significantly more time-consuming than established qualitative research methods such as a onehour semi-structured interview where the researcher might discuss with participants their engagement with place. For local councils to confidently incorporate the outcomes into planning mechanisms and decisions there is a need for the methods to be more widely and deeply applied, with obvious resourcing implications. Our methodology requires an iterative process of discrete stages: • • • • •

collecting the data via the AV recording glasses; analysing the recording, including transcribing any audio; watching the recording with the participants who narrate their journey; transcribing that interview; analysing the second transcript.

This is not only time-consuming for the researcher, but, in common with many VRM, it places an additional burden on the participants who are asked to commit more time to the research process. This resulted in a small number of participants declining the follow-up interview. We also found that on a small number of occasions the technology failed and did not record, leading to frustration on the part of both researchers and participants. One participant generously offered to retake their walk, but others understandably declined. To provide a back-up recording we added a smaller camera to the side of the AV glasses.5 While we considered that the glasses were not as obtrusive as GoPros, some participants were self-conscious about the visibility of the AV glasses and the ethics of recording, and commented on this either during the walk, or when narrating their experience to us. On the recording, one participant spoke to a passer-by: ‘Hello, I’m doing research. I have to talk to myself [laughs, and then talks to us]. I’m getting strange looks!’ [M] (see also Cooke and Frieze, 2017; Cooke and Constantinidis, 2019). Some participants were self-conscious about talking over the recording while watching it with us and needed prompting, disrupting the three-stage narrative methodology. In common with other small-scale intensive research methods (Creswell, 2013), the limited number of participants makes it difficult to generalise and draw broader conclusions, but we consider that within the HUL – with its emphasis on multiple layers of information – by including fine-grained, detailed descriptions of place, the VRM approach provides a way of capturing this intimate, multi-sensory and mobile engagement with place. Further studies could map and analyse participants’ routes across the suburb using Google Maps or some of the GIS applications that have been used so far in the City of Ballarat’s HUL process (Fayad and Buckley, 2019) to understand the intersections of these urban

152  Steven Cooke and Kristal Buckley transepts and whether there are particular ‘hot spots’ of attachment. It would also have been useful to compare and contrast Ballarat East with a newer suburb, which perhaps does not have such traditional ‘heritage’ features. For the evaluation of the PastPort app, the VRM method provided the opportunity for participants to critically reflect on both their use of the digital technology and their engagement with place. These pilot VRM projects examined sense of place within two different practical contexts and local areas in Victoria (Australia). Our experiences in working with urban heritage there and in other parts of the world suggest an urgent and growing desire to experiment and share new approaches, and to decentre the ‘expert’ heritage practitioner in the act of identifying how and why places and areas are important.6 As the work in Port Melbourne demonstrates, local councils and communities have a range of different needs for these understandings which extend beyond the operations of the legal frameworks for heritage protection. PastPort provides a means of incorporating the experiences and perceptions of newer and older residences, as well as visitors to the area. This divide can be a considerable challenge for cities that experience significant levels of tourism. Building place knowledge based on the diversity of memories and ordinary encounters can be further facilitated by digital methods of this kind. New methods for participation and understanding of place is a major pillar of the emerging practices within the network of cities. Despite the limitations outlined in these pilot projects, VRM provides an additional layer of information to contribute to established methodologies for understanding attachment to place.

Acknowledgements The PastPort project was funded by the Australian Research Council [Discovery Project: DP140101188], and the VRM research for Ballarat East was supported in part by an internal research grant from Deakin University’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences. We are indebted to all the residents who so generously gave up their time to participate in this study and to colleagues in local government in the respective areas of Port Phillip and Ballarat (particularly Susan Fayad and Catherine McLay in Ballarat). We would also like to thank Paulette Wallace, ­Donna-Lee Frieze, Georgia Meros and Dora Constantinidis who provided research assistance. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the session ‘Histories of Urban Heritage: Emotional and Experiential Attachments across Time and Space’, convened by James Lesh and Rebecca Madgin, as part of the meeting of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies, Huangzhou, China (2018).

Notes 1 The first version of the Burra Charter was adopted by Australia ICOMOS in 1979, and the current version is dated 2013. For the current and superseded versions, see: https:// australia.icomos.org/publications/charters/. 2 The examples used in this chapter have been used in Cooke and Buckley (2020) and Cooke and Constantinidis (2019).

Visual research methodologies  153 3 The experience of adopting and working with the HUL in Ballarat has been discussed in several published sources, including: (Buckley et al., 2016; Buckley and Fayad, 2017; Fayad and Buckley, 2019; and Cooke and Buckley, 2020). See also WHITRAP and the City of Ballarat, 2016; Pérez and Martínez, 2018. 4 http://pivotvision.com/. accessed 18 September 2019. At the time of writing, Pivothead are no long selling AV glasses. 5 http://gecocam.com/ accessed 18 September 2019. 6 See, for example, recent work in the Asia-Pacific region by the Organisation of World Heritage Cities to develop participatory tools for urban planning and sustainable tourism: https://www.ovpm.org/secretariat/asia-pacific/.

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Part III

Sites

10 Building emotional GIS A spatial investigation of place attachment for urban historic environments in Edinburgh, Scotland Yang Wang Introduction This chapter spatially investigates urban residents’ place attachment to the historic environment they experience in their daily lives by developing an EGIS (emotional GIS) – a methodology proposed by the author. EGIS combines the terms ‘emotion’ and ‘GIS’ to highlight the central concern of the research, which is to examine and understand place attachment from a geographical perspective. The methodology has been developed by building on online PPGIS (public participation GIS) mapping, whereby spatially referenced place attachment data are collected via a map-based survey, interrogated by spatial analysis and made visually explicit with maps. The chapter has two main objectives. The first is to spatially access historic places to which people form emotional attachments. In this vein, the study contributes to recent academic research that has demonstrated the importance of ‘considering the lived, sensorial and embodied experiences of, and emotional attachments to, historic spaces alongside traditional assessments of physical fabric’ within current heritage discourse and practice (Madgin et al., 2018: 596). The second objective is to examine the spatial relationships between such historic places and the places that people visit as part of their daily lives. In so doing, this chapter provides further evidence on the spatial attributes of place attachment that have been less explored. This chapter presents empirical work carried out in Edinburgh, Scotland, which focused exclusively on members of local civic associations and a Facebook group, Lost Edinburgh. Civic associations in the UK broadly refer to ‘those non-state, voluntary and local associations that aim at improving the quality of the built and natural environment’ (Hewitt and Pendlebury, 2014: 26). The burgeoning of civic associations dates back to the late-nineteenth century. Since their inception, they have demonstrated a constant and strong focus on ‘the quality of place and the value of local distinctiveness throughout their history’, battling against the erosion of local heritage and identity (Hewitt and Pendlebury, 2014: 26). The Lost Edinburgh Facebook group, established on 4 April 2011, is a public forum ‘dedicated to sharing old photos showcasing the ever-changing face of Edinburgh, its history and its community throughout the centuries’ (Lost Edinburgh, 2019). Followers share, comment on and learn from the images and videos of Edinburgh’s different places in the past that are posted by like-minded individuals. Such activities spark

160  Yang Wang discussions on topics including historic places lost through demolition, obliteration or alteration in the course of urban growth. These topics have made Lost Edinburgh an ‘emotional community’ where its members share collective attachments to the past and may ‘generate the social capital needed to mobilise against the further destruction of the past’ (Gregory, 2015: 45). These particular groups of people, especially members of civic associations, many of whom are often labelled as ‘expert citizens’, claim to represent wider public opinion by filling the gap between the state and the lay citizen in the participatory process of local governance (Hewitt and Pendlebury, 2013, 2014; see also Craggs, ­Geoghegan and Neate, 2015). Therefore, though some dispute their role due to the narrow demographics and background of their members, it is from this perspective that the values of EGIS as a tool for facilitating public participation in planning and conservation can be tested. This is discussed in the final section. The chapter is structured as follows. The opening literature review outlines the key themes involved in spatially exploring urban residents’ place attachment to the historic environment. A summary of the methodology then follows, providing contextual details about the case study area and describing how the spatial data were collected and analysed. The third section presents the research findings. The fourth section interprets the development of EGIS. The final section discusses the findings, the future of place attachment mapping and the opportunities for using EGIS as part of public participation and urban development initiatives. Place attachment, civic engagement and place attachment mapping Place attachment has developed as an ‘umbrella’ concept for understanding the affective bonds (predominately positive) between people and places (see Lewicka, 2011 for an extensive review). It is a fundamental psychological condition of human existence but may only become (more) palpable when being disrupted by, for example, changes to place (Manzo, 2003). Changes to place that cause (or are believed to cause) disruptions to place attachment overwhelm people with threats to their sense of continuity, stability and place-related identity (Brown and ­Perkins, 1992), and result in subsequent emotional reactions such as anxiety, grief, sadness or loss (Fullilove, 1996). In cases of incongruous and unsympathetic changes to place induced by proposed development projects, such disruptions to place attachment may not only cause upset feelings, but may also further result in people’s engagement in civic actions to resist the proposals regardless of their potential value (Manzo and Perkins, 2006). One such example is the place-­protective actions seen in the wind farm projects in the UK (Devine-Wright, 2009). In considering the psychological force of public opposition, Devine-Wright (2009) suggests that instigators ‘seek to anchor and objectify changes in such a way as to enhance rather than threaten’ their place attachment (p. 437). A recently published article by Madgin et al. (2018) highlighted the significance of understanding the London Southbank Undercroft skaters’ powerful emotional attachments to their skate spot, which led to a 2015 campaign against the

Building emotional GIS  161 relocation of the venue. In Edinburgh, where the present research has been carried out, citizen-led campaigns to resist changes to the historic environment have been the focus of local news media and civic associations. The Save Leith Walk campaign, launched in 2018, is a recent example. Local residents fought against the demolition of a historic two-storey sandstone block because it is a well-loved place to shop, work and socialise (Rae, 2019). What underpinned the desire to prevent changes in the London Undercroft case and in the Edinburgh’s Save Leith Walk case were the strong attachment and sense of identity and ownership ‘derived from cumulative lived experience of places’ (Madgin et al., 2018: 587; see also Jones and Leech, 2015). However, to begin to understand the affection that people have for a particular historic place only after a prospective development disrupts it may be too late. The geographies of ‘the affective connections between bodies and spaces that transformed spaces into places’, particularly the affective connections with historic spaces, ought to be uncovered and thereby ‘rescued’ prior to developments or redevelopments (Jones and Evans, 2012: 2322). Turning to the place attachment literature, people’s affective connections to various localities that ‘could be linked with place protective action’ (Brown, R ­ aymond and Corcoran, 2015: 51) have been approached more effectively and intuitively in a few mapping studies. Central to these mapping studies is the spatial operationalisation of the place attachment concept that turns verbal emotional data into spatially referenced information. Brown and Raymond (2007) considered people’s ‘special place’ as the ‘prima facie place attachment measure’ and produced a density map of the geographic distribution of such special place locations. The research revealed how such mapped place attachment could alert planning authorities to where introducing landscape changes may put people’s attachment at risk (Hewitt and Pendlebury, 2014: 26). In a later study, they and their colleagues operationalised place attachment as ‘home range’ and asked participants to identify areas that they most identified with and depended upon (Brown et al., 2015). The study further discussed the potentials of place attachment mapping for identifying where place-protective action would be strongest or where provocative development proposals would be more likely to be acceptable (Hewitt and Pendlebury, 2014: 26). Therefore, the first objective of this research is to map urban residents’ everyday experience of place attachment to the historic environment. The spatial attributes of place attachment A mapping method is more than a tool to render place attachment spatially. It also provides a methodological approach to consider the spatial attributes of place attachment. A central concern in the literature about the spatial attributes of place attachment has been the associations between people’s movements through spaces and place attachment. David Seamon’s work considered how place attachment may arise out of everyday movements: ‘many everyday movement patterns and places of rest are part of a habitual time-space lattice’ (Seamon, 2014: 13), people unconsciously ‘follow a more or less regular regimen of actions, experiences, situations and occasions all grounded in particular places and paths of

162  Yang Wang movement among those places’ (Hewitt and Pendlebury, 2014: 26). The ‘habitual regularity’ contributes to people’s identification in their everyday life and to their sense of continuity which, once disrupted, may cause feelings of emotional distress (Seamon, 2014: 14; see also Seamon, 1980). Such unconsciously developed place attachment from habitual everyday movements is largely spatially dependent as it is associated with spatial variables such as the route and spatial extent of the movements, place of residence and the distance between place of residence and the locations of various ‘places of rest’. The associations of place attachment with people’s movements through spaces were also theorised in the mapping study of Brown et al. (2015). The study linked the concept of place attachment to home range, whereby a person’s home range – which is initially a biological definition of the area ‘traversed by the individual in its natural activity of food gathering, mating, and caring for young’ – is comparable to (or at least has much in common with) the area to which he or she would develop an attachment (Brown et al., 2015: 43). Zia et al. (2014) proposed a similar idea which drew together the concepts of sense of place and ‘human ambit’ which is another biological term that refers to an individual’s movements through spaces. In this respect, the spatial locations of historic places or areas where people form emotional attachments may not be a complete random selection, rather they are associated with their everyday movements. Customarily, it has been a methodological challenge to identify spatially located experiences of place using psychometrics and, as a result, this has been overlooked in the established measurements of place attachment. In comparison, the mapping method enables the investigation of the spatial–emotional relationship between people and places through the analysis of spatially referenced data. This study, after identifying the spatial distribution of historic places to which people feel attached, applies a spatial analytical approach to examine the associations of people’s place attachment to the historic environment with their everyday movements.

Method Case study area This research was carried out in Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland. Edinburgh has a great concentration of both built heritage and residential population in and around the city centre. Seventy-five per cent of the buildings in the city have been listed and are in better condition than those in most other historic cities in the UK (Edinburgh World Heritage, 2005). Lying at the centre of the city are the medieval Old Town and the Georgian New Town which, together, have been on the list of World Heritage Sites since 1995. Fifty-five per cent of Edinburgh residents live within four kilometres of the city centre, which makes Edinburgh the fourth most densely populated city in the UK (The City of Edinburgh Council, 2013). The historic environment experienced as part of the everyday lives of Edinburgh’s citizens generates the assumption that deep emotional attachments to the historic environment exist within this city.

Building emotional GIS  163 This assumption is reinforced by the fact that Edinburgh has a vibrant ‘urban associational culture’ (Hewitt and Pendlebury, 2014: 26). The distinct historical character and rich historical remains of Edinburgh may never have been created without the constant pressure from the residents. Patrick Abercrombie described the challenge faced by planners in the immediate post-war years to foist development and redevelopment plans on Edinburgh: ‘nothing is so likely to arouse controversy and opposition as change or destruction of any of the ancient human landmarks of this city (Edinburgh)’ (Abercrombie and Plumstead, 1949, A Civic Survey, p. 53, cited in Madgin and Rodger, 2013: 518). Instrument A map-based survey was designed to collect two main areas of spatially referenced data. First, in order to ground people’s place attachments to the historic environment on maps, this study drew on Brown and Raymond’s (2007) work to spatially operationalise place attachment. Participants were requested to mark on a map of Edinburgh any historic places that they believed were significant or special to themselves. The mapping was done using the online PPGIS toolkit Maptionnaire, where respondents could place pins on the map to identify specific locations of historic buildings, streets, gardens or spaces, and vary the map scale to more precisely locate a place using the ‘zoom’ function. They were encouraged to indicate as many locations as they wanted. They were also asked to name the places they identified in follow-up questions. Following Brown and Raymond (2007) and Lin and Lockwood (2014), identifying a ‘special place’ demonstrates a certain degree of reliability as a proxy for the spatial operationalisation of place attachment. Second, in line with Seamon’s work, data that could spatially reflect ‘place[s] of rest’ in people’s everyday movements were collected. Participants were instructed to identify any places or areas they visit as part of their daily lives – such as where they work, socialise, go shopping, send children to school, buy a cup of coffee in the morning, commute, walk dogs and so on. It was assumed that the spatial distribution of these places would have an effect on the special historic place selection. Question items for participants’ socio-demographic profiles were also included. Sampling Members of nine local civic associations and Lost Edinburgh followers participated in the survey. Those associations were: the Cockburn Association (The Edinburgh Civic Trust), Edinburgh Old Town Development Trust, Broughton History Society, the Dean Village Association, Grange Association Edinburgh, Inverleith Society, Colinton Amenity Association, Portobello Amenity Society and the Cramond Association. Apart from the Cockburn Association, which has a citywide remit, these groups focus on residents living within their immediate vicinities. It should be recognised that some residents were members of more than one of these associations, and could also be followers of Lost Edinburgh.

164  Yang Wang Data collection The data were collected between 1 April and 30 September 2018. The survey invitation was emailed to members of the nine civic associations and was posted on the Lost Edinburgh Facebook page. Data preparation and analysis In order to display and analyse the spatial data, some preparatory work was required. Each mapped historic place was assigned a unique ID and was ascribed two profiles: a place profile, consisting of its geocoordinates (longitude and latitude), name and designation; and a person profile, which comprised the socio-­ demographic profile of the participant who mapped it. The designation asset of each place was checked using the Designations Map Search1 developed by Historic Environment Scotland (the leading public body ‘to investigate, care for and promote Scotland’s historic environment’, Historic Environment Scotland, 2019a). Table 10.1 shows a segment of the first five entries of the special historic place (SHP) location datafile created for the analysis. The spatial distribution of SHPs was thereafter displayed on a series of maps. To examine the effects of spatial distribution of the mapped daily life place locations on the SHP selection, the SHP dataset was treated as a spatial point pattern dataset and submitted to spatial point process analysis. A spatial point pattern, such as the SHP, can be thought of as the realisation of an underlying spatial point process. It can thus be described by formulating an explicit mathematical model of the underlying process. If a model can be developed that fits the data well, the estimated values of the model’s parameters provide summary statistics which can be used to explain the underlying process that determines the spatial phenomenon being studied when they are related to scientific hypotheses (Diggle, 2014). Spatial point process modelling is widely covered in many statistics textbooks (e.g., Baddeley, Rubak and Turner, 2015; Diggle, 2014). It has been applied in the urban context for studies of social networks, employment, mobility, crime and health, but has been less used in environmental psychology. In this research, using the language of point process, the SHP distribution was assumed to follow an inhomogeneous Poisson process with an intensity function depending on a spatial covariate which is the density of mapped daily life place (DLP) locations. An inhomogeneous Poisson process model with a loglinear intensity function taking the form of the following equation was fitted to the SHP data:



  u   exp.  Z  u  

where λ(u) is the estimated intensity of SHP at u, θ is a parameter vector that needs to be estimated and Z(u) is the varying density of DLP available at u calculated based on kernel estimation. Residual analysis, inhomogeneous K function and leverage analysis developed by Baddeley and colleagues were employed to diagnose the

Table 10.1  A segment of the first five entries in the SHP location datafile Longitude

Latitude

Designation

Respondent ID

Education

Family history of living in Edinburgh

102

Sighthill Drive

−3.281693

55.920460

None

12

First degree

Third generation

103

Silverknowes Parkway

−3.267510

55.971955

None

12

First degree

Third generation

104

Pennywell Road

−3.250065

55.970250

None

12

First degree

Third generation

45

Lauriston Castle

−3.285599

55.960348

Category A listed building and Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes

16

First degree

Second generation

46

Edinburgh Castle

−3.182602

55.948623

A group of category A, B, and C listed buildings, and Scheduled Monument

16

First degree

Second generation

Building emotional GIS  165

Place ID Name

166  Yang Wang mis-specifications of the models. Detailed theory can be found in Baddeley et al. (2005), Baddeley, Moller and Waagepetersen (2000) and Baddeley, Chang and Song (2013). The analysis was carried out using the ‘spatstat’ package (v 2.0-1) (Baddeley, et al., 2015) in the R statistical environment (R Development Core Team, 2016).

Results Overall, 427 SHPs and 710 DLPs were mapped by 135 respondents. Each respondent mapped at least one SHP and one DLP. The average number of SHPs mapped per resident is 3.16, and 5.26 for DLP. This sample comprised more men (52%) than women (48%). Thirty-seven per cent were aged between 25 and 54, followed by the age group 55–64 years old (28%). The oldest age group (65 years or older) accounted for 21% while the youngest (less than 34 years old) made up 14%. A large majority of respondents reported degree-level educational attainment (72%) and claimed home ownership (85%) either outright or with a mortgage. Over half (54%) were newcomers to Edinburgh. Of the 427 SHPs, 194 historic places including individual buildings, groups of buildings, green spaces, streets and areas were mentioned. Over 60% (119) of these historic places had been listed, scheduled2 or selected for the Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes.3 Figure 10.1 shows the spatial distribution of the 427 SHPs in Edinburgh, revealing an aggregation of SHPs towards the city centre. Figure 10.2 displays the spatial distribution of SHPs within an area of central Edinburgh. A visual inspection suggests that places with a relatively higher density of SHPs were gardens, parks and large green open spaces. Many of these places are also popular visitor attractions, such as the Royal Botanic Garden, Holyrood Park and Calton Hill. Table 10.2 lists the ten most frequently identified historic places. Spatial point process modelling revealed a statistically significant association of SHPs with DLPs (Z = 52.06, p < 0.001). Residual analysis, inhomogeneous K function and leverage function results indicated significant misspecification and poor fit of the model.4 Figure 10.3 presents a perspective view of the leverage function. Sharp peaks indicate areas with large values of leverage, which means that the presence of SHP within these areas had a substantial effect on model fit. It can be seen that the model has extreme high values of leverage (>0.4) in central Edinburgh. The leverage of a data point in fact depends mainly on its related covariate value. The SHP with the highest leverage is where the most extreme value of DLP density was observed, for example, places like ­Edinburgh Castle where the lowest DLP density should be seen.

The creation of EGIS The use of the online PPGIS technique for data collection, the cartographic mapping and the spatial analysis together make up the basis of an EGIS (emotional GIS) – a methodological approach for registering, displaying and exploring

Building emotional GIS  167

Figure 10.1  Spatial distribution of SHP locations. Notes: Areas shaded in grey are conservation areas. The boundary of Edinburgh was defined by its 597 Data Zone areas (Data zones are the key geography for the dissemination of small area statistics in Scotland. The data zone geography covers the whole of Scotland and nests within local authority boundaries [Scottish Government, 2014]). Source of polygon shapefile of Data Zone: Copyright Scottish Government, contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right (2019). Source of polygon shapefile of conservation areas: Copyright City of Edinburgh Council, contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right (2019). This map was created using the ‘tmap’ package (v 3.3-1) (Tennekes, 2018) in R.  

 

emotional data, which could innovate mapping studies of people–place emotion and their practical applications. First, EGIS allows for the collection and creation of large volumes of spatially referenced emotional data using PPGIS. If made into an online open data input system, it could facilitate the collection of large volumes of volunteered geographical information (VGI) data for academic use. For example, researchers would be able to retrieve spatial emotional data matrices from an EGIS database and make links between the emotional data and other spatially referenced information such as census data to address various research questions about place attachment and the historic environment. Second, it produces a series of maps and thus enables place attachment to be made spatially explicit, which is a necessary step for place attachment research to

168  Yang Wang

Figure 10.2  Spatial distribution of SHP locations in central Edinburgh. Source of the background map: Google (n.d.). Roadmap of central Edinburgh, zoom level = 14, Retrieved 11 November 2019, using the ‘get_map’ function in the ‘ggmap’ package the (v 3.0.0) (Kahle and Wickham, 2013) in R.

Table 10.2  Ten most frequently identified historic places Rank

Place name

Frequency

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Edinburgh Castle Royal Botanic Gardens Holyrood Park National Museum of Scotland Calton Hill Princes Street Garden The Meadows Palace of Holyroodhouse The New Town Arthur’s Seat

38 21 18 15 13 9 8 7 7 6

Building emotional GIS  169

Figure 10.3  Perspective view of the leverage function for the point process model.

achieve its impact on planning or decision support (Brown et al., 2015). Planners and policymakers could use the EGIS as a crowdsourcing tool to acquire citizen knowledge and to better evaluate a specific development proposal in terms of its impact on people’s lives and place attachments to the historic environment. EGIS could also be used to support public participation in spatial problem solving and decision making that would affect urban historic spaces. Third, EGIS takes the spatial investigation of place attachment beyond simple cartographic mapping to explore meaningful spatial patterns of place attachment and its associations using spatial statistics. Finally, EGIS offers a fascinating tool for civic engagement (discussed later).

Discussion This research applies a spatial perspective, as well as spatial statistics, to the study of residents’ everyday experience of place attachment to the historic environment. It provides interesting insights into the spatial distribution of historic places where people form emotional attachments. It also proposes an EGIS methodology to explore, understand and characterise the spatial attributes of place attachment. The mapping findings show that participants identified a large number of localised historic places with which they form emotional attachments. Such places, according to Pendlebury (2009), are commonplace, mundane or everyday heritage. They do not meet the criteria for a listed building, a scheduled monument or inventory status designation, and may even not be located in conservation areas (see Figure 10.1 for their coincidence with conservation areas). They are,

170  Yang Wang therefore, not afforded any legislative protection. Some, like Leith Walk, might also be in a derelict condition. However, the affection people have for them should not be disregarded by planners and conservationists. They are as important as those which have been designated for their special historic values in terms of maintaining people’s attachment. Scannell and Gifford’s (2010) study found city dwellers’ attachment to the natural aspects of a place was stronger than attachment to its civic aspects. The SHP clusters in green spaces corroborate this finding. There have been also many studies on how urban green spaces – such as parks and gardens – as a readily available type of nature, offer restorative benefits for individuals’ health and well-being (e.g., Carrus et al., 2013; Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Knez et al., 2018). These places, therefore, foster emotional attachment within residents. In this sense, the history and historic meanings of these places might be aspects of secondary importance in forming place attachment. The top ten list of the most frequently identified SHPs highlighted the emotional significance of popular visitor attractions in a historic city to its residents, which is a topic that has received little attention in the literature. Bartie and Mackaness (2016) mapped the visual exposure of popular visitor attractions in Edinburgh. Those on the SHP list, including Edinburgh Castle, Calton Hill, Princes Street Garden and Arthur’s Seat, were found to have especially high visual exposure. It is thus meaningful to think about how residents perceive the prominence of these landmarks in their city, and how it might have led to their attachments. The poor goodness of fit for the spatial point process model indicated that everyday movements could only partly explain the developmental process of attachment to the historic environment. Future research could consider developing a predictive point process model that can better characterise the SHP distribution by adding more spatial covariates such as the abovementioned visual exposure of different places. A useful perspective to think about when considering other covariates is to distinguish the unconscious and self-conscious development process of place attachment. Lewicka (2013) distinguishes two types of place attachment: place inherited and place discovered. Place inherited refers to an unconscious or taken-forgranted people–place relationship that derives from a deep familiarity with a place, most commonly observed in long-time residents. Place discovered means the deliberate choice of a particular place of residence, followed by ‘active involvement in its goings-on’ (Lewicka, 2013: 162). The study found these two types of attachments tend to cluster with different groups of variables describing people’s social and personality profiles which relate to two fundamental modalities of human existence: communion and agency (for detailed discussions, see Lewicka, 2013). This typology also applies to, and is of particular value for, the delineation of the spatial attributes of emotional relationships between people and the historic environment within the context of city life. On the one hand, people’s daily/weekly rhythms within urban historic spaces create an unconscious (or less self-conscious) experience in place which leads them to form the type of attachment comparable to the place inherited dimension. On the other hand, people sometimes travel (perhaps virtually) for some particular cultural, social

Building emotional GIS  171 or recreational purpose, and these contribute to a more self-conscious way of forming relationships to historic places that corresponds to the place discovered dimension. Unlike the unconscious experience in place which may largely be influenced by spatial movements, the self-conscious process is primarily driven by human agency, social conditions of people and the unique attributes of the historic places that draw people’s attention. In this respect, the model only explained the unconsciously developed attachment conditioned by everyday movements. Future studies could consider spatial covariates that would account for the self-conscious developmental process. Different spatial covariates in a point process model can be further viewed as representing different dimensions of attachment (e.g., self-conscious and unconscious dimensions). In this sense, a well-established spatial point process model is the spatial equivalent of a place attachment scale, which would measure place attachment in a spatial way and measure place attachment dimensions that traditional psychometric scales fail to capture. Limitations There are some limitations to the research. The first is the spatial operationalisation of place attachment. It should be recognised that the term ‘special historic place’ cannot capture the full spectrum of place attachment to historic places. In addition, unlike the early place attachment mapping studies, this study did not ask respondents to assign values of specialness to the historic places they identified (c.f., Brown and Raymond, 2007). There were also sampling issues: the results are not generalisable to the overall residential population of Edinburgh. Building an EGIS for civic engagement The sampling issues involved in PPGIS research go beyond questions of generalisability, however. Brown (2012) argued that the heart of PPGIS is public sampling and participation, not the GIS, but, as far as the author is aware, none of the earlier place attachment mapping studies have defined the public or engaged with participation theory. This Edinburgh study and its use of PPGIS to create EGIS can be viewed as the first attempt to consider these issues by choosing members of local civic associations and Lost Edinburgh followers in public sampling. Within the local-state relationship context, these groups, especially local civic associations, were recognised as ‘well placed to represent community views to local authorities and others’ (English Heritage report Heritage Counts, cited in Craggs et al., 2015: 374). They usually have ‘well-educated and networked membership of professionals’ with sustained commitments to civic actions over a considerable time period (Hewitt and Pendlebury, 2014: 35). This professional expertise allows them to claim a level of authority over their views (Hewitt and Pendlebury, 2014). Their connections with their local community councils, the city council and other influential bodies (Hewitt and Pendlebury, 2014) also enable a sense of empowerment among community members (Manzo and Perkins,

172  Yang Wang 2006). These make local civic associations a good starting place to demonstrate the usefulness of EGIS in facilitating civic engagement. Local civic associations could deploy the EGIS to engage directly and routinely with local planning authorities. They could use EGIS to obtain crowdsourced data to discover historic places that should be preserved in order to sustain local identity, attachment, lifestyles and livelihood, and to present empirical evidence when evaluating a specific development proposal or plan that may affect such places. On the other hand, the city council and the community councils could use EGIS to engage with civic associations and the wider public in spatial problem solving and decision making that would affect urban historic spaces. As a result, EGIS functions in a way that is comparable to what Hester (1993, 2010, 2014) claimed to be ‘the sacred structure’: an inventory of ‘sacred places’ that ‘exemplify, typify, reinforce, and perhaps even extol the everyday life patterns and special rituals of community life’ (Hester, 1993: 273). EGIS could help to facilitate civic engagement in other ways. First, a publicly accessible EGIS could host online campaigns and provide a basis for campaigners to legitimise their wishes related to place attachment, and to negotiate with private developers or public-sector agents over unsympathetic development proposals. Second, the EGIS could be used as a pedagogical interactive digital mapping tool capable of teaching young people to appreciate historically significant spaces and to understand how socio-spatial processes extend through time – a viable strategy for developing their interests in history, enhancing their place attachment and fostering civic engagement (Stefaniak, Bilewicz and Lewicka, 2017). The future of place attachment mapping and EGIS This research has proposed an EGIS methodology based on place attachment mapping. In fact, the term ‘emotion’ encompasses both positive feelings like joy and fondness, and negative feelings such as fear, sadness and dislike. In humanistic cartographic research undertaken on the emotional relationship between people and places, the most commonly mapped emotions have been those of fear and discomfort of urban residents (Griffin and McQuoid, 2012). Researchers challenge current place attachment studies that favour the exploration of the positive affects with ‘eulogized spaces’ but ignore the negative and ambivalent feelings related to unloved places (Madgin, Bradley and Hastings, 2016; Manzo, 2003). Therefore, it would be worth incorporating these emotions into place attachment mapping in future studies. Exploring a spatial division between positive and negative people–place emotions also helps us understand the politics of place attachment when a place is appreciated by some people but not valued by others. The ways in which mapping could be integrated into a quantitative or qualitative research design for a better understanding of place attachment phenomena and related themes should also be appreciated. For example, Jorgenson and ­Stedman (2011) suggest that ‘[o]nce the boundaries of the spatial objects have been recorded for each individual, supplementary instructions can ask participants to identify the location of physical features they consider to be of particular importance’, or they can be asked to rate their ‘beliefs about a place, the feelings associated with it, and

Building emotional GIS  173 the behaviours that are undertaken there’ (pp. 800–803). In their research, Jorgenson and Stedman coded physical variables of the mapped areas (including the ‘size of the mapped area’, ‘the degree of fragmentation of the area’, and ‘whether the area of attachment included waters’) and measured their associations with environmental attitudes (Hewitt and Pendlebury, 2014: 26). Brown et al. (2015) also saw a future in linking place attachment mapping to the assessment of place-inspired behaviours such as place-protective or place-enhancement behaviour. Apart from working with a structured questionnaire, follow-up interviews could also be carried out to obtain contextual details to triangulate map findings. The most valuable aspect of mapping, however, lies in its ability to generate insights into the spatial attributes of place attachment as well as the role that spatial variables play in the development of place attachment. In this research, the first-­order inhomogeneous Poisson point process modelling with a single covariate might be an oversimplification, but provides a useful first step in this emergent field of research. Future research could incorporate more spatial covariates in the model, or consider a more detailed and essentially multidimensional model to examine the spatial attributes of place attachment and its genesis. Alternatively, other spatial analytical approaches may be considered. For instance, distance-based analysis for a point pattern approach could be used to examine whether home location would affect the spatial distributions of the historic place locations to which someone feels attached. Finally, if place attachment is seen as constantly changing (Low and Altman, 1992) and thus fluid and adaptable (Brown and Perkins, 1992), then affective bonds between people and place are not fixed in space and time. Rather, the use of an EGIS can collect spatial-temporal emotional data over time to track changes in place attachment. This could allow researchers to consider why certain historic places that were once emotionally significant are now less valued, while other places with historically formed emotional attachments remain important today and may well continue to be in the future.

Declaration of conflicting interests The author declares no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements The author is grateful to the administrative staff of the local civic associations in Edinburgh and the founder of the Lost Edinburgh Facebook group for their generous assistance in data collection. Special thanks also go to the two book editors and the author’s supervision team for their great support.

Notes 1 The Designations Map Search helps to identify the designated asset of a designation site by place, address, postcode or names/references of the designation site. It can be

174  Yang Wang accessed at https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Viewer/index.html?appid=18d2608ac12840 66ba3927312710d16d. 2 Historic Environment Scotland maintains a schedule of monuments of national importance. Scheduling is the process of adding monuments to this list. Scheduling is not the same as listing and uses different legislation (Historic Environment Scotland, 2019c). 3 Scotland has an Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes which is a list of its gardens and designed landscapes that are ‘grounds intentionally laid out for artistic effect’, and which are of national importance. Sites included in the Inventory do not have the statutory protection as listed buildings or scheduled monuments do (Historic Environment Scotland, 2019b). 4 Only leverage function result is presented as it is relatively easy to be understood for readers who do not have a statistic background, and a full discussion of all three analyses is beyond the scope of this chapter.

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11 Observing attachment Understanding everyday life, urban heritage and public space in the Port of Veracruz, Mexico Ilkka Törmä and Fernando Gutiérrez Introduction Urban conservation has traditionally focused on monuments and other physical evidence of the past, or on intangible cultural manifestations mainly associated with the arts and folklore (Lowenthal, 1985; Graham, 2002; Stubbs, 2004; Tweed and Sutherland, 2007). Recent UNESCO recommendations go beyond the conventional categorisation of heritage. They approach heritage as a matter of negotiation: any cultural asset has the potential to be considered heritage. The relativist approach shifts the question of what heritage is to the ways heritage unfolds (Veldpaus, 2019: 90). This fresh approach is important for studies on people’s emotional reaction and connection to places. An emerging paradigm of conservation calls for a shift from monuments to people, social functions, communal memory, experiential and emotional values; from preservation to sustainable use and development of historical urban places (Tweed and Sutherland, 2007; Madgin et al., 2018). Observing people using urban spaces help us to identify those communal or social values and nurture them. In this chapter, we adopt systematic map-based, time-serial observations of people that are able to reveal everyday life practices in and rhythms of historic places – an aspect of heritage that has traditionally been overlooked in conservation practice. The external appearance of buildings can be noted instantaneously. The patterns of everyday life, however, unfold gradually. Time-serial observations thus allow sufficient intervals for the recording and representation of the rhythms of urban life. Recorded on a map and combined with other methods, observations can represent patterns of occupation and appropriation, and their relation to other properties of space (Whyte, 1980; Latham, 2003; Hall, 2012). Mapped observations are valuable for heritage conservation not only as documents of social practices, but also by their epistemic nature. Robust observations of people in space capture such time-space routines (Seamon, 1979). In combination with other methods, observations might also shed light on how collective meanings are created at small urban scales such as a square: meaning is not simply written in representations – it is a material and networked process (Bender, 2010 cited in Griffiths, 2016). As representations of at once time and space, this approach offers an innovative paradigm for analysing the everyday experience, value and use of historic places.

178  Ilkka Törmä and Fernando Gutiérrez The case of the Plazuela de la Campana (the Plazuela), a small square in the historic centre of the Port of Veracruz in Mexico, illustrates how the local community appropriates the square daily and how social and cultural practices are distributed across the place (spatialised). Veracruz is one of the oldest colonial port-cities in the continental Americas. The characteristic tropical Mexican-­ Caribbean culture is still alive in a few squares of the historic centre, especially in the ubiquitous music and noisy public life. Observations, together with interviews, and analysis of the urban form and urban policies, help to explain the revitalisation of recent decades. Our study on the Plazuela intersects with the literature on both urban heritage and public space. A key question in our research was how to trace the links between space, culture and everyday life, and whether this can inform us how heritage value forms. In this case study, we suggest that the interdependence of the urban fabric of historic areas, traditional culture (such as folkloric music and dance) and everyday life is key to understanding the urban heritage of Port of Veracruz. The first section of this chapter discusses how observing and mapping everyday life overcomes the artificial categorisation of tangible and intangible heritage. The second section introduces the methodology for the case study and shows the role that observations played in this research. The third section analyses the historic and geographic context and findings of the Plazuela case. The chapter concludes that observations of everyday life progress the theorisation of urban heritage and place attachment by shifting the focus from traditional fabric-­ oriented conceptions of heritage to the broader qualities and experiences which make places.

Understanding urban heritage through observations on everyday life and spatial culture The use of the terms ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ creates an artificial dichotomy in conservation practice. Places are at once physical and social, rendering tangible and intangible heritage inseparable. While the interdependence of tangible and intangible heritage is recognised in the abstract (UNESCO, 2018), our purpose is to understand it beyond viewing traditions simplistically as belonging to the site of their origin. Culture has often been conceived as ‘an immaterial and disembodied entity, composed of ideas, customs, knowledge and shared beliefs and values’ (Gregory et al., 2009: 448). However, culture is profoundly spatial. Space integrates cultural and physical qualities to ‘express the power relations between different groups and reflect ongoing patterns of cultural change’ (Low, 2000: 50). In this way, space gets history and identity – it becomes a place. From the perspective of spatial culture, mapping offers the possibility of writing the spatial conditions of everyday life. Mapping is in this sense an interpretative method, not simply an illustrative projection (Griffiths, 2016: 255). This argument recognises everyday life practices not only as a representation of culture but also as a place-specific act. The material qualities of a place shape occupants’ behaviour, movement and activities, which are crucial to understanding a place (Seamon, 1979; De Certeau, 1984).

Observing attachment  179 Observational research on urban life has roots in the fields of urban planning and urban design. Observations provide these disciplines with practical evidence for the human-centric design of streets (Appleyard and Lintell, 1972), squares (Whyte, 1980) and neighbourhoods (Gehl, 2001). Methods of mapping people in cities have influenced, for instance, anthropological studies on cultural meanings of plazas and public spaces in Latin America (Richardson, 1982; Low, 1997, 2000). Observations of quotidian activities recorded in maps and research diaries reveal a ‘geographic narrative that may be difficult to describe with words’ (­Monmonier, 1993: 189). Participant observation is a staple method of ethnographies, which typically aims to discover and interpret patterns in a group’s mental activities and social relations. However, by highlighting map-based and time-­ serial observations, we want to emphasise the discovery and interpretation of patterns in collective spatial activities and spatial relations. This emphasis is not to suggest the physical, the social and the spatial are separate, but to portray spatial culture in more sophisticated and people-centred ways. It is to go beyond the long-standing philosophical and disciplinary division of the social and the spatial and a simplistic view of their interaction. All space is fundamentally socialised: it is constantly structured socially in everyday actions (Lefebvre, 1991; Hillier and Hanson, 1984). Space does not determine social relations. It mediates them through people’s spatial understanding of the society that is not confined to the perceivable physical space (Hillier and Leaman, 1973). Similarly, mapped observations of people’s movement and activity do not represent mechanistic relations with physical space. They are snapshots of how people produce, create and make use of their local spatial and social possibilities. Recording the movements of people at historic places can also be considered alongside other map-based analyses of urban forms, which enhance the possibilities for interpretation in this chapter. Together, observations and their recording via maps form micro-­geographies that can provide either confirmatory or complementary information to traditional place attachment methods such as ethnography and quantitative questionnaires. Fuller micro-geographies might even inform what gives rise to and sustains spatial culture (Low, 2000; Latham, 2003; Gutiérrez, 2017). They may illustrate aspects of everyday life which ultimately give cultural heritage value to specific places, and may indicate what properties of the place are relevant to the meaningful conservation of places. Everyday life can be understood as a culture with specific spatial qualities. The specificity makes it relevant to discussions of urban heritage. The term ‘everyday life’ often evokes a range of ordinary activities such as playing, walking, commuting, reading, sitting and so on. These are typically repetitive activities, and they are necessarily distributed across a place (Gregory et al., 2009: 223). Sociability and conviviality are fundamental components of everyday life and so must also be recognised as an important representation of urban life (De Certeau, 1984; Amin, 2008). On their own, practices of everyday life may seem universal but, coming together in a particular way, they become an important representation of what people value in cities, including historic places. Historic urban places may be valued precisely because of activities or memories associated with them. Quotidian practices are, therefore, revealed through people’s usage patterns of

180  Ilkka Törmä and Fernando Gutiérrez urban places. When such patterns are meaningful to a community, they may well even be regarded as heritage. Accordingly, an investigation into the connections between spatial culture and heritage calls for mixed methods, both observing spatial patterns and inquiring into their meaning. Written, visual and mapped observations are necessary to expose the relationship between space and tradition (Low, 1997, 2000).

Research methods Our study on the Plazuela de la Campana combined participant observation, systematic observations of people recorded on maps, archival research, semi-­ structured interviews, questionnaires conducted on site and uploaded to open Facebook groups, and analysis of urban morphology. The methodology of the Plazuela case study developed in two stages. Our initial goal was to raise awareness of the square and its events as a cultural asset. For this purpose, we documented the Plazuela’s historic and current uses and analysed its urban form. The documentation was presented in an exhibition in the Casa Principal Gallery in Veracruz during September and October 2016 (Gutiérrez and Törmä, 2017). Our exhibition presented preliminary findings supported by graphic material (maps and boards as a gallery installation) and also collected memories of the Plazuela and proposals for its future. As part of the exhibition, we also organised a public debate about historic public spaces in Veracruz and their heritage significance. In hindsight, the exhibition was an exploratory stage. It gave rise to more articulated research questions of how the Plazuela was successfully revitalised after a period of notoriety and neglect, and how perceptions of it have changed. The methodology and research questions were then refined in the second stage of the study. The final combination of methods allowed us to triangulate our findings and results, meaning weaknesses in some methods were addressed through other complementary methods as part of strengthening the overall research design and ensuring as robust a study as possible. The exploration stage: observations, morphological analysis, interviews and archival analysis Mapped observations

In the first research stage in 2016, we employed systematic observations of activities and movement within the Plazuela which were then recorded on digital maps. The first aim was to picture the cycle of transformation of the Plazuela from tranquil daytime mode to the peak fiesta hour and back to weekday calm. The second aim was to investigate patterns of use and interaction, their frequency, distribution and relation to the specific form of the square (Gutiérrez and Törmä, 2017). In this way, the time series of observations describes the social possibilities available within the Plazuela at different times of the day and night. On Friday 22 July (4 p.m. to midnight) and Monday 25 July (8 a.m. to 2 p.m.), we recorded visitors’ locations and activities and then traced their movement every

Observing attachment  181 two hours. We marked the visitors on printed maps and then redrew them later using a computer-aided design (CAD) programme. Visitors were recorded sitting, standing, passing and conversing in the square, revealing their distribution and numbers as a snapshot at different times. The movement was recorded by tracing the paths of people moving in the square for 10 minutes at a time to portray the distribution and density of movement in the Plazuela. Participant observation Our research is based on our previous knowledge of the Plazuela. One of the authors has been a regular visitor to the Plazuela since the early 2000s. Over the last two decades, the square has become recognised as a place in local folklore and has become important within local traditions. We had the advantage of one author having grown up in the Port of Veracruz and the other author experiencing the Plazuela initially as a tourist. These two perspectives, insider and outsider, helped us to understand the Plazuela over two decades. We had interesting and ongoing conversations around, for instance, the cultural authenticity of the events. We saw the events as at the same time constructed from borrowed traditions and an expression of the idiosyncratic urban life and ambience in the Port of Veracruz. During three years of intermittent fieldwork and participant observation, we became regular visitors to the Plazuela and engaged with the events and visitors in different ways. We made personal notes of our impressions of the place, and took photographs and videos at different times of the day to clarify and nuance our mapped observations. We avoided identifying individuals but rather recorded collective social practices (Gutiérrez and Törmä, 2017, 2020). Morphological analysis Our analysis of the morphology of the square enhanced our interpretation of the mapped observations. We used gradient maps of visibility and accessibility to describe the form of the square. These maps reveal the varying probability of visitors to the Plazuela seeing and being seen, encountering or avoiding other people in different parts of the square. Overlaid with the observations of activity and movement, this morphological analysis made apparent how people interact with the physical properties of the Plazuela. Visibility means a field of possible viewsheds, determined by opaque boundaries like buildings. It links the immaterial and the material constitution of the social (Brighenti, 2010: 4–5). As a bounded field within space, visibility brings territories into the picture and, with territories, issues such as communication, control and privacy. We produced maps using visibility graph analysis (VGA), a computational method developed and tested within space syntax theory (Turner et al., 2001). There is, for example, a significant correlation between the degree of visibility of street spaces and the ways people tend to move through those spaces (Turner and Penn, 1999; Desyllas and Duxbury, 2001). Two measures were used in our analysis, both based on a fine grid of viewpoints overlaid on the map. A local measure of visual connectivity describes immediate visibility. It is derived from the

182  Ilkka Törmä and Fernando Gutiérrez number of direct visual connections from each point to other points covered in the analysis. A global measure, ‘visual integration’ (Hillier, 2007: 268), describes visual accessibility. It takes into account chains of visual connections from each point to all others. Therefore, it reveals areas that remain exposed or invisible to a greater extent than direct visual connectivity. However, the study area set for the visibility graph analysis affects the resulting visual integration, because as a global measure it could be calculated ad infinitum. We set the limits of the study area to cover parts of the immediately adjacent streets and alleys until the next street crossings. This study area illustrates the effect of the neighbouring street spaces on the visibility of the square, but not the effect of the wider city structure. The visibility graph analysis was computed with the depthmapX software (Turner et al., 2001; Varoudis, 2011). Interviews and memories of the Plazuela The interviews with visitors to the Plazuela provided crucial details for this study. We asked visitors about regular music and dance events – which were also identified in our observations and digital maps. We interviewed Miguel Ángel García Cortés (Don Miguel), the organiser of the events in the Plazuela. We also interviewed the Director of the Museo de la Ciudad (City Museum) who works as a social historian of Veracruz. The two interviews were conducted to understand different narratives and perceptions of the events held in the Plazuela. Don Miguel highlighted his goal of rejuvenating a derelict square. By contrast, the Director, as a historian, interpreted the music and dance within a continuum of Veracruz’s public culture and as an identifiable phase in the history of public spaces in Veracruz. Furthermore, from July to August 2016 we collected 25 posts and comments from two open Facebook groups, ‘Veracruz a través del Tiempo’ and ‘El Viejo y Nuevo Veracruz’. These posts contained memories of the square from years or decades ago, and may indicate how people have felt attachment to the Plazuela. These personal memories put our contemporary observations in a broader perspective. Archival analysis Don Miguel and the Director also granted us access to historical documents, such as photographs and historical maps from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. As space is not localised, but a broad schema (Hillier and Leaman, 1973), these documents provided an important temporal and geographic backdrop for observations in the present-day Plazuela. Historical maps suggest the changing urban context of the Plazuela. In the walled nineteenth-century city, for example, the Plazuela is midway between the harbour and the central city blocks and a gate from which the city extended towards a railway station. Today, the wall has been demolished, the freight harbour has been relocated, the railway system has changed and the city has been extended in all directions. That is, the relative centrality and geographic importance of the Plazuela have decreased as the city has transformed and expanded, partially explaining the decline of the square and the motivations for revitalising it.

Observing attachment  183 The complementary stage: questionnaires and interviews While the exploration stage principally studied how the Plazuela has been used, in the complementary stage we wanted to find out why it has been revitalised. The questionnaire was designed to test our hypothesis that the newly introduced cultural events have changed the perception and heritage value of the square. Moreover, the results of the questionnaires highlighted possible causes of the changes and so sharpened our research. The questionnaire asked about social contacts at, visits to, activities in and memories of the square, as well as opinions about its current appearance, the events it hosts and additional demographic information. The questionnaire included multiple-choice answers and participants could complete it in less than eight minutes. It was disseminated at different times, just as we had varied our times of observing the square. We received 125 responses, 82 of which had answered all the questions; 83% were completed online and 17% were collected on site. The online questionnaire was shared on the open Facebook sites and via the Culture and Tourism Department of the municipality. Besides studying the distribution of the answers, we searched statistical dependencies between any two questions. To confirm a dependency, we calculated Spearman’s Rho correlation coefficients between the questions, and based our analysis on statistically significant (confidence level 99%) correlations, focusing on correlations that are 0.25 or higher in absolute value. In the second stage, we conducted semi-structured interviews with different actors involved in the music and dance events in the Plazuela. We interviewed Don Miguel again, as well as his daughter who helps run the events, the Director of Culture and Tourism of the Veracruz Town Hall, a musician, local artists and frequent visitors. We also analysed documents from the personal archives of Don Miguel, such as newspaper clippings and photographs from his diaries. These documents evidenced the initial reception of the Plazuela’s and Don Miguel’s experimentation over the years with different kinds of events (before settling on music and dance). This personal archive allowed us to understand that music and dance had a particular appeal within the local community which made them successful in rejuvenating the Plazuela.

Plazuela de la Campana and music in the historic centre of Veracruz The Plazuela de la Campana was laid out during the Spanish colonial period and the Ordinances of the Indies of the late sixteenth century. The Ordinances proposed a particular ‘grid-plan’ or ‘chess-board’ urban layout (Crouch and Mundigo, 1977: 400). The town hall, the main cathedral, the administrative centre and commercial areas were placed around the zócalo (the main plaza), which became a public space of political power and civic life. The urban and social function of the central plaza continued for centuries. There were also secondary squares, plazuelas or p­ lazoletas (small public spaces often close to churches, convents or monasteries), which served almost as an extension of churches and hosted events such as local festivals and religious ceremonies (Foster, 1960; Socolow and Johnson, 1981). The Plazuela

184  Ilkka Törmä and Fernando Gutiérrez was initially the rear courtyard of the Santo Domingo monastery of the Dominican Order, built in the early seventeenth century. The square included a bell to call to religious services. Like most of the ecclesiastical buildings, the Santo Domingo monastery and its square were nationalised by the state in 1857, during a period referred to as the War of Reform. After some years of demographic change in the historic centre in the mid-­twentieth century, the area decayed and became dangerous. The Plazuela, like many other public spaces in the centre of Veracruz, turned into a shady urine-reeking quarter of prostitution and homelessness. At the same time, historic areas in Latin America from the Spanish colonial era were becoming recognised as being of architectural or historic significance. UNESCO and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) began discussions about how to protect archaeological sites and historic centres in the 1960s. The Normas de Quito (the Quito Charters) of 1967 and 1977 identified the importance of historical sites in Latin America: such places were clearly understood to be urban heritage. Following UNESCO’s recommendations, Latin American countries set agendas for the conservation of these urban areas. Legal protection of historic centres by the Mexican national authorities began in the early 1970s, and these laws incorporated the historic centre of Veracruz. A crucial question for our study became why the introduction of cultural events revitalised the Plazuela. Historically, Veracruz has been described as a bustling place with multiple cultural influences drawn from Spain, Cuba and other Caribbean cities (García de León, 2009, 2011; Malcomson, 2012). These influences had an impact on local music, dance and urban life that characterise the local culture. The Afro-Caribbean influence on Veracruz’s culture, along with its trade connections to other ports, meant that Cuban music genres, such as danzón (a slow partner dance), became important in Veracruz. Music and danzón events took place in communal courtyards from the colonial period until the late nineteenth century (García de León, 2009). In the twentieth century, many of these courtyards, along with the squares, decayed and became sites associated with ‘undesirable’ practices related to crime and prostitution. They were no longer sites of ‘traditional’ use. Danzón had lost popularity in Veracruz by the 1960s (Malcomson, 2012). As part of a national attempt to ‘rescue’ historic centres and folklore, local authorities created the Institute of Veracruzan Culture (IVEC) in 1987. Its remit was to foster and revive traditions by organising public cultural events and by teaching folk music and dance. They also developed conservation strategies for historic centres such as the restoration of façades and streets. The increased popularity of Cuban music in public spaces has reinforced the idea that these genres are something ‘Veracruzan’, even though they are not (Malcomson, 2012). The government introduced music and dance events into public spaces such as the zócalo, Parque Zamora and Callejón La Lagunilla. However, in the Plazuela, the events were not instigated intentionally by government strategies.

The revitalisation of the Plazuela with music and dance The historic centre of Veracruz declined between the 1970s and 1990s. Don Miguel, a retired architect, returned to Veracruz in the mid-1990s and found the

Observing attachment  185 Plazuela in a poor state of repair. Motivated by his memories of this area as his childhood playground, Don Miguel developed a strategy to revitalise and clean the Plazuela. He established Café Auténtico Veracruzano (The Authentic Café of Veracruz) facing the square from the ground floor of a building in the middle part of an alleyway. Don Miguel negotiated with the local authorities to obtain a concession that allowed him to set café tables out in the Plazuela. He was also granted unconventional permission to organise cultural events on the square, as long as they were free for all visitors. Extending the café to the square and arranging events not only supported his business interests but also led to the revitalisation of the Plazuela, reviving traditions and folklore, and creating an atmosphere of ‘old Veracruz’ for the local people and tourists. The conservation strategy of the historic centre lent authority to Don Miguel’s efforts to revitalise the Plazuela (Gaceta Municipal, 1996). Music and dance events aimed at attracting visitors to the Plazuela created a positive image for the decayed square (García Cortés, 2011). The popularity of folk music and dance was remarkable, and Don Miguel started hiring bands to play a variety of popular genres, of which Cuban Son genres were the most popular (for the process of revitalisation of the Plazuela with music and dance, see Gutiérrez and Törmä, 2020). At the beginning of the 2000s, the municipality brought the danzón events to the Plazuela. In consequence, Plazuela de la Campana was transformed into a square for traditional music and dance. The urban form, use and sociability Urban culture manifests itself at Plazuela de la Campana not only in the form of music and dance performances but also in practices of everyday life – social routines and the varied uses of the square. In the Plazuela, it is not only music and dance per se that attracts visitors, but also the sociability of the place. It stems from the friendships which people have made there and their personal and collective memories of the square. Experiencing the Plazuela as regular visitors, we noticed that the pleasant social atmosphere brings people together and fosters social bonds during the weekend music events, while other visitors enjoy the tranquil square on weekdays. Our observations demonstrate that social activity transforms the square across the days and hours, making it possible to discern the repetitive rhythms of the Plazuela, as shown in Figure 11.1. The overall form of the Plazuela, originally a courtyard of the Dominican Order, has changed little since its inception. The urban context around it, however, has changed dramatically. At the same time, the domestic form of a courtyard has been appropriated in many ways. Space may be defined ultimately as a realm of particular possibilities to its inhabitants (Gibson, 1979 cited in Lapintie, 2007). In the Plazuela, the particular possibility is the privacy the square offers in the very centre of the city. Tensions have always existed at the Plazuela between its private and public features. Privacy within the public square is possible, providing for both charming and challenging outcomes: there is a sense of cosiness that engenders community and provides quiet corners for romantic rendezvous, but the square also provides refuge for rough sleepers and unsavoury or unpopular

186  Ilkka Törmä and Fernando Gutiérrez businesses. A recent example of contestation occurred with the opening of a gay bar in the Plazuela in early 2018, which was unpopular with some of the square’s regular visitors. The bar closed in 2019. Visitors take advantage of the spatial and social qualities of the square for different purposes: passing, trading, mingling, resting and kissing (Figure 11.2). Apart from during the dance events, no-one sits in the most unseen corners of the site, except for one embracing couple when this corner is shaded from the sun. Otherwise, daytime users divide themselves between two major sitting places. The most popular place is the highly visible area close to Arista Street. We witnessed elderly people using the same benches in this space daily. As William H. Whyte (1980) noted, people tend to linger where there are others around. The other popular sitting area, at the north edge of the square, offers different benefits. The benches there have less footfall and are little seen from the streets. Consequently, depending on the shade, it is a popular place for naps, fondling couples, rough sleepers or others seeking solitude, while still having a good view of the square itself. Our analysis of people’s visibility in the square also shows that Don Miguel has his café where the alleyway meets the square – in the visually most integrated spot. He can easily see everyone in the square from his café, and his café can be seen from both streets. Anyone passing the square must also pass in front of his café. The placement of the café in this strategic location has contributed to the longevity of his business and his status as a public persona in Veracruz. A remarkable feature of the Plazuela is regular events. The square is transformed from a quiet place during weekdays to a weekend evening fiesta (Figure 11.1). The time series of observations on the Plazuela, a relatively little visited square during the daytime, reveals two distinct modes. Social possibilities within each of these modes are radically different. The daytime mode relies more on the static or physical spatial qualities of the square. The event mode transforms the spatial dynamics of the square but depends on regularly organised events. The events both resist the secluded character of the square by filling it up and make use of the intimacy that it offers. During cultural events, attention turns to the stage at the back of the square, a spot which is not visually integrated into the surrounding streets and is not normally popular (see Figure 11.2). The businesses around the square set out their tables around this prime spectator area (Figure 11.3). Early birds, typically elderly people, reserve public benches by the stage in anticipation of the performance; some people group together to socialise. The area close to Arista Street, most used in the daytime, becomes a secondary dance floor that younger visitors without reserved seats tend to occupy for weekend events. The eastern edge of the square is thronged with passers-by and spectators. The rhythmic gathering affords a range of social opportunities – casual, planned, informal and enabled by the dance code (Figure 11.3). Music, dance and the crowd in the small square also offer a distinctive atmosphere to be enjoyed. Some, especially elderly people, attend the music and dance events simply to enjoy the ambience. Our study confirmed, through the questionnaire, that strong social networks and connections to place have been formed by regular visits to the music and

Observing attachment  187

Figure 11.1  Selected observation hours showing the change from a weekend night to weekday noon in the Plazuela.  

Source: Authors’ elaboration.

188  Ilkka Törmä and Fernando Gutiérrez

Figure 11.2  Visibility analysis of the urban form and recorded people.  

Source: Authors’ elaboration.

dance events at the Plazuela. Around half the visitors have made ten or more friends in the square, and an even larger proportion of the participants know several people who regularly visit it. The questionnaire evidenced that the more often people visit the square, the more acquaintances they make there (Gutiérrez and Törmä, 2020). Importantly, people coming for dance and music also come

Observing attachment  189

Figure 11.3  The Plazuela during music events and weekdays.  

Source: Authors’ photographs.

to the Plazuela to see their friends – dual motivations are very common. People personally value the place due to the friendships they have made there and for the cultural activities held there, suggesting a diversity of cultural value for and place attachment to the Plazuela. The place itself becomes cherished through the events that are held there.

190  Ilkka Törmä and Fernando Gutiérrez

On the relation of everyday life, place attachment and heritage Experiencing the Plazuela during different seasons and investigating it with different methods allowed us to understand how it had become a cultural asset. Its cultural value had been built by the continuous work of a few individuals, such as Don Miguel, who organised the popular music and dance events with little support from the local authorities. However, the cultural value now perceived by visitors to the Plazuela is not simply in the folk performances, but also in the friendships they have created and continue to sustain. Furthermore, our study shows that the physical space and the historical context are relevant to the popularity of the events. Set in the historic centre, the events may appear to casual visitors as part of nostalgic ‘old Veracruz’. Music and dance events have been organised in other public spaces in the historic centre of Veracruz. However, most questionnaire respondents regarded the events and the Plazuela as complementary, which might have to do with music and dance events historically having been organised in Veracruz’s courtyards – as well as the shape of a courtyard being particularly suitable for social dance events. The past notoriety of the Plazuela is increasingly forgotten: today it is most closely associated with the conviviality of the weekend fiesta. The Plazuela is now remembered fondly as a residential square, a playground and a romantic meeting place – what it once was and has become again. A distinctive spatial culture is produced not only through the traditional music and dance performed regularly on the square, but also through other patterns of everyday life. The cultural significance of the Plazuela stems from this crossover of urban rhythms: frenetic preparation for events counterbalanced by calm moments on the square – a man having a siesta, a teenage couple kissing, men playing dominoes in the quiet of the morning, youths gathering together in anticipation of an event, elderly people enjoying the atmosphere around them (Figures 11.1 and 11.3). We suggest that patterns of urban life should be understood as essential to the production of heritage value for historic places.

Conclusions Understanding the everyday life, connections and value of historic urban places requires mixed methodological approaches. We argue that ethnographic immersion in the site combined with mapped and time-series observations are important because they can record time–space routines of people. In combination with other methods which look to the past, present and future, our observations illuminate how heritage value is created through the spatial culture of the square. People value and become attached to heritage places as individuals, but there are also broader social patterns and processes operating which can be revealed by studying the micro-geographies of places (Lewicka, 2011). Our record of movements, flows and activities, coupled with memories collected in the questionnaire and through interviews, demonstrates how the Plazuela generates attachment in different ways. The memories describe activities from decades ago, revealing how people have become attached to the square over time. Some of the activities

Observing attachment  191 recalled, including dancing and courtship, were also observed in the present-day square. The characteristics of the Plazuela quite possibly engender these activities. We also suggest from our morphological analysis and the Plazuela’s history that the privacy offered by its particular form of a courtyard at the very public centre of Veracruz is an important aspect of its appeal. Music and dance events are also strongly associated with the Plazuela. Mexican cultural heritage policy does not generally address the broader cultural aspect of heritage places creating and strengthening place attachments in historic centres. Furthermore, a greater understanding of what makes a place unique and how cultural heritage value is both created and strengthened is useful not only for the conservation of historic places but also for enhancing urban environments more generally.

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12 It’s only a joke if you don’t take the fitness industry seriously Photographs as archives of place attachment at the early twentieth-century gym Kali Myers On a blog post on his website, Dave Draper (2000) – an internationally acclaimed bodybuilder with several International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness (IFBB) Mr America, Mr Universe and Mr Olympia titles to his name – reflected on his early training days at the ‘all-male’ ‘beach-removed site of the Muscle Beach Gym’ in 1930s Santa Monica, California: Two long steep staircases penetrated the eternal dimness, illumination coming from three strategically located 60-watt bulbs…The concrete floor was cracked and bulging, the walls crumbling and the ceiling 12 feet overhead was sagging, especially where the ground floor bar leaked beerlike brownish ooze. An ankle deep puddle formed near the squat rack each winter and nobody used the shower or toilet except in emergencies…Milk crates, old 2X4’s and splintered plywood nailed together by nearsighted musclebound carpenters made up most of the benches and racks…[there were] a dozen Olympic bars, bent and rusty, tons of plates scattered throughout the 2,500 square foot floor, [and] dumbbells up to 160’s that rattled at broken welds. For some, Draper’s description of the grotty and crowded ‘Dungeon’ – as the gym was affectionately known – might induce disgust. Yet for those who – whether as a professional, an everyday enthusiast or a weekend warrior – love the grind and who form part of the transnational physical culture community, Draper’s portrayal of the oozing, rusted and chaotic Muscle Beach Gym may well describe, as in Draper’s own words, ‘unquestionably the greatest gym in the world’. Further, Draper’s nostalgia for Muscle Beach Gym is rooted not just in the walls and paraphernalia of the place, but in the visceral bodily experience that it induced: Here bodybuilding began, embryonic. The original, not the imitation. Here exercises were invented, equipment improvised, muscle shape and size imagined and built, and an authentic atmosphere existed like a primal ooze. You were awash in basics and honesty. Most significantly for this chapter, Muscle Beach Gym’s importance as an urban place of everyday memory (Sleight, 2018) is specifically, explicitly tied to

It’s only a joke if you don’t take the fitness industry seriously  195 Draper’s emotional attachment to this now lost historic site: ‘I loved it then, the memory more now.’ Draper’s reminiscences of the Muscle Beach Gym and the bodies – including his own – built within its walls call attention to the connection between body, emotion, memory and place. Draper’s recollection of the Muscle Beach Gym is an embodied memory: it contains echoes of feeling in both the emotional and physical sense. It is a memory that incites all the senses: the dimly lit sight of the space; the sound of grunting and of plates clanging; the touch of iron against calloused hands; the smell of mould emanating from the disused bathroom; the taste of sweat and chalk. And it is a memory that incites the heart: the sense of community and camaraderie bouncing between bodies and barbells. This visceral recollection demonstrates – as Wells (this volume) reminds us – that body and emotion cannot be disentangled. But it also reminds us that the physical and sentimental feelings associated with an emotional response can similarly not be extricated from the place that evokes it. This chapter takes the early twentieth-century gym ‘seriously’1 as a site of everyday heritage, as a place made significant by the intersection of community and individual place attachment (Hayden, 1995). It reads the emotional connection to the gym as a physical, spatial and social phenomenon. The deep emotional attachments forged between groups of people and everyday places, such as gyms, where they act out their lives are drivers of urban experience and creators of heritage. Yet these everyday sites of heritage and expressions of place attachment are often too ordinary to enter the remit of heritage governance or practice (Lesh, 2019). They are often too unremarkable to be formally recorded and, thus, memorialised. Yet the individuals and communities who form emotional attachments to such places have their own ways of preserving their memories of them. Like Draper, they may represent their memories in words: blog posts, anecdotes, shared stories. They may record them in their bodies: remembered patterns of movement or paths taken through a place or city. They may – as is the focus of this chapter – capture them through the lens of a camera, the embodied space of the photograph becoming a metonym for the embodied memory of the place and feeling it depicts. To draw on art historian W.J.T Mitchell (2005: 68), whether considering the subject or the viewer, ‘images both “express” desires that we already have, and teach us how to desire in the first place’. This chapter examines photographic material related to the early twentieth-­ century gym for evidence of the expression of emotion as social practice and bodily experience. Adopting an archivally based methodology which is sensitive to the spaces between the record – to the voices which help us to locate the historical relationships that exist between (heritage) places and people (Schofield, 2014) – this chapter offers a means of understanding how people have historically formed and expressed emotional attachments to places. In this way, the chapter offers a means of interpreting the historical archive which contributes to the process of uncovering the intersections of community, place and emotional attachment. To do this, the chapter draws on findings offered by the emotional turn in the discipline of urban history regarding the formation of attachment to place as it occurs in the (emotional) body. Specifically, the chapter follows scholars such as Joseph Ben Prestel (2017), Monique Scheer (2012), Barbara Rosenwein (2016)

196  Kali Myers and particularly Nicolas Kenny (2014), who writes of emotions as social processes or practices impacting identity, values, beliefs and human relations. This chapter is concerned with how heritage scholarship and practice might interpret historical sources to find how people felt, treated and used places in the past. In this way it extends and expands the historical method in a manner which can be useful to contemporary heritage studies and processes of heritage management.

The gym as heritage place Gyms have had and continue to have demonstrable importance to physical culture enthusiasts across the world (Silk, Andrews and Thorpe, 2017). Gyms that act as a touchstone for the international physical culture community – such as Louie Simmons’ powerlifting powerhouse Westside Barbell and bodybuilding meccas such as the original Gold’s Gym in Venice, California and Doherty’s Gym in multiple sites across Melbourne and Perth, Australia – are important to a transnational physical culture community, whether or not specific individuals have had the opportunity to actually visit them. Yet for those who are not part of this community, the idea of the ‘gym’ as site and space inspires a particular kind of dismissiveness. As Draper’s description of Muscle Beach Gym implies, in the mid-twentieth century, gyms were associated with a lack of both hygiene and social respectability. From the mid-twentieth century, gyms and gym bodies became sites of moral panics about sexuality and gender (Miller, 2001). Across the twentieth century, the gym has been envisioned as a homosocial space and so has been associated with homoeroticism and homosexuality, or at least its possibility (Duncan, 2007). Similarly, the increasingly muscular physiques of women competing in bodybuilding in the 1970s and 1980s triggered fears of women becoming men/masculinised, and eventually led to a different set of competition – and social – criteria to judge the strength, symmetry and attractiveness of men’s and women’s bodies (Ndalianis, 1995). The gym has also had to contend with a Western philosophy based on the Cartesian dualism of mind and body, leading to the assumption that those who work on their form do so at the expense of their mind (Penny, 1993). Yet the community gym has been a popular, if often masculinised, urban space since the nineteenth century. Eugen Sandow’s Institute of Physical Culture at 32a St James Street, London was one of the first notable examples (Daley, 2002). In the mid-twentieth century United States the typology exploded in popularity, and sites such as Muscle Beach and Tanny’s Gyms proliferated (Pollack and Todd, 2016). In postwar Australia, schools of physical culture similarly expanded in popularity (Scharagrodsky and Varea, 2016) and notable sites in Sydney included the Grace Brothers Gymnasium at their flagship Broadway store, and the Langridge School of Physical Culture in George Street. Today, the form continues in functional fitness gyms around the world – such as CrossFit ‘boxes’ – whose key selling point is their community. Community gyms are places which evidence both intense localised attachments, and whose meanings, mythologies and sensorial impacts for bodies expand beyond national borders (Stewart, Smith and Moroney, 2013).

It’s only a joke if you don’t take the fitness industry seriously  197 Health and fitness, and its associated places of exhibition and enactment, are inherently inflected with and reflective of gender (Saltonstall, 1993; Duncan and Klos, 2012; Waitt and Stanes, 2015). The gym as social space has also been critiqued by scholars of race for its inherent whiteness (Lobo, 2014). Yet the emotional attachment to the community gym as place is open to – and formed by – all kinds of bodies. The early twentieth-century gyms examined in this chapter are places where all kinds of bodies are present and in the process of forming and expressing emotional attachments. In reading the photograph as metonym of embodied memory, researchers should be cognisant of broader social inequalities which privilege and make familiar particular memories and experiences (and their expression). The images selected for this study could indeed be critiqued for extending the assumption and memory of the community gym as masculine and white space. As an early foray into using photographs as historical methodology to uncover emotional attachment to place in the past, this chapter leverages the familiar in order to show what the photograph makes possible for historical interpretation in a heritage context. It is hoped that the methodology provided herein will in the future be used to examine archival photographs which capture the experiences and emotions of bodies whose voices are too often neglected. This chapter responds to Wells and Stiefel (2018: 18), who argue for a mode of heritage practice which is more people centred and ‘more responsive to people and human needs’, through offering a reconceptualisation of how to approach and read historical sources which collapses binaries of quantitative/qualitative, objective/ subjective and factual/emotional in relation to the built environment (Madgin and Lesh, this volume). I contend that it is precisely the gym’s interstitial existence between the poles of trivial (as everyday sites of dismissiveness for a broader society) and vital (for those who use and love them) which inspires such strong emotional responses. Sites such as the early twentieth-century gym – simultaneously trivial and vital – thus provide insight into social processes and identities which can act as an index of broader cultural heritage values and beliefs. As Prestel (2017: 14) demonstrates, comparing the practice of gymnastics in Cairo and Berlin in the early twentieth century provides insight into both the minds and bodies of those cities’ inhabitants: At the turn of the twentieth century, physical exercise, such as gymnastics, spread in the Egyptian and the German capitals. This development was not only part of a new conceptual knowledge, but the practice of physical exercise also had a lasting material effect on the muscles, nerves, and fibers of urban dwellers’ bodies. Sites of emotional attachment are shaped by and shape the bodies which use them, with resultant importance for the cities and societies they inhabit (c.f. de Gelder, 2009). Our physical and sensorial interactions with the places we occupy form emotional reactions. The sound of soft music and clinking cutlery creates an atmosphere of contentment at a restaurant; the sight of a warm blanket on our couch can evoke comfort; the smell of disinfectant in a dentist’s waiting room can set us

198  Kali Myers on edge. Depending on the intensity and duration of these emotional responses, we may form a particular emotional attachment to the place that inspires it. As Madgin et al. (2018) demonstrate for a London skatepark, ‘knowledge’ of place was ingrained in the bodies and minds of skaters through muscle memory and sensory input such as sound: it was the physicality of being and performing in place which forged the skaters’ sense of ownership over the site, and which led to their fight against its relocation. A similar process is evident in the formation of emotional attachment to gyms, and this can be read in the photographs in this chapter through a focus on the visual relationship between body and space, between foreground and background, in the movement implied by such images and in the broader social metaphors they conjure. Finally, taking gyms seriously as sites of emotional attachment and everyday heritage in a historical trajectory that encompasses the first half of the twentieth century responds to and transcends two major challenges at the intersection of history of emotions and cultural heritage scholarship. In Theatres of Memory, Raphael Samuel (1994) pointed to a distrust of the historical authenticity of heritage’s presentation in popular culture. Samuel’s polemic implies a truism which has dogged the heritage studies field, namely that the tastes and preferences of the public need to be mediated through the lens of expertise in order to be designated heritage (Smith, 2006). This assumption underpins much contemporary heritage practice and has proved a difficult obstacle to surmount in otherwise well-intentioned attempts to expand and democratise heritage as both a social and academic field. The emphasis on a particular mode of expertise – rather than on emotional connections and community expertise – to evaluate the value and significance of places is echoed by the issue that, if it is not to be found written down in the archive, history as discipline struggles to interpret non-traditional source material: it relies on that which is objective and recorded rather than that which is bodily, intimate and ephemeral (Kenny, 2014). By offering a means to read historical photographs as expressions of emotion – as physical and sentimental interaction with and response to place – this chapter proposes a means of integrating archivally based methods with people-centred interpretation into the processes of heritage management.

Imaging historical expressions of emotion and place attachment Examining photographs as archival evidence of the ways in which emotion is constituted by being in time and place offers the beginnings of an answer to the question posed by historian Sarah Pinto (2017: 104): ‘What, if anything, does a historical focus turned towards the emotions add to our understandings of the past?’ Here, the understanding that is sought is the connection between body, place and emotion that explains the desire people have (historically) had to go to and be in particular gyms; and what that then tells us, as historians or heritage researchers, about how attachment is formed and how it changes over time. Following anthropologist Paul Connerton’s suggestion that ‘individuals conceptualise the spaces they occupy as a function of their body’, Kenny’s (2014: 11–12) examination of emotions in an urban context provides a means of

It’s only a joke if you don’t take the fitness industry seriously  199 interpreting the language of emotional expression as ‘providing the “metaphors by which we think and live”’. If emotions are simultaneously indexes of metaphors of thought and ‘something that people do in a specific social context’ (Prestel, 2017: 13), then the sites which provoke these emotional expressions must act as repositories of contemporaneous values and ideals. The challenge for historical research into heritage places lies in the issue that the sensorial experiences which these sites inspire – and the bodily practices which respond to them – must be filtered through textual, visual and spatial languages in order to be shared and thus to be examined and understood. This focus on ‘language’ in a broad sense is important. In order to be expressed, an emotion must pass from an individual body into a shared encounter: what is individually felt must be processed through some form of language in order to create a ‘cultural meaning’ that can then be read/understood by others. It is in the moment of sharing that experience ‘becomes social phenomenon, decipherable to many on the basis of common encounters’ (Kenny, 2014: 18–19). To that end, this chapter seeks individuals’ and communities’ feelings about the gym as expressed through the language of historical photography, while being careful to eschew the ‘typical problem in emotional history: the lopsided nature of the surviving evidence; and the temptations of constructing neat narratives’ (Trigg, 2017: 50) by being ever cognisant of the ambivalent contradiction that exists in the association of photography with the ability to document and capture truth, combined with the eternal ‘possib[ility] for a photograph to misrepresent’ (Sontag, 2003: 41). The historical photograph at once documents and embodies the emotions of the past, but to distinguish and read these threads is a fraught and nuanced task. It requires sensitivity to what postmodern art historians such as Craig Owens (1978), Rosalind Krauss and Livingston (1985) and Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1991) have persuasively argued is the crucial task of the (art) historian: to ‘reflect back on the way that images make meaning’ (Soutter, 2013: 4). In ‘Thinking About Photography’, Wells and Price (2015) invoke British historian E.H. Carr’s distinction between ‘historical facts’ and ‘facts of history’. According to Carr (2008), in order to build accounts of the past and make sense of the present, the narratives of history produced at any given historical moment must necessarily embody the concerns and anxieties of the present. Wells and Price suggest the same must be said for photography. For the discipline of history, the photograph exists as an uncomfortable double entendre between traditional archive – insofar as it is a medium of ‘collation, comparison, repetition and distribution’ (Campany, 2003: 20) – and cultural artefact – insofar as it is socially constituted and open to interpretation. The interpretation of the historical photograph of the twentieth-century gym as emotional document allows the researcher to ‘read’ the physical and sentimental response to the gym triggered in the body and mind of the photographed subject, and to extrapolate the possibly mirrored physical and emotional response in the photograph’s viewer. French philosopher Roland Barthes (1994: 53) tells us that to discover a photograph ‘it is best to look away or close your eyes’. Barthes’ essay, doubling as a eulogy for his late mother, was about the emotional responses that a viewer can have to a photograph – his essay was not about what

200  Kali Myers we see in a photograph, but what we feel in and through it. For cultural theorist Susan Sontag (2002, 2003), photography – with its possessive action between the photographer’s instrument and the photograph’s subject – shrinks the distance between the subject and the viewer. Barthes and Sontag frame this chapter’s analysis of the photograph as a metonym of an emotional relationship which mediates an emotional attachment to place across time, space and bodies. The photograph is simultaneously embodied – a place, body and emotional expression preserved within the photograph – and disembodied – an emotional response located in and triggered by the space of the photograph, but geographically and/or temporally distant from the place it depicts. The photograph evidences the relationship between body, emotion and place. The photograph captures the moment of a body being in and feeling place. It simultaneously evokes in its viewer that same moment: a sensation that is physically and emotionally felt. An archivally based method of reading historical photographs of the gym which is attuned to this relation between body, mind, emotion and place thus helps us to understand attachments to place as they are being formed through the act of taking, being in and looking at a photograph. Such an understanding suggests a means by which everyday sites of emotional attachment could be formally included in heritage methodologies of research, conservation and interpretation.

The emperor has no clothes: Eugen Sandow, turn of the century, British Empire This photograph (Figure 12.1) of world-famous strongman Eugen Sandow’s Institute of Physical Culture at 32a St James Street, London captures the relationship between body, society and feeling at the localised site of the urban gym. The location of Sandow’s Institute – between Bond Street and Piccadilly in London’s most well-heeled district – was deliberately chosen as a means of differentiating the Sandow school from the boxing gyms popular in working-class neighbourhoods (Chaline, 2015: 127). And we can see in this image the affluence of the site: the immaculate cleanliness of the place; the luscious Persian rugs marking each exercise station; the sheer multitude of equipment available to each individual client. While bodies are conspicuously absent from this image, the very existence of this gym at the heart of one of the world’s largest cities evokes the bodies who would frequent it and marks them with evidence of their class. As fitness historian Eric Chaline makes clear, the appearance of membership-based commercial gyms in the late nineteenth century required ‘several existing socio-economic factors: at the very least, a large urban population with sufficient leisure time and disposable income’ (Chaline, 2015: 112). In this image, we can read the physical and emotional sensations that bodies visiting the place would have felt. The desire for privacy, for example, is palpable, evidenced by the curtains sequestering each station. There is perhaps here a sense of embarrassment regarding the body – relatively unclothed – sweating, grunting and struggling its way through weightlifting and plyometric exercises. In the nineteenth century, displays of the muscular body were contests between nakedness and nudity (c.f. Clark, 1999; Black, 2013: 12). When Sandow toured Australia

It’s only a joke if you don’t take the fitness industry seriously  201

Figure 12.1  ‘One of the Spacious Exercise Halls’, c.1898. The Sandow Institute of Curative Physical Therapeutics at 32A St James’s Street London. Source: The Connoisseur, vol. XXV (1909), London.

and New Zealand in 1902–3, for example, the eroticism of his form – clad only in leopard-skin briefs – was tempered by advertorial language that stressed the relation of his exposed posing to the statuary of ancient Greece and Rome (Northern Star, 1925; Schrader, 2016). A consideration of contemporary textual sources can illuminate the emotions embedded in photographs (and vice versa). The need for seclusion evidenced by the Institute’s design suggests an attachment between body and place which casts the Institute as a site of shame: a place where bodies go to be alone, hidden as they perform necessary but unsavoury acts. Yet Sandow – whose own bulging scantily clad body was often publicly displayed in the act of heaving weights – had devoted his career to attempts to rearticulate the gym as a site of respectability. And he was successful in this endeavour. By the time he toured Australia in 1902, Sandow was the overseer of arguably the world’s first fitness empire. His Institute had trained instructors coaching people all over the world (including in Australia and New Zealand), he himself trained people both at the gym and via correspondence, he had a line of fitness products including his own ‘grip dumbbells’ and he published articles on exercise, nutrition and health (e.g., Sandow, 1897, 1902). Perhaps, then, in constructing his Institute, Sandow was not acquiescing to the notion of physical improvement as an action which should be secreted but was in fact deliberately creating a place whose atmosphere inspired a different metaphor of thought, a different emotional association and attachment. The sound and movement of the curtains brushing closed or open – a corporeal experience inspired by looking at the photograph – creates an antiseptic and anodyne ­hospital-like atmosphere which hints at an association between exercise and the

202  Kali Myers medicinal. Taken in this light, the image suggests a society in which physical culture as discipline is intertwined with discourses of science and rationality. In the orderly replicability of each station – and, one assumes, of the methods of physical improvement applied to a body or bodies that entered it – we see physical culture as a production line. Exercise is uniformly imposed upon bodies which are then spat out at the other end as perfect physical specimens. The medicalisation and systematisation of physical culture evident in this image of one of the earliest examples of the urban commercial gym speaks to a desire for the early twentieth-century body to ‘measure and be measured’ against its counterparts (Daley, 2002). This encapsulates numerous individual and community feelings and sensations regarding both the urban gym and the city. This was a period when the bodies of urban dwellers were regarded as sickly and destroyed by the demands of modern urban life in which rhythms of daily life were regulated by the modern city and changing senses of duration and time (Davison, 1993). As Kenny makes clear, these bodily practices and sensorial experiences were ‘not only born out of the material consequences of modernity, but deeply implicated in the formulation of perceptions about the city, and indeed about the body itself’ (Kenny, 2014: 203). The ordered, taxonomic approach to training the body evident in this photograph of Sandow’s Institute displays the origins of the gym as a place inextricably tied to the affective bodily sensations of the city, to the sensorial and emotional consciousness of the body as a social being. The understanding of such a place – and its impact on a city’s inhabitants, past and present – has clear implications for both historians and heritage practitioners.

Mythologies of Muscle Beach, 1930s USA In opposition to Draper’s description of the squalor of Muscle Beach Gym, the nearby open-air gymnasium named Muscle Beach was sunny, energetic and optimistic. In 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, the popularity of Muscle Beach as a site for the practice of gymnastics and calisthenics induced President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s employment and infrastructure programme the Works Progress Administration to build a tumbling platform (Chaline, 2015: 143). In 1937, this was complemented by the City of Santa Monica’s addition of ‘a ­twenty-four-by-eighty-foot wooden platform…parallel bars, benches, and high rings’ (Black, 2013: 32). The weightlifting equipment – dumbbells, barbells and plates – was often provided by the users and stored in a makeshift hut. Muscle Beach, Santa Monica is the site of many mythologies: the origins of bodybuilding and the US fitness craze; the mental and physical fortitude of the American Dream (and American body) in the face of the adversity of the Great Depression; and the embellished biographies of some of the US’ most well-known physical culture figures. Among these was ‘barbelle’ Abbye ‘Pudgy’ Stockton (Figure 12.2). As the story goes, Pudgy – already a chubby teenager – found herself in that most relatable of modern work conditions: overweight as the result of a sedentary post-high school job as a telephone operator. Unhappy with her burgeoning weight, Pudgy one day picked up the dumbbells that her then boyfriend

It’s only a joke if you don’t take the fitness industry seriously  203

Figure 12.2  Abbye ‘Pudgy’ Stockton on Santa Monica Beach, 1947.  

Cecil, Charles, Herald Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

Les Stockton had bought her. ‘Then she put them down. Then she picked them up again.’ (McCracken, 2007: 2) When Pudgy debuted her newly sculpted form in a homemade two-piece on Muscle Beach in the mid-1930s, she was an instant sensation and her name – which stuck as a now ironic moniker – and image was emblazoned on health and fitness magazines throughout the 1940s. Captured in this image in a pose reminiscent of the strongmen and strongwomen of nineteenth-century vaudeville acts, Pudgy’s was a body that encapsulated the emotion of happiness, combined with the energy, enthusiasm and novelty

204  Kali Myers associated with Muscle Beach’s early days. Here was a body which, unlike those of the previous century’s strongwomen, was as conventionally attractive – and feminine – as it was built. This was a body that was strong, capable: able to press 45 kg, snatch 47 kg and clean 60 kg at a height of 157 cm and weight of 52 kg (Twardziak, n.d.) – an impressive score sheet by any measure. This was a body clearly confident in its abilities and in being looked at: head facing towards the weight it knows it can hold, left arm acting as graceful counterbalance in an aesthetically pleasing pose. This was a youthful body bursting with energy. And yet, it was a body that was approachable, desirable and achievable. Unlike the strongwomen of yesteryear – whose names (Minerva, Vulcana, Sandwina, Athleta) seemed as sculpted as their bodies and carefully curated public personas – Pudgy Stockton, from her name to her frame, seemed to encapsulate the everywoman. A self-starter (having trained herself) and path-breaker (as one of the first women to train at Muscle Beach), the strength and self-assuredness of Pudgy’s body captured in this photograph encapsulates the sensorial and emotional affects that she embodies as both individual and representation. We see her grit and determination as a person at the same moment that she comes to represent the US-as-nation’s youth and vitality. Taken in the early postwar period, this photograph of Pudgy, with her right arm raised in triumph above her head in an echo of the Statue of Liberty’s torch, signals a new era of US dominance and independence. Pudgy left the gym business – and Muscle Beach – in the early 1950s to raise her daughter. From that point on she – and her image – fell out of public consciousness, a fact which has ensured her embalmment as 1930s and 1940s fitness and American Woman icon. But while Pudgy’s youthful feminine vigour was protected from entropy, a less triumphant fate awaited Muscle Beach. In 1959 Muscle Beach was closed, ostensibly due to maintenance difficulties, though the archival records tell a slightly different story. News that the site was to be demolished led supporters to launch a court case against the City of Santa Monica. In the Cold War context of promoting conservative American virtues, the presiding judge ruled in the City’s favour, citing the activities that took place at the site as ‘“freakish”, “homoerotic”, and “unbalanced”’ (quoted in Chaline, 2015: 147). An unprosecuted 1958 sex scandal involving several men and a couple of underage girls may well have had some bearing on the court’s decision (Black, 2013: 39–40). The equipment was dismantled, the platforms bulldozed and the site eventually turned into a parking lot. By 1963, the physical culture enthusiasts had found a new location for their pastime, this time at a site two miles south in Venice Beach, Los Angeles. ‘It seems like it was always sunny,’ Pudgy would later say of her time at Muscle Beach (quoted in McCracken, 2006). The photographs – the embodied memories of the place – give a semblance of veracity to her reminiscence. Luminescent with nostalgias of the recent past, of summers gone by and of a time before Muscle Beach’s fall into ignominy, the photographic archive of Muscle Beach gives an insight into the joy of the bodies in the images – of their delight in being part of something new and vital – and of the bodies who look fondly upon them, whether remembering their own experiences or imagining what it must have been like to be a part of it.

It’s only a joke if you don’t take the fitness industry seriously  205 Much like the images of Pudgy Stockton and her Muscle Beach alumni – among them early Hollywood heartthrob Steve Reeves – Muscle Beach itself has now been preserved. The continued growth of the California fitness movement through the latter half of the twentieth century led to the 1989 rededication by the City of Santa Monica of the Original Muscle Beach. Two years earlier, the City of Los Angeles had designated the newer (and also un-listed) site Muscle Beach Venice to distinguish the sites’ history. Today, both sites remain in action – conserved through use – with the Original retaining its focus on gymnastics and its Venice counterpart focusing more on bodybuilding and weightlifting (The Original Muscle Beach Santa Monica, 2018). The photographic record of both sites continues to grow as physical culture enthusiasts from across the world make the pilgrimage to memorialise themselves on film in the places and poses of their idols.

On Broadway: Grace Brothers Gymnasium, postwar Australia In this photograph of the Grace Brothers Gymnasium (Figure 12.3), each of the bodies captured is performing a different movement from a different physical discipline. Their strong lines and determined self-possession, scattered through the foreground and background of the image, echo the iron beams and supports and the lead piping cutting through the gym floor. This is an inherently masculine space. And, indeed, the Grace Brothers Gymnasium was a site where the social production of gender was intimately tied to the particular implements and processes used in the improvement and shaping of the body. Although this had been an aspect of the gymnasium since antiquity, the relationship of the gymnasium as physical place to the idealised representation and both private and public presentation of the human body intensified in Australia in the mid-twentieth century as a result of war, race anxiety and a burgeoning national identity. During World War I, a common alarm regarding troops’ fitness was raised across Europe, Australasia and the United States. As a result, in the wake of the fighting and despite the Depression of the 1930s, gymnasia flourished in the interwar period. This was also a flourishing period for theories of eugenics in physical culture. Eugenic panics such as ‘race motherhood, mental hygiene, [and] juvenile delinquency’ had had an understated effect on the development of physical culture theory and the government provision of spaces for physical culture – such as playgrounds and bathhouses – since the nineteenth century (Rodwell, 1999: 96). But the rise of fascism in Europe, combined with the fall-out of the war, within the specific context of Australia – a settler-colonial nation increasingly anxious regarding its geographic location in Asia – saw notions of racial purity and strong national identity become increasingly important in the area of physical culture. Popular health magazines such as Health and Physical Education pointed to Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany as examples of national identity and racial purity protected through ‘the development of compulsory physical education, national labour, and eugenic programs’ (Rodwell, 1999: 109). The interwar period coincided with the apogee of fitness as a means of producing bodies strong and pure enough to defend Australia as ethnically white nation (Kirk, 2000: 50). This was also a period when the physical and mental discipline and form

206  Kali Myers

Figure 12.3  Men exercising in the Grace Brothers Gymnasium, Sydney. Sydney Morning Herald, 3 June 1933, Fairfax/National Library of Australia.

provided by organised physical training was, for the first time, a major force in the social production of bodies as economically productive (and gendered) citizens (­Scharagrodsky and Varea, 2016: 785). There was, thus, a corresponding national campaign in 1938–39 to promote recreational physical activity which led, in 1941, to the passing of the Federal National Fitness Act. It is within this context that the Australian urban gym developed as a place where conflicting emotions of national pride, racism (or fear of the other) and self-efficacy played out. The Grace Brothers Gymnasium was overseen by physical culturalist and ex-British army officer J.H. Cartwright, who held a Bachelor of Physical Education degree from the University of Washington (Labor Daily, 1936b). The gym opened in the 1930s and took up an entire floor of the five-storey ‘Model Store’ that was the Grace Brothers Federation Queen Anne Broadway department store (Grace Bros, 2020; Former ‘Grace Bros Homewares’ Including Interior, 2020). The more than 5,000-square-foot space was stocked with the latest equipment and held training in numerous physical culture disciplines. A 1933 article in the Labor Daily provided a full list: ‘horizontal, parallel and stall bars, ropes…ladders, vaulting bars and…horses, pulley and spring developers, punching bags, rowing machines…’ Clients could undertake – either in classes or one-on-one courses – training in ‘boxing, wrestling, ju jitsu [sic] and fencing’. The gym even stocked a number of Cartwright’s own invention, the ‘captive wheel for fitness’.

It’s only a joke if you don’t take the fitness industry seriously  207 Cartwright’s gym was men only, but in May 1936 a slightly smaller women’s gymnasium (measuring 4,500 square feet) was opened on the floor above the men’s gym (Labor Daily, 1936a; Sydney Morning Herald, 1938). More important than the extensive list of equipment and the physical culture disciplines – also on full display in this image – was the sense of familiarity and friendship fostered by the gym. Here we see a group of men, largely clustered in pairs (boxing, performing synchro-leg raises, assisting in handstands), who together form a community; or, in the context of eugenicist, race-anxious, settler-colonial postwar Australia, perhaps an army. The collection and interaction of bodies at the Grace Brothers Gymnasium suggests the construction of a public, of a nation, at and through the urban gym: a young, virile, white and masculine nation, familiar metaphors of thought for anyone who has experienced or studied Australia. This is a community space of joy, trust and anticipation. The bodies in this photograph form attachment to place and each other through the act of exercising together in place: it is through the gym that they come to exist as gendered, racialised and strong social beings. As one of Cartwright’s competitors, T.A. Langridge, who ran the Langridge School of Physical Culture in George Street, Sydney wrote in a 1923 series of articles for literary journal Triad, ‘Although we may “exist”, in a way, we cannot say that we live…if we do not maintain ourselves in a fit condition’ (1923a, p. 52). Langridge, who also hosted broadcasts on Australian Broadcasting Commission (1941) public radio and offered a correspondence course for those unable to attend his school in person (Langridge, 1960), was here making explicit what is implicit in the Grace Brothers image. Specifically, Langridge was establishing a link between healthfulness and physicality: an association permeated by the emotionally derived notion that physical fitness – over the pursuit of material wealth or consumption – is the key to happiness and personal fulfilment. In another article, Langridge (1923b, p. 50) makes reference to the physically fit worker as the productive and efficient worker: ‘The business chief in 1923… knows that he cannot get such effective work from a staff that is not physically fit.’ Like Langridge’s writings, this photograph encapsulates the belief that the responsiveness of the body – trained by the gym – is both creative and determinative of that body’s ability to feel and perform as a social being.

Conclusion In the emotional space of the photograph of the early twentieth-century gym, we find a snapshot of the search and desire for community and emotional connection within a specific social structure (the city). The historical photographic archive of the early twentieth-century gym provides evidence of an emotional and physical affect induced by a particular place (the gym) for a particular body (that of the physical culture enthusiast), and this emotional and physical affect is evident in both the depicted and the viewing body. In providing a methodology for how to read the relationship between place, body and emotion through the language of the photograph, this chapter maps out a means of interpreting place attachment

208  Kali Myers in the past and its importance in the present. Such a process is essential for capturing places of community and belonging, the kinds of places worthy of heritage assessment and conservation. None of the sites explored in this chapter are heritage listed; some no longer exist other than through photographs. Yet considering these sites through the lens of place attachment and people-centred heritage practice allows for a greater understanding of heritage values, especially historic, social and aesthetic values. Historian Graeme Davison has argued (1991: 11) in What makes a building historic? for an expansion of the criteria to extend beyond mere age to incorporate ‘the rich understanding they give us of people’s everyday lives in the past’. As this chapter has demonstrated, the incorporation of emotion and the methods of the history of emotions into assessments of heritage significance of a place adds yet another a dimension to the answer to this question. To take the gym as emotional, embodied site seriously from both a historical and a heritage perspective reminds us that it can be in the most unremarkable and familiar of spaces that new insights into the past, present and future of our social and cultural identity can be found.

Note 1 The chapter’s title is drawn from historian Jonathan Black (2013: 88) who notes that fitness personas can often seem silly, but that, for those people involved, ‘it was only a joke if you didn’t take fitness seriously’.

References Andreasson, J. and Johansson, T. (2017) The New Fitness Geography: The Globalisation of Japanese Gym and Fitness Culture, Leisure Studies, 36(3), pp. 383–394. Australian Broadcasting Commission (1941) Saturday Details of Highlights in Today’s A.B.C. Programmes, ABC Weekly, 3(18). Barthes, R. (1994) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by R. Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Black, J. (2013) Making the American Body: The Remarkable Saga of the Men and Women whose Feats, Feuds, and Passions Shaped Fitness History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Campany, D. (ed.) (2003) Art and Photography. London: Phaidon. Carr, E. H. (2008) What is History? Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin Books. Chaline, E. (2015) The Temple of Perfection: A History of the Gym. London: Reaktion Books. Clark, T. J. (1999) Olympia’s Choice, in The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 79–146. Daley, C. (2002) The Strongman of Eugenics, Eugen Sandow, Australian Historical Studies, 33(120), pp. 233–248. Davison, G. (1991) What Makes a Building Historic? Melbourne: Historic Buildings Council, Victoria. Davison, G. (1993) The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

It’s only a joke if you don’t take the fitness industry seriously  209 Draper, D. (2000) Joe Gold’s Gym & The Dungeon, Dave Draper. Available at: https:// www.davedraper.com/joe-gold-dungeon.html (Accessed: 19 July 2020). Duncan, D. (2007) Out of the Closet and into the Gym: Gay Men and Body Image in Melbourne, Australia, The Journal of Men’s Studies, 15(3), pp. 331–346. Duncan, M. C. and Klos, L. A. (2012) Paradoxes of the Flesh: Emotion and Contradiction in Fitness/Beauty Magazine Discourse, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 38(3), pp. 245–262. Former ‘Grace Bros Homewares’ Including Interior (2020) Office of Environment & Heritage NSW. Available at: https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/heritageapp/ ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=2420516 (Accessed: 8 June 2020). de Gelder, B. (2009) Why Bodies? Twelve Reasons for Including Bodily Expressions in Affective Neuroscience, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 364, pp. 3475–3484. Grace Bros (2020) Sydney Living Museums. Available at: https://sydneylivingmuseums. com.au/stories/sydneys-home-furnishing-stores-1890-1960/grace-bros (Accessed: 8 June 2020). Hayden, D. (1995) The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Johansson, T. and Andreasson, J. (2014) The Gym and the Beach: Globalisation, Situated Bodies, and Australian Fitness, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 45(2), pp. 143–167. Kenny, N. (2014) The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kirk, D. (2000) Gender Associations: Sport, State Schools and Australian Culture, International Journal of the History of Sport, 17(2–3), pp. 49–64. Krauss, R. E. and Livingston, J. (1985) L’amour fou: Photography & Surrealism. Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art. Labor Daily (1933) Grace Bros. Have Find Gymnasium: All the Latest Devices – Many Classes, 7 July, p. 2. Labor Daily (1936a) 700 Guests: Physical Culture College Opened at Grace Bros, 1 July, p. 9. Labor Daily (1936b) Fine Physical Culture Display, 1 December, p. 8. Langridge, T. A. (1923a) On Being Good To Yourself, Triad: A Journal Devoted to Literacy, Pictorial, Musical and Dramatic Art, 9(2). Langridge, T. A. (1923b) Some Talk of Physical Culture, Triad: A Journal Devoted to Literacy, Pictorial, Musical and Dramatic Art, 9(1). Langridge, T. A. (1960) Langridge Way to Health. Sydney: Langridge Schools of Physical Culture. Lesh, J. (2019) Social Value and the Conservation of Urban Heritage Places in Australia, Historic Environment, 31(1), pp. 42–62. Lobo, M. (2014) Affective Energies: Sensory Bodies on the Beach in Darwin, Australia, Emotion, Space and Society, 12(August), pp. 101–109. Madgin, R., Webb, D., Ruiz, P., and Snelson, T. (2018) Resisting Relocation and Reconceptualising Authenticity: The Experiential and Emotional Values of the Southbank Undercroft, London, UK, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 24(6), pp. 585–598. McCracken, E. (2006) The Belle of the Barbelle, New York Times Magazine, 31 December. McCracken, E. (2007) Pudgy Stockton: The Belle of the Barbell, Iron Game History, 10(1), pp. 1–3. Miller, T. (2001) Sportsex. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

210  Kali Myers Mitchell, W. J. T. (2005) What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ndalianis, A. (1995) Muscle, Excess and Rupture: Female Bodybuilding and Gender Construction, Media Information Australia, 75, pp. 13–23. Northern Star (Lismore, NSW) (1925) Eugen Sandow – Muscular Development, 24 October, p. 11. Owens, C. (1978) Photography “en abyme”, October, 5, pp. 73–88. Penny, S. (1993) Virtual Bodybuilding, Media Information Australia, 69(August), pp. 17–22. Pinto, S. (2017) The History of Emotions in Australia, Australian Historical Studies, 48(1), pp. 103–114. Pollack, B. and Todd, J. (2016) American Icarus: Vic Tanny and America’s First Health Club Chain, Iron Game History, 13(4), pp. 17–37. Prestel, J. B. (2017) Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860–1910. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rodwell, G. (1999) The Eugenic and Political Dynamics in the Early History of Physical Education in Australia, 1900–50, Critical Studies in Education, 40(1), pp. 93–113. Rosenwein, B. H. (2016) Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saltonstall, R. (1993) Healthy Bodies, Social Bodies: Men’s and Women’s Concepts and Practices of Health in Everyday Life, Social Science & Medicine, 36(1), pp. 7–14. Samuel, R. (1994) Theatres of Memory. London & New York: Verso. Sandow, E. (1897) Strength and How to Obtain It. London: Gale & Polden. Sandow, E. (1902) The Gospel of Strength According to Sandow: A Series of Talks on the Sandow System of Physical Culture, by Its Founder. Melbourne: T. Shaw Fitchett. Scharagrodsky, P. A. and Varea, V. (2016) Tracking the Origins of Physical Education in Argentina and Australia, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 33(8), pp. 777–796. Scheer, M. (2012) Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is that what makes them have a history)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion, History and Theory, 51(2), pp. 193–220. Schofield, J. (Ed.) (2014) Who Needs Experts?: Counter-Mapping Cultural Heritage. Ashgate, Farnham. Schrader, B. (2016) The Big Smoke: New Zealand Cities 1840–1920. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books. Silk, M. L., Andrews, D. L. and Thorpe, H. (eds) (2017) Routledge Handbook of Physical Cultural Studies. Oxon: Routledge. Sleight, S. (2018) Memory and the City, in Maerker, A., Sleight, S., and Sutcliffe, A. (eds) History, Memory and Public Life: The Past in the Present. Oxon: Routledge, pp. 126–158. Smith, L. (2006) Uses of Heritage. New York: Routledge. Solomon-Godeau, A. (1991) Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sontag, S. (2002) On Photography. London: Penguin. Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Soutter, L. (2013) Why Art Photography? Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Stewart, B., Smith, A. and Moroney, B. (2013) Capital Building through Gym Work, Leisure Studies, 32(5), pp. 542–560. Sydney Morning Herald (1938) Gala Opening of Australia’s First Theatre Gymnasium for The Langridge School of Physical Culture, 16 July, p. 3.

It’s only a joke if you don’t take the fitness industry seriously  211 The Original Muscle Beach Santa Monica (2018) Santa Monica. Available at: https://www. santamonica.com/original-muscle-beach-santa-monica/ (Accessed: 19 July 2020). Thomas, A. (1993) Some Thoughts on the Body: “How It Means” and What It Means, Iron Game History, 2(5). Trigg, S. (2017) Bluestone and the City: Writing an Emotional History, Melbourne Historical Journal, 44(1), pp. 41–53. Twardziak, K. (n.d.) Abbye ‘Pudgy’ Stockton Was the Original Muscle Beach Girl, Muscle & Fitness. Available at: https://www.muscleandfitness.com/muscle-fitness-hers/ hers-athletes-celebrities/abbye-pudgy-stockton-was-original-muscle-beach-girl/ (Accessed: 19 July 2020). Waitt, G. and Stanes, E. (2015) Sweating Bodies: Men, Masculinities, Affect, Emotion, Geoforum, 59(February), pp. 30–38. Wells, J. C. and Stiefel, B. L. (eds) (2018) Human-Centred Built Environment Heritage Preservation: Theory and Evidence-Based Practice. New York: Routledge. Wells, L. and Price, D. (2015) Thinking About Photography: Debates, Historically and Now, in Wells, L. (ed.) Photography: A Critical Introduction. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 9–74. Wilkinson, T. (2020) Typology Gymnasium: Invented by the Ancient Greeks, the Gym Has Served as a Social Institution That Has Impacted Not Only the Body but Also the Mind, Architectural Review, pp. 52–61.

13 Making visible attachments: artists as a lever for highlighting a sense of place and emotional attachments to heritage Articulating public art and urban renovation in Porto-Novo, Benin Elizabeth Auclair and Elise Garcia A number of international texts stress the importance of preserving heritage, not only as monuments or ‘objects’ to be conserved, but also as place-based, ­people-centred processes combining tangible and intangible dimensions. In addition to famous architectural monuments and tourist sites, there is an increasing focus on ‘ordinary heritage’ and ‘everyday heritage’ which incorporates cultural and social elements of the urban fabric. Preservationists and place-makers are developing new projects and establishing methodologies in order to identify what matters for the population, while consciously acknowledging their representations, values and emotions, and incorporating local communities in heritage preservation and valorisation efforts. Within these methodologies, we can observe the rise of processes that involve local communities and specifically artists in urban projects. In this chapter we propose to examine the actors, methodologies and tools engaged in the preservation of the traditional squares of Porto-Novo, Benin. These traditional squares – also called voodoo squares – are urban places that articulate religious, cultural, social and economic functions. A project for the conservation, restoration and renovation of these squares was initiated in 2014 by the municipality of Porto-Novo with the financial support of Cergy-Pontoise Agglomeration in France. A decentralised cooperation strategy between these two cities was implemented in 2006. The ongoing project, led by a local cultural institution, Ouadada, involves both local people and local artists. Our intention is to analyse the engagement of artists in urban planning practices, and to show how these practices can be seen as a tool that enables local people to express their sense of place and emotional attachments to heritage. The study explores how the involvement of artists in renovation projects takes into account – and eventually modifies – the perceptions and emotions of the residents in the specific context of traditional squares. This chapter also investigates how artistic creation creates words and images for voodoo heritage, which is often hidden, and also augments narratives not only for local people but also for visitors. Finally, the chapter explores how this process contributes to a shared knowledge relating to voodoo heritage.

Making visible attachments  213 This chapter is based on the results of research carried out from 2016 to 2018, within the geography research centre of Cergy-Pontoise University, with the support of Cergy-Pontoise Agglomeration and the French Embassy in Benin. The fieldwork was conducted over several stays in Porto-Novo. This enabled us – as researchers – to discover and acquire knowledge of the city, more specifically of the squares, and to observe the uses of public, private and religious spaces; to visit artists’ workshops and art exhibitions; and to conduct qualitative interviews with religious leaders, family chiefs, residents, cultural actors and artists. The methodology was principally based on semi-structured individual interviews conducted with 56 local people. Two sets of interview questions were created: the first was addressed to 30 residents of the renovated squares, nine political, administrative and/or religious leaders and five tourist guides. A second set of interview questions was used for interviews with 12 artists (some of whom were interviewed twice, in 2017 and in 2018), almost two-thirds of the total of 20 artists involved during the various phases of the project. The purpose of these interviews was to gather evidence regarding the role and level of engagement of the various actors in the heritage and artistic participation process, and to examine their discourses and representations concerning different dimensions of this project. The aim was first to understand the perception of the places themselves, through histories, memories and feelings. The interviews also focused on the renovation project in order to measure the personal involvement of the residents and artists in the conservation process and to analyse the modalities of governance and the partnerships established. The rich and abundant data collected was interpreted using several analysis grids, mainly based on discourse analysis. Among the different themes raised in the interviews, a number of artistic and creative dimensions are specifically explored.

Exploring the sensitive and emotional dimensions of heritage: investigating what matters for people New patrimonialisation processes focusing on people This research project concerning the conservation and renovation of the traditional squares of Porto-Novo is embedded in current theoretical work addressing urban heritage issues. It is marked by the broadening of the concept of heritage and the chronological and spatial extension of this notion (Heinich, 2009), and also by the rise of participatory processes within public policies and urban planning projects (Blondiaux, 2008; Desponds et al., 2014; Auclair et al., 2017). New definitions and representations of ‘patrimonialisation’ processes stress the importance of heritage communities as much as of the objects themselves, and emphasise the relationship between populations and their heritage (Hertzog et al., 2017). These approaches also underline the sensitive and affective dimensions of heritage. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, much research on heritage led by geographers, sociologists or anthropologists has been devoted to analysing ‘what matters’; ‘what makes sense’; ‘what counts’ for the residents (Gravari ­Barbas, 2003; Rautenberg, 2003; Watremez, 2008; Veschambre, 2008).

214  Elizabeth Auclair and Elise Garcia Laurajane Smith (2006) argues that heritage is a complex process, a cultural practice that includes acts of commemoration and memory, but that also includes the construction of feelings of attachment and belonging. Smith shows that, though heritage can mean different things to different people, it is a process that builds common cultural values, representations and meanings. She therefore highlights the importance of participatory approaches in order to break with the ‘authorised heritage discourse’ composed of utterances and decisions made exclusively by ‘experts’ without sufficient recourse to people and communities. The authenticity of heritage lies in the meaning that it is given by residents in their daily lives. Daniel Fabre (2013), in his work on patrimonial emotions, demonstrates ‘the strength of local attachments and the emotional investments it entails’, as well as the importance of personal stories. He considers that the ordinary, the familiar and the intimate are essential values to understand and analyse contemporary processes concerning heritage (Fabre, 2016). The theoretical outcome of this research agenda is also linked to sustainability issues, and can be demonstrated through urban projects which aim to foster a sense of place and belonging, while also bridging the past and future of the city (Auclair and Fairclough, 2015). These changes to understandings of heritage, along with a shifting heritage policy context, can be linked to a set of international texts and charters which encourage nation states to acknowledge and promote diversity of culture and heritage, and to focus on the populations affected by heritage measures and urban policies. The 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, together with the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, recommend a greater awareness of the diversity of cultures, traditions and ways of life. Moreover, the 2000 European Landscape Convention and the 2005 Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (Faro Convention), both supported by the Council of Europe, as well as the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, are even more attentive to people and communities, promoting participatory processes and fostering the notions of ordinary and everyday heritage. These texts encourage policies where the residents themselves identify, define and participate in the preservation of the symbolic ‘resources’ of their territory, that is to say what counts for them. Public art: a way of revealing symbolic and poetic dimensions of the city? Cultural urban planning approaches often seek to reveal and commemorate elements of history through the use of public art. This approach is not straightforward, however (Ardenne, 2002; Ruby, 2002). Public art has been a part of cities since at least Greek and Roman antiquity, and over time several definitions and objectives for urban public art have been proposed. Public art has also been the subject of numerous controversies (Heinich, 1997; Guinard, 2010). Today, public art, and specifically street art, can be considered as a kind of ‘aesthetic activism’. The culture industry often exploits artistic practices in the service of festivals created for commodification, leisure and entertainment. Meanwhile, changing forms of art, often based on performance, or ephemeral or non-durable materials, can

Making visible attachments  215 also serve as a basis for social integration policies, in the name of strengthening social ties within communities (Ardenne, 2010). Although the use of public art is always at risk of instrumentalisation, its social dimension remains a crucial issue and is a focus of academic research. Malcom Miles defines public art as ‘the making, management and mediation of art outside its conventional location in museums and galleries’ (Miles, 1997). His work shows how promoting public art in urban projects can contribute to more convivial urban environments. In the same field, research by Sharp, Pollock and Paddison has examined how public art and architecture can contribute to the social cohesion of the city. Their hypothesis is that ‘public art, or the process through which it is produced is able to create a sense of inclusion’. They consider that ‘by this way, public art should be able to generate a sense of ownership, forging the connection between citizens, city spaces and their meanings as places through which subjectivity is constructed’ (Sharp et al., 2005). But a question still remains: in our societies geared towards economic growth, place marketing and tourism, how can art contribute to enhancing the sensitive, imaginary and symbolic dimensions of places? This question reveals a tension between ‘poetic’ and ‘prosaic’ dimensions, a tension analysed and highlighted by the philosopher Edgar Morin (2002). Many cities rely on public art to transform urban landscapes, and these policies should meet several objectives. Apart from the obvious aesthetic values of art, three additional functions are even more central. First is an urban planning function: the aim is to support the renovation of ancient neighbourhoods or the development of new urban districts and to confer civic values on these urban spaces, to restructure the city and to reinforce identities. However, the pursuit of rapid, visible and measurable results weakens the long-lasting and resilient links that can emerge between the works of art and the local community. Second is a social function: the aim is to produce works of art that bring residents together. However, some strategies seem to be mere efforts for ‘buying social peace’, often in particular neighbourhoods in crisis, where other public policies have failed. When works of art are simply ‘set’ in public spaces, without any consultation of or participation by the residents, the social impact seems limited (Guinard, 2010). Finally, there is a place marketing function: art is frequently seen as a communication tool for developing attractiveness and promoting the city. Given the growing competitiveness among cities, there is a danger that as cities look for ‘recipes that work’ the resulting artistic projects become inauthentic, a sort of contest for the most spectacular outcomes. Consequently, the works of art fail to express the singularity of places or to meet the expectations of the population. In this context, it seems interesting to reconsider the term ‘public’ based on Marcel Henaff’s definitions of public space: that which ‘is public [is] what is exposed to the community, to its judgement and approval. Public means simultaneously open to all, known from all and recognised by all’ (Henaff, 2008). These definitions suggest a collective dimension of public space and imply authentic relations with the population. Our primary research question examines how to appropriately create urban policies and implement urban projects which promote art in the city that is symbolic of the aspirations of the population.

216  Elizabeth Auclair and Elise Garcia

The traditional squares of Porto-Novo: combining cultural, religious and social heritage The fundamental role of the voodoo culture Porto-Novo, capital of Benin, is situated in the south of the country, at the edge of a lagoon opening onto the Atlantic Ocean. It has a population of approximately 300,000 (N’Bessa, 2013). Porto-Novo is the name given to the city in the eighteenth century by the Portuguese, who built a port and actively participated in the slave trade from this site. Between the fifteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century, different migratory flows contributed to the development of this territory and its cultural diversity, including two main groups: the Yoruba coming from Nigeria and the Goun coming from Togo. These populations shared voodoo traditions and practices, and the southern part of Benin is sometimes identified as the cradle of voodoo culture (Sinou and Oloudé, 1989; Tall, 1995; Cousin, 2013). At the end of the nineteenth century, the country (named D ­ ahomey) was colonised by the French before gaining its independence in 1960. The historic part of Porto-Novo is known for the diversity of its heritage: colonial and Afro-­ Brazilian buildings, sacred trees and forests and the natural landscape of the lagoon ­(Julhé-Beaulaton, 2009; Sinou, 2013). The traditional voodoo squares are also part of the city’s heritage, although they have remained invisible and unknown for a long time. Voodoo practices and traditions were repressed during the colonial period and then again during the communist period of the 1970s: voodoo was even banned from history books. In the past, these voodoo squares have often been threatened or destroyed. During the colonial period, churches and cathedrals, as well as schools, were sometimes erected on these squares, and roads were built through them, physically dividing them, as part of modernising the city. These social and physical changes to the city were the means by which colonial authorities fought against indigenous religious practices condemned by the Church. These squares were also threatened during the communist regime of Mathieu Kerekou, which banned all religions including voodoo practices. Although many voodoo priests were arrested and tortured during the communist period, many people continued to practice their religion discreetly at home (Bassalé, 2013). For at least the last two decades, however, voodoo practices have been authorised and have now resumed with force in the south of the country and especially in Porto-Novo. A national day, dedicated to voodoo, was instituted on 10 January 1993, and voodoo is now defined as an element of national cultural heritage. However, the recent valorisation of this particular heritage is still complex (Coralli and Houénoudé, 2013). The relations within families and between communities and neighbourhoods are established in large part through these voodoo rites and ceremonies. These spiritual practices – or at least some form of attachment to these traditions – are still strongly rooted in the population, including among the younger generations and among artists and intellectuals, even though accurate data concerning the number of ‘believers’ is difficult to obtain. Indeed, voodoo worship is not exclusive and can be combined with other religions (Dorier-Apprill, 2006). Being Catholic or Protestant is understood by residents as a ‘genuine religion’, while voodoo worship seems to be more a

Making visible attachments  217 cultural tradition; a kind of heritage that must be respected, preserved and protected. These traditional squares, therefore, play a fundamental role for the families and the communities living around them, and also for family members living in other towns and villages – or even for the Benin diaspora abroad. Moreover, these places hold a special status in the urban fabric, mingling private, public and ‘common’ dimensions (Auclair and Garcia, 2019). These squares are legally considered by the municipal administration as part of the public domain. Nevertheless, they are organised and structured by the communities that live in the cities, and can therefore be considered as a ‘commons’ since they symbolically belong to a group, a family and a lineage. These squares are not private because they are open to all: people can cross the place, walk around, stop to rest on a bench, play cards, eat in the street kitchens and shop at the outdoor merchants. A multifaceted attachment to the squares: ‘I consider it like the apple of my eye’ A large number of interviewees explained that these squares have significance for their lives. The phrases used by the residents, such as the ‘apple of my eye’, demonstrate an almost physical dimension of this attachment, and the squares can be considered a component of their personal identity. The attachment to these squares is articulated via three main elements (Auclair and Garcia, 2019). First, there is a kind of family and generational attachment to the spaces: their ancestors came to settle and live there, and the traditional events of the family and community, such as weddings, baptisms and funerals, are organised at these squares. Second, there is a religious and cultural attachment to these squares: they host sacred physical objects dedicated to the local and family divinities, and voodoo practices and ceremonies take place at these sites. All these events are opportunities for performances of dance, music and songs. Third, there is a kind of social attachment to these squares: they are essential for the community’s sociability and conviviality. The squares are also significant for fostering social relations within neighbourhoods, and have various cultural, social and commercial uses. Many residents feel linked to neighbourhoods (and their squares) not only because they were born there, but also because the previous generations of their family were born there too. The notion of the neighbourhood and its squares as a kind of physical inheritance, as a common good received at birth, for which the community is communally responsible for life, is very important. This form of place attachment reveals itself in the form of a collectively felt responsibility. The transmission process of these squares’ history is mainly through oral history. A sense of belonging to place emerges in two ways. First, the residents feel they belong to the place, and feel that the place belongs to them: ‘this place is ours, it is our heritage; that means it belongs to all of us. My great grandparents, my parents have always said that the land belongs to no one, it cannot be sold[,] it is our thing’. However, the squares are not the property of any one person: ‘this is the common property of all the sons and daughters of this neighbourhood’. Thus, there is a strong attachment to the voodoo culture. This cultural heritage comprises both the squares’ physical space and their various material components

218  Elizabeth Auclair and Elise Garcia (sacred trees, temples, convents, altars and votive niches; the legba). It also includes the religious traditions and practices conducted within the squares. Voodoo worship has a historical dimension which often transcends the different religious affiliations of the residents: ‘in the family, there are Catholics and Protestants, everyone does what he or she wants, but voodoo worship, which is the legacy of the ancestors, must still be honoured’. The ancestral practices have indeed survived the conversion of the population to Christianity and Islam (Bassalé, 2014; Dorier-Apprill, 2006). The syncretism that characterises the city of Porto-Novo seems to create openness and tolerance among the communities, even if some tensions do exist. Additionally, attachment to the squares is related to the social and economic life that goes on there. The places have several socio-economic functions, and various types of formal and informal business are conducted within them. Travelling or permanent traders sell snacks and other small groceries and provide services such as hairdressing. These squares host private and public events organised by the residents, local actors or the municipality. The squares are used as a place where families meet to resolve disputes. They are also spaces for relaxation and recreation activities, especially for young people who meet there in the evening to talk, practise sport or play cards.

The renovation of the squares: articulating heritage valorisation and artistic creation A participatory approach The renovation project, called Eclosions urbaines, is presented by its proponents as operating at ‘the crossroads of urban planning, public art, urban design and local economy’.1 The project involves local residents, craftspeople and artists. The participatory approach draws on various forms of expertise from planners, architects, masons and artists, as well as citizens. The local community is mobilised according to what philosopher Martha Nussbaum (2011) calls their ‘capabilities’. This approach can be related to the ‘right to the city’, originally defined by Henri Lefebvre (1967), but now extending to a ‘right to heritage’, or a ‘right for everyone to have an objectified and localised past, inherited or chosen’, using the words of Daniel Fabre (2013). The project aims to gradually rehabilitate the traditional squares of the city, depending on funding. Porto-Novo numbers more than 50 traditional squares, many of which have become degraded over time by erosion and a lack of maintenance (Bassalé, 2014). A recent study identified 19 squares likely to benefit from the renovation project.2 Since 2015, one square has been selected and renovated every year. The renovation works encompass the walls and façades of the buildings, as well as the preservation of their religious elements. For each renovation project, a network of contemporary artists is mobilised to create individual or collective works of art for placement in the square. These works are fully integrated into the conservation process and take into account cultural and religious practices. Historical and spiritual expressions of the community become essential: the works of art are largely inspired by voodoo practices and symbolic rules. The coordinator of the project, Gérard Bassalé, explains the role of the artists: ‘voodoo is artistic. I see art everywhere in the voodoo: the sacred songs, it’s art; the ways they are composed and sung, the percussions, the voodoo rhythms are artistic. If we are aware and agree that art is present

Making visible attachments  219 everywhere in the voodoo, we cannot intervene in these places without appealing to art.’ This approach comprises two parts. First, works of art are fully integrated into the architectural elements of the squares, such as the walls of temples and convents, doors, stairs and street design. Second, paintings and sculptures are created for the squares and displayed every year as part of a temporary outdoor exhibition across several areas in the city. The aim is to make the population aware of the significance of the local heritage and of artistic creation. Collecting and sharing histories and memories of the squares The conservation process for a single square takes about a year. The preliminary consultation meetings include voodoo chiefs, family representatives the administrative officials, as well as the residents of the neighbourhood and users of the place. Collective visits to the squares, temples and convents are organised to gather general knowledge and expertise from the public, and to take into account, as much as possible, their needs and aspirations for the renovation works (Figure 13.1). Then, the artists observe and study the squares, collect stories and thereby uncover the cultural, social and historical characteristics of the place. This first stage of the process is to bring together the artists and the families and other locals living around the squares. On these occasions, people share their memories of the squares. By publicly sharing memories beyond the immediacy of

Figure 13.1  Visit with the residents on Migan Square, 2018. Courtesy of Association Incite, France.

220  Elizabeth Auclair and Elise Garcia individual families, by putting memories into words and having conversations with artists, a kind of participatory heritage inventory emerges. Exposed to histories and memories through storytelling, the artists are acquainted with the identity of the squares and come to understand what is important about them for local people. Artists and residents co-designing art works The artists are inspired by local memories and histories as part of creating their own heritage interpretations. The conversations with the community enable the artists to understand local expectations and the limits of what is appropriate in their creative practice. The next phase of artistic design takes the form of collective workshops among the artists. Here, the discussions and stories take on new dimensions: history and memory are once again discussed and reinterpreted. For the artists, in addition to confronting new ideas and discussing practices, collaborative design workshops allow them to go beyond the sum of individual creations. This is also when the artists obtain the approval from locals for their creations; proposed sketches and models become subject to debate and modification may be required. An inhabitant of Djihoué Square, renovated in 2015, describes this process: the art works correspond to what we wanted. For example, there is a percussionist on the temple of the deity Tchina and we were consulted to choose the motif. So we proposed a balafon player, since it is one of the instruments we play in this temple…Each time the artists had to intervene, they first showed us the models. When it did not correspond to what we wanted, we asked them to change. Debates sometimes relate to the style of the creations when the residents, fond of traditional and figurative representations, must validate more abstract and contemporary art works. As one of the artists explains, some saw something else, everyone was interpreting, enriching the debate. I explained what I wanted to do, they understood more. My job is to allow people to dream, to go deeper…The residents, it’s legitimate, want things that we understand right away, figurative. There is a culture to be acquired for people to go beyond what is visible. Already we live in culture voodoo, there is the visible and the invisible, it requires certain codes to pass from one to another. The method applied in this project enables the artists to become ‘co-producers’ with the residents of the future heritage of the squares. Once the art works have been planned by the artists and approved by the locals, they are then created in situ. Designed in durable materials – cement, metal, stone, stabilised earth or pneumatic – the works are embedded in the walls of the family houses and voodoo edifices (Figure 13.2).

Making visible attachments  221

Figure 13.2  Artists and craftsmen working on Djissou Comè Square, 2015.

These various modalities of participation are significant for the meaningful conservation of local urban heritage. Art historian Christine Mengin (2013) writes: ‘These practices play a key role in the preservation of Africa’s tangible cultural heritage…They testify that conservation activities, far from being the preserve of authorised specialists, are the work of local communities, who consider heritage conservation as a combination of technical activities and protection of spiritual values.’

A new image of the squares: increased attachment to heritage Art works for revealing intangible heritage, bridging the past and the present Art reveals and enhances intangible heritage, and this seems vital for the population: ‘it is very important to have artwork here, it is our identity, we do not want it to be lost. We keep this preciously; it’s like our museum’, explains one of the residents. An elderly person talks of the need to transmit the voodoo heritage: ‘these drawings guide young people so that they know their culture better. This is very important because it allows them to make the connection with their origins, and it prevents several parts of the indigenous culture from disappearing.’ The works of art also establish a link between tradition and modernity. Far from simply transmitting an ancient – or ‘frozen’ – heritage, the creative process and artistic outcomes bring tangible and intangible heritage elements into contemporary reality. By connecting the past with the present, the works of art form a continuum between tradition and modernity.

222  Elizabeth Auclair and Elise Garcia The renovation project enables the artists to assert or reaffirm their social role as ‘transmitters’ of this common heritage. Almost all the artists involved claimed attachment to the voodoo culture, even though only some of them practise this form of spirituality. As a young artist explained: ‘I am Catholic, but culturally and traditionally, I love doing research on the Fa, the voodoo, and so on. As an artist, one has to raise questions. An artist must know where he comes from.’ The works of art reveal to locals and visitors an essential element of the squares. Placing artistic creation at the heart of the renovation of the squares thus contributes to the positive transformation of the image of these places and to conserving the material and immaterial heritage they house. As one of the family chiefs explained: ‘the artists brought out the elements that are usually hidden in the convents, to show visitors that we are a great dynasty. What the artists have achieved is eternal; it’s never going to get lost. If we leave here, the works will stay.’ The heritage, thus revealed, acquires a new dimension, a new status: from secret to visible, from private to public, from religious to cultural. (Re)discovery, (re)appropriation and transmission of heritage The first beneficiaries of the works of art are the residents of the squares themselves. The history of their place and of its occupants is newly exposed. ‘When I walk on the renovation site to Ogou Con, I realise that I had never before seen the memory of my ancestors thus materialised. I thought it was real. This exhibition allows communities to discover or rediscover their own heritage’, explained a woman living on Migan Square. By preserving and enhancing the heritage of the squares, the works of art bring together the community through this transmission function and ultimately reinforce intergenerational links. For several artists, the renovation project was an important step in their careers and for their practice. It allowed them to express their art in a public space, offering a new visibility for their work and improving their chances of recognition in a country where there are few museums, and where the formal expression of art is only just starting to be appreciated by the population. However, the main sources of satisfaction lie beyond individual interests. Most artists involved in the project say they are very sensitive to the opinions and perceptions of the locals and are aware of the importance of the cultural, historical and social aspects of their creative intervention. As an artist explained: the works belong to the residents, they recognise themselves in their symbols. They talk about them and make them theirs, that's what is interesting. Otherwise it would not have been a success. The very first people who will promote the works are, first and foremost, the families who live with them. … We take the responsibility to write our own story. I am happy and proud. This is important from a generational point of view, for posterity. When we are no longer there, the children will see the works, they will ask questions, the references will be in front of them, in front of their courtyards, their houses. It's their story, their culture.

Making visible attachments  223 Improving the urban environment: strengthening senses of place and belonging For the residents and users of the squares, the renovations lead to a permanent improvement in their physical, social and economic environment. The project improves living and working conditions in several respects, through the installation of street furniture, consolidation of floors and walls (many of which were threatening to collapse) and investment in basic infrastructure such as drinking fountains and public lighting. In Yoho Dikouin Square, renovated 2016–2017, a children’s playground has replaced a former open-air rubbish dump. When the works of art are finished and a square’s renovation is complete, a permanent association is formed which arranges maintenance, upkeep and cleaning of the square. On Djihoué Square and Djissou-Gbogan Square, the income of small merchants has increased significantly. A barber explains: ‘the hair salon became prettier and it attracted much more customers. I really see the difference. Every day, I used to receive between 20 and 25 people. Today, it can go up to 40 to 45.’ The renovations also encourage various forms of sociability. A young man explains: more beautiful buildings have been installed, in solid materials, and works of art. Previously, the place was not lit, now there are solar streetlights. This has helped to strengthen the bonds between the residents of this district, we exchange, sit in the shade of trees, we meet more between young people to play cards. The various interventions in the squares have generated a feeling of satisfaction for many people, who now emphasise the beauty of the places and say how proud they are to belong there. The art historian Didier Houénoudé evaluates the process: this project allows people to be reconciled with their history and with the neighbourhoods in which they live. Some of these places had a bad reputation. When we give back their ‘nobility’ to these spaces, it strengthens the sense of belonging of the population, and the residents learn to live together again, a situation which had disappeared. A kind of ‘re-appropriation’ is reflected in the terms chosen by the residents to talk about their places, which emphasise the square’s beauty and attractiveness. Furthermore, the fact that people come to visit the squares and take pictures generates a feeling of pride. Sharing the heritage, widening the ‘common’ In the last stage of the process, sharing the history and memory of the voodoo squares extends not only from the families to the artists, but also more widely to visitors and tourists. The renovation of these spaces has motivated the creation of

224  Elizabeth Auclair and Elise Garcia tours, led by guides mostly living in the neighbourhood and trained for this purpose. The quality of the renovation of the squares, combined with the presence of works of art, attracts many visitors from around Porto-Novo and from Cotonou (Benin’s largest city), and also foreign tourists. The conservation and promotion of the squares encourages sustainable tourism, in contrast to the current colossal tourism projects instigated by the national government. The locals have indeed created an association in order to manage their squares. With the presentation of the co-produced works of art, a more holistic history of the places is revealed to visitors. The renovation projects provide access to an unknown heritage, often shrouded in mystery, and even often associated with negative representations. One of the artist decrypts this phenomenon: people who are not even ‘initiated’, who are outside this practice, come to put the culture of the residents into the public place in order to demystify and improve the image of voodoo, and to allow people to understand that it is not something that hurts. Culturally, the voodoo appears as a federating element. The potential scope of this common heritage extends to the whole world, with the launch in 2019 of a new digital tool to disseminate the local culture and heritage of the squares.3 It appears that the specific heritage of these public squares has entered a global commons.

Conclusions The analysis of the urban renovation project in Porto-Novo has stressed the particular role of the artists and the impact of public art on the population, and more specifically has demonstrated how artists can be a lever for highlighting senses of place and emotional attachments to heritage. The attachment of the residents to their squares can be observed from the very beginning to the end of the artistic process: participating in public meetings; having discussions with artists; sharing their own histories, memories and experiences; explaining religious symbols and practices; and preparing art works. This individual commitment will often last throughout the process. The trust given to the artists during the course of the renovation seems to reinforce the residents’ strong ties to the neighbourhoods and squares where they live. Through the personal testimonies they hear, artists are inspired to create works that reveal and enhance the identity of the squares. The ‘stories’ exposed by the artworks are not only the result of literary research, they also highlight the experiences and intimate perceptions of the population. As such, the art works reflect the attachment of the residents to their places, from the initial ‘material’ used for the artworks (the individual stories) to the final works (the artistic representation of stories). Significantly, the interviews with the local community demonstrated that attachment to the squares existed before the renovation and before the artistic process. But the state of disrepair and the insalubrity of these spaces aroused a form of shame: ‘this square contains our voodoo; they were there, but they were

Making visible attachments  225 not protected, not well managed, during the rituals.’ According to the residents, beyond the bad conditions in which the divinities were set, their own futures were at stake: the walls that fall weaken the deities, and therefore it weakens us too, because in return, the protection and benefits that divinities must provide cannot be realised. It is a chain of problems, diseases, bad luck in our activities …So we had to renovate. It seems that the renovation of these spaces and the artistic process have not ‘created’ but ‘repaired’ a feeling of belonging. By transforming the image of the places, the art works have a three-fold function: they (1) safeguard, (2) revive and (3) reinforce the attachment of the residents to their squares and to their heritage. Moreover, this experience shows that artistic intervention does not ‘freeze’ the current attachment of the residents to the squares. On the contrary, artists play the role of ‘transmitter’, creating and making possible a continuum between past, present and future – between the sense of belonging of the residents of yesterday, those of today and those of tomorrow.

Notes 1 Cf. ‘Porto-Novo, éclosions urbaines. Révéler le réseau des squares traditionnelles, pollen d’une urbanité africaine oubliée’, published in 2015 by Porto-Novo and CergyPontoise Agglomeration, Ouadada cultural centre and the EPA (School of African Heritage). 2 Ibid. 3 For virtual visits to the squares, see www.eclosions-urbaines.com

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226  Elizabeth Auclair and Elise Garcia Blondiaux, L. (2008) Le nouvel esprit de la démocratie. Actualité de la démocratie participative, Paris: Seuil. Coralli, M. and Houénoudé, D. La patrimonialisation à l'occidentale et ses conséquences sur un territoire africain, Espaces et societies, 2013 (1–2). Cousin, S. (2013) Extension du domaine de la restauration Porto-Novo capitale: entre vision patrimoniale, modernité vodoun et regard touristique, in Mengin, C. and Godonou, A. (eds), Porto-Novo: patrimoine et développement, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Desponds, D., Auclair, E., Bergel, P. and Bertucci, M.M. (eds) (2014) Les habitants, acteurs de la rénovation urbaine ? Rennes: PUR. Dorier, E., Tafuri, C. and Agossou, N. (2013) Porto-Novo dans l’aire métropolitaine littorale du Sud-Bénin: quelles dynamiques citadines ? in Mengin, C. and Godonou, A. (eds), Porto-Novo: patrimoine et développement, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Dorier-Apprill, E. Les échelles du pluralisme religieux en Afrique subsaharienne, L’Information géographique, 2006/4 (vol. 70), pp. 46–65. Fabre, D. (2013) Emotions patrimoniales, Paris: Edition de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Fabre, D. (2016) L’ordinaire, le familier, l’intime, loin du mouvement, in Hottin, C. and Voisenat, C. (eds), Le moment patrimonial. Mutations contemporaines des métiers du patrimoine, Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’homme. Gravari Barbas, M. (ed.) (2003) Habiter le patrimoine, Enjeux, approches, vécu. Rennes: PUR. Guinard, P. (2010) Quand l’art public (dé)fait la ville? la politique d’art public à Johannesbourg, EchoGéo [online], 13 | 2010, accessed 20 September 2010. http://­ journals.openedition.org/echogeo/11855; DOI:10.4000/echogeo.11855 Hall, T. (2003) ‘Art and urban change: Public art in urban regeneration, in Blunt, A., Gruffudd, P., May, J., Ogborn, M. and Pinder, D. (eds), Cultural geography in practice, London: Routledge. Heinich, N. (1997) L’art contemporain exposé aux rejets , Etudes de cas, Nîmes: Jacqueline Chambon. Heinich, N. (2009) La fabrique du patrimoine, de la cathédrale à la petite cuillère, Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Henaff, M. (2008) La ville qui vient, Paris: Editions de l’Herne. Hertzog, A., Poulot, M.L. and Auclair, E. (2017) Poser les jalons d’un inventaire participatif : retour sur la complexité d’une démarche de co-construction à Cergy-Pontoise, in Auclair, E., Hertzog, A. and Poulot, M.L. (eds), De la participation à la co-construction des patrimoines, l’invention des communs? Paris: Editions le Manuscrit. Julhé-Beaulaton, D. (2009) Un patrimoine urbain méconnu. Arbres mémoires, forêts sacrées et jardins des plantes de Porto-Novo (Bénin), Autrepart 2009/3 (n°51), pp. 75–98. DOI:10.3917/autr.051.0075 Lefebvre, H. (1967) Le droit à la ville. Paris: Economica, Antropos. Mengin, C. (2013) Introduction, in Mengin, C. and Godonou, A. (eds), Porto-Novo : patrimoine et développement, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Miles, M. (1997) Art, space and the city: Public art and urban futures. London: Routledge. Morin, E. (2002) Pour une politique de civilisation, Paris: Editions Arléa. N’Bessa, B. (2013) Le doublet Porto-Novo/Cotonou : un développement urbain conditionné par l’économie et la politique, in Mengin, C. and Godonou, A. (eds), PortoNovo : patrimoine et développement, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Nussbaum, M. (2011) Capabilités. Comment créer les conditions d’un monde plus juste? Paris: Climats.

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14 Emotional attachments to historic urban places Heart-bombing heritage Thompson M. Mayes

In an interview about why old places matter to people, Adele Chatfield-Taylor, then the President of the American Academy in Rome and an internationally known preservationist, recalled an experience she had in hearings before the New York Landmarks Commission. Members of the public would appear before the Commission and speak movingly about how important an old place was to them, often in deeply emotional terms. In response, the chair of the Commission would thank them for their time and testimony but explain to the person that how they felt about the old place was not a factor in determining whether the old place met the criteria for designation under the landmarks law. Although the rhetoric of historic preservation – of heritage – often refers to the deep meanings that these places have for people (the United States’ National Historic Preservation Act refers to the ‘sense of orientation’ preservation provides), these emotional meanings have generally not been used to identify sites worthy of preservation. Indeed, the field of historic preservation has not generally adopted the necessary tools for defining or understanding emotional attachment to places, and for determining how such places should be preserved in a community. Instead, the field continues to rely on its more narrow definitions of architectural and historical significance as criteria for designation. In Why Old Places Matter, I wrote about 14 reasons that old places matter to people: from continuity, memory and identity; to beauty and sacredness; to history and architecture; to community, sustainability and economics (Mayes, 2018). In researching these reasons, I came to a conclusion that surprised me: many of the reasons that are most commonly cited as the rationales for heritage conservation in our laws and policies – such as history, architecture and economics – do not address directly the most fundamental reasons that these places matter to people. Why Old Places Matter begins with essays on the ideas of continuity, memory, and individual and collective identity. These ideas together describe something that has not generally been expressed as a rationale for historic preservation in statutes and ordinances, yet is implicit: old places matter because people are emotionally attached to them. When people are emotionally attached to places, the continued existence of these places becomes fundamentally important. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the sense of belongingness immediately follows the physiological needs of air, food and water, and the need for safety (Maslow, 1943). The old places of our

Emotional attachments to historic urban places  229 cities and towns, neighbourhoods and individual sites (to follow the format of this book), and the attachments people feel to those places, give people the sense of continuity, memory and identity that are part of fulfilling that fundamental sense of belonging (as well as some of the physiological, safety and other needs throughout Maslow’s hierarchy). As an essential part of fostering a sense of belonging, historic preservation – heritage conservation – becomes not only something nice to do that enhances peoples’ lives, but a practice that has the potential to be fundamentally necessary for people’s emotional and psychological health. As Yang Wang summarises in Chapter 10 of this book, Changes to place that cause (or are believed to cause) disruptions to place attachment overwhelm people with threats to their sense of continuity, stability and place-related identity (citing Brown & Perkins, 1992), and result in subsequent emotional reactions such as anxiety, grief, sadness or loss (citing Fullilove, 1996). A key point becomes obvious: historic preservation practice in the United States and heritage conservation in other parts of the world generally use tools that only capture some of the key reasons that old places matter to people, and not necessarily the most fundamental reasons. Specifically, the legal regulatory tools in the United States – listing in the federal National Register of Historic Places and/or designation under local historic preservation ordinances – primarily use criteria that are based on architectural or historical significance and not criteria tied to emotional attachment. As Jeremy Wells states in Chapter 2 of this book, One reason why place attachment is not often associated with built heritage conservation or historic preservation is that these fields have long been based on objective (non-emotional) criteria promulgated by rules and regulations, leaving little or no room for the feelings that people have for historic or older places (citing Wells & Baldwin, 2012). While I certainly advocate for the continued preservation of architecturally and historically significant places, the regulatory practices of historic preservation seem to leave many places that people care deeply about unacknowledged and unprotected. As Cooke and Buckley state in Chapter 9: ‘When places are ‘missed’ by these surveys – or their recognition is limited to their architectural, aesthetic or historic values – the legal frameworks can fail to reflect community attachment and expectations. Better recognition of the experience of place attachment – including these small details of sensory engagement and the experience of movement – are potentially of substantial practical value.’ In the United States, many scholars and practitioners alike have noted the limitations of the current tools and practices. Specifically, the designation of sites of significance to underrepresented communities, such as African Americans, LGBTQ people and others, has often been hampered because these sites did not meet the criteria for architectural or historical significance or because they did not meet the standard for integrity – the ability of the place to convey its significance through its existing

230  Thompson M. Mayes physical features (Michael, 2014). At the same time, many of these places were often of deep emotional importance to the people who were historically associated with them. These concerns about the mismatch between heritage practice and the people it is intended to serve has been acknowledged internationally. As Auclair and ­Garcia point out in Chapter 13, the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape and other international conventions include the ideas of promoting participatory processes and fostering the notions of ordinary and everyday heritage [and encouraging] policies where the residents themselves identify, define and participate in the preservation of the symbolic ‘resources’ of their territory, that is to say what counts for them. Although the practising preservation field is largely disengaged from the field of environmental psychology and the concepts of place attachment, there seem to be areas where the academy and practitioners are in alignment. In the United States there is growing awareness of the need to capture a broader range of values. In Preservation for People: A Vision for the Future, the National Trust for Historic Preservation took the opportunity of the 50th anniversary of the United States’ National Historic Preservation Act to listen to people around the country talk about the opportunities and challenges facing the preservation field. The key concept that emerged was the idea that preservation is for people. As Preservation for People puts it: Preservation must put people first. This insight may seem simple and even obvious to many. And yet it carries profound implications for our movement going forward. While preservationists of 50 years ago often framed their work – our work – by explaining the impact places have on our spiritual, social, and economic well-being, our federal preservation infrastructure – regulations, funding priorities, documentation, survey directives – have tended to focus almost entirely on the built environment, and especially buildings. Restoring people’s needs and desires to the center of preservation realigns our priorities; gives us renewed focus, flexibility, and energy going forward; and will help re-galvanize our movement in this new era. Our work empowers all people to share the stories and meanings of the places and traditions that matter to them and to play an essential role in determining the future of their communities. (p. 6) In Preservation for People, the National Trust called on the field to take several steps that are directly related to the methodologies presented in this volume. These steps include: • •

identify, create and provide financial, human and technical resources that empower people to tell the stories of the places that matter to them and to determine the future of those places; review and modify practices that impede the identification, nomination and designation of places meaningful to all Americans – specifically: the

Emotional attachments to historic urban places  231 concepts of integrity and period of significance, as well as the living-architect and 50-year rules, as used in the National Register; and – the complexity and cost of preparing and submitting forms for National Register, state and local designation; • harness technology and social engagement to help communities identify the places they consider worthy of preservation and to tell more complete stories; • embrace evolving technologies, new research and social media to expand the stories that historic sites tell and encourage visitors to interpret their own experiences and perspectives. (p. 8) The National Trust drafted these action steps, fully intending to establish highly aspirational goals, which reflected the sense in the field that change is needed. But there is the all-important question of how. How exactly does the field of heritage develop and implement a practice that ‘empowers all people to share the stories and meanings of the places and traditions that matter to them’? Or as Wells puts it in this volume, ‘imagine how useful it would be to inform which places are worthy of conservation based on people’s emotional attachment to them.’ How do preservationists, planners and community activists begin to identify and implement the tools necessary to achieve these action steps? The chapters in this book bring together a variety of techniques and processes that reveal the potential breadth and variety of the ways that communities could begin to capture peoples’ emotional attachment to places. Authors also explore the uses of this information to inform which places are important for the community to preserve as part of its heritage or to manage and interpret existing heritage sites in a more inclusive – and more meaningful – way. The methodologies in this book include tools that exist, but that have not generally been used in the designation processes of historic preservation. This includes ethnographic studies (Bideau and Yan, in Gulou, Beijing, China; Törmä and Gutiérrez in Veracruz, Mexico); surveys (de Jong, Garduño Freemen, Beza, Novacevski and Gray, in Victoria, Australia); participatory civic art projects (Auclair and Garcia in Porto-Novo, Benin); and the history of emotional attachment revealed in historical photographs (Myers). Other chapters present relatively new tools that are just beginning to be used in heritage. Many of these are technological tools, including: social media such as Facebook (Gregory and Chambers); emoji (Madgin); map-based websites such as surveyoflondon.org. (Dowding); webGIS (Bideau and Yan); visual research methodologies (VRM) and Pivothead (Cooke and Buckley); and emotional GIS (EGIS) using Maptionnaire (Yang Wang). Additionally, authors draw from other disciplinary traditions, for example, Wells’ use of neuroscience (EEG, fMRI). In addition to the wide variety of tools offered by the chapters in this book, it is worth noting the wide diversity of places represented: from Edinburgh, Scotland, to Gulou, China, to Porto-Novo, Benin, to Veracruz, Mexico and to a number of places in Australia – Melbourne, Ballarat, Sorrento and Queenscliff. This geographic multiplicity reinforces the point that the formation of emotional

232  Thompson M. Mayes attachments to places appears to be a common trait of people all over the world as conditioned by local societies and cultures, a trait that is not always expressly acknowledged in the practice of heritage. At the same time, while the techniques presented in this book serve as examples and potential models, they are not designed with the idea that each would be appropriate for every community. In fact, one of the appealing aspects of the variety of techniques presented is that some seem tailored to the specific community where they were implemented, consistent with the idea that heritage should be informed by the local community and that community-specific tools may be needed to understand residents’ relationship to the place. The techniques offered here are not exhaustive; they are a sampling of tested practices. Together they suggest that the field of heritage has or can develop the tools to begin to answer the question of ‘how’, and to capture more of the deep and fundamental reasons that old places matter to people. Seen as a whole, the techniques presented in this book suggest that we have the potential capacity to know what people value in their surroundings and what they would value as heritage. One of the most useful aspects of this volume is its basic thesis that emotional attachments to heritage are essential and can be identified and recognised in addition to the criteria of history and architecture. As Madgin and Lesh state in the Introduction, ‘We believe that emotional attachments to historic places are constitutive of the very reasons why the past matters to people and are therefore fundamental to people-centred conservation.’ Or, as Kali Myers states in Chapter 12 while discussing a methodology for reading the relationship between place, body and emotion through the language of historic photographs, such a process is ‘essential for capturing places of community and belonging, the kinds of places worthy of heritage assessment and conservation.’ When techniques similar to those presented in this book are used in heritage or planning currently, they are almost never used expressly with a focus on emotional attachment. Instead, they are intended to broaden the existing criteria of historical, cultural or architectural significance, including being more inclusive of underrepresented communities. While I support the broadening of these existing criteria, I recognise that this approach does not try expressly to capture emotional attachments, and therefore does not quite get to the heart (so to speak) of the matter. For instance, SurveyLA used digital tools in a project funded by the Getty Conservation Institute to conduct a comprehensive survey of Los Angeles, C ­ alifornia. SurveyLA was recognised for broadening approaches to preservation surveys (National Trust, 2017) and clearly identified a much broader range of older places. However, the determination of significance, and therefore designation, continued to be based on traditional preservation criteria of architectural and historical significance (Los Angeles City Planning website, 2020). The recognition and recording of significance could thereby be broadened through the development of historical theme studies for all areas of the city, and citizens were invited to participate in outreach events to help identify locations of social, cultural and historical significance in their neighbourhoods. The survey was conducted by consultants trained in the professional standards of historic preservation.

Emotional attachments to historic urban places  233 On the other side of the United States, Elihu Rubin and Saima Akhtar at the Yale University Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage developed the New Haven Building Archive as an open-access interactive platform that provides the public with the tools to not only learn about social, material and urban history, but also to add information based on citizens’ own knowledge or experience of a place and to empower local communities to express their personal connections to a building (Akhtar 2018). In Texas, the San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation is engaged in community mapping and storytelling to capture more of the cultural connections residents have with the historic places (Guerra 2016). While there are other limited examples of attempts in the United States to connect emotional attachment to heritage (Bonney, 2015), most efforts to broaden the places that are recognised as significant are not expressly based on capturing people’s emotional attachments. All of the techniques in this volume drive towards the reward of increasing the ability of heritage – as both a material place and as a process – to connect more closely to people’s basic attachments to place and therefore fulfil fundamental human needs; to become more people centred as a field. Yet there are substantial structural challenges to implementing these processes as part of the existing framework for historic preservation, both in the United States and in other parts of the world. The existing regulatory processes have in some cases been in place for more than 50 years. The processes are supported by legal frameworks that have been tested by legal challenges, refined in response to those challenges, and that will be difficult or undesirable politically to change, including in the United States – challenges based on due process and property rights. They are time tested and largely accepted, and therefore difficult to modify. The existing frameworks are also supported by professionals who have been trained in the specific skills to fulfil the existing processes. As the National Trust developed Preservation for People, some noted that the professional field of preservation is trained in architectural history but not in social engagement nor in the tools used in planning to help develop a vision for a community. Training for practitioners in these participatory processes may be essential if heritage is to capture more of the emotional reasons that old places matter to people. The current preservation regulations also have substantial benefits that are well recognised, including the preservation of historic architecture and communities, the promotion of heritage tourism, the economic benefits of rehabilitation and community revitalisation. Finally, it is important to recognise the reality that the traditional processes also have significant impact on people’s emotional attachments to place: previously underrepresented communities also express a sense of pride and belonging when a place important to their community is designated as significant through the traditional processes. Although there are scholars who advocate for a wholesale reinvention of the mechanisms for historic preservation (Page & Miller, 2016), the more likely path is incremental change which would include a broadening of the existing regulatory frameworks and the development of additional or ancillary processes. Although it is possible for the types of techniques described in this book to re-shape and inform existing regulatory frameworks for historic preservation, some may be

234  Thompson M. Mayes more likely to be used as ancillary processes, or to result in different tools and schemes. For example, when the citizens of San Francisco and San Francisco Heritage began to express outrage (using terms of emotional attachment such as ‘beloved’ and ‘part of peoples’ daily lives’) about the loss of the old businesses that gave the city character and distinctiveness, a new regulatory and incentive tool was created. The Legacy Business Program includes a Legacy Business Registry and Legacy Business Historical Preservation Fund. The Registry identifies places that are part of the history or culture of their neighbourhoods and agrees to maintain the historical name, essential business operations, craft and traditions of their businesses. While the purpose is to recognise that longstanding, community-serving businesses can be valuable cultural assets, the programme does not expressly reference in its criteria the sense of emotional attachment people feel for the businesses (City and County of San Francisco, Office of Small Business, 2018). Yet, in examining emotional attachments to heritage, the book begins to answer specific questions about how the field can become more people centred and be able more directly and expressly to meet peoples’ fundamental needs. In presentations about old places and peoples’ individual identity and memory, I have occasionally been asked why society should preserve places that simply represent an individual’s own identity or memory. Public officials, practitioners and the general public find data and scientific methods more credible than stories about why people care about these places. These chapters begin to show techniques that collect and amalgamate individual emotional attachments to place into a collective connection grounded in scientific method and data. As Törmä and Gutiérrez in Chapter 11 summarise, ‘People value and become attached to heritage places as individuals, but there are also broader social patterns and processes operating which can be revealed by studying the micro-geographies of places (citing Lewicka, 2011)’. In ‘Narrating places – blurring boundaries: co-creating digital histories of place’, Chapter 6, Dowding describes the use of a map-based website by the Survey of London in the area of Whitechapel, East London to collect and disseminate the diverse stories, impressions and memories of people ‘submitted not only by the Survey’s historians, who are the website editors, but also by the public’. Dowding recognises the potential for wider participation implicit in this process: ‘In the twenty-first century, the potential for democratisation of history through participatory digital methods is widely recognised by scholars and heritage organisations, reflecting a broad-ranging disciplinary re-alignment which seeks to give a platform to a larger range of writers of history.’ Dowding adds later that the use of digital technology has enabled the Survey to pursue ‘a more active agenda of co-creating urban history, it aims to give voice to many rather than to a singular authority, and so generate a multi-vocal record of Whitechapel’s streets and buildings’. The use of online mapping tools is becoming more frequent in planning and in historic preservation. In ‘Emotional geographic systems: a spatial investigation of place attachment for urban historic environments in Edinburgh’, Chapter 10, Wang describes the online PPGIS toolkit Maptionnaire, as a map-based survey ‘instrument’,

Emotional attachments to historic urban places  235 where ‘Participants were instructed to mark on the map any historic places that they believed were significant or special to themselves and were asked to name the place in a follow-up question’ (emphasis added). For the fields of planning and historic preservation, online mapping is an outgrowth of an existing and well-understood tool: place surveys. Because of this, online mapping may be quickly implementable in other places. Although websites may permit individuals and groups to share their stories and meanings about the place, those stories may still be considered ancillary to the designation of the resources as heritage, or their stories may not meet the criteria for designation or listing under historical or architectural significance. Other chapters illustrate the use of new sources of data through social media. Jenny Gregory and Sandra Chambers in Chapter 3 examine the use of ‘lost’ sites on social media, concluding that ‘social media provides a valuable source for urban historians to analyse social attitudes towards urban heritage and emotional attachments to place’. Gregory and Chambers conclude, rather than focusing solely on tangible evidence, regulatory authorities should indeed take heed of the intangible – the emotional impact of the loss of place – particularly at a time of rapid urban transformation in which older values are being eroded and many feel a loss of control and uncertainty about the future. The overarching takeaway is that social media is a powerful source of data about people’s attachment to place and can reveal a collective sense of the places that people care about. While social media is used actively as an advocacy tool in historic preservation, it has not yet generally been used formally to identity the places that should be designated. With regard to the use of social engagement as recommended by Preservation for People, Auclair and Garcia, in Porto-Novo, Benin, studied a civic art process that was highly participatory and proposed the creation of an art project in 50 traditional squares in Benin. Stating in Chapter 13 that, ‘The authenticity of heritage lies in the meaning that it is given by residents in their daily lives’, the project involved a participative approach to creating art projects in the squares. The artists drew on ‘various forms of expertise from planners, architects, masons and artists, as well as citizens.’ The result was that residents began to see the squares as beautiful, and they were proud to live there. While art is used to bring attention and appreciation to the heritage of specific neighbourhoods or communities, it is not expressly used as a way of identifying places that should be protected by law. Yet, art projects may elicit appreciation of these places growing to such an extent that people will begin to recognise that an everyday place is also a place of heritage that should be protected. The artistic process may bring out history, stories or culture that will lead to designation of the place as heritage. Similarly, the use of art processes at existing places designated and recognised as historic may bring out new meanings and bring the ‘heritage elements into contemporary reality’, as the United States National Trust has done by commissioning contemporary artists and writers at Shadows on the Teche in New Iberia, Louisiana and other National Trust Historic Sites.

236  Thompson M. Mayes In considering the techniques in this volume, it is important to emphasise that these tools, even if they do not elicit information that meets existing criteria for designation or protection of heritage resources, have significant benefits in their own right. In discussing the online survey called the Melbourne Lovability Index, DeJong et al. revealed in Chapter 4 a number of dimensions in which historic places form and contribute to place attachment in Melbourne, including through ‘promoting wonder’, noting that ‘the historic is a crucible of creativity and imagination’ and that ‘language in these processes functions as a way of creating and imagining layers of history and change that further deepens place attachment’. Others emphasised that the participatory projects to identify emotional attachments also deepen those attachments. These techniques highlight that even the process of eliciting the places that matter to people can help deepen that attachment and increase civic engagement. All of the methodologies described in the preceding chapters in some way engage the people themselves in determining the places they feel attached to. These processes not only democratise the process by broadening and deepening the number of voices of people expressing the old places that matter to them, they also potentially deepen the attachments between people and place through their application. These participatory approaches foster civic engagement and ongoing care for the community (Dowding). In contrast to a heritage programme that identifies sites determined by experts as significant, these techniques go to the people themselves, and, perhaps most significantly, not only identify attachments, but help to foster and build emotional attachments to places. One of the themes that runs through many of the chapters in this book is the idea that heritage is a process, and that peoples’ relationships with the old places that constitute their heritage change over time. This idea is recognised by the academic fields that study heritage but is not frequently discussed by practitioners even with regard to the places where processes are revealing new meanings and significance for specific places. As Madgin states in Chapter 5, ‘Emoji as method: accessing emotional responses to changing historic places’: ‘The significance of heritage assets may be fixed through documents such as statements of significance and listed building descriptions, but emotional responses to these assets are not fixed in time or place.’ Auclair and Garcia state in Chapter 13: ‘A number of international texts stress the importance of preserving heritage, not only as monuments or ‘objects’ to be conserved, but also as place-based, people-centred processes combining tangible and intangible dimensions.’ And, ‘The authenticity of heritage lies in the meaning that it is given by residents in their daily lives’. In Chapter 7, Garrow describes the way Auld Leithers, Real Leithers and Adopted Leithers each had different attachments to the same place. This concept of heritage as process is neither widely understood, nor expressly acknowledged among practitioners, but it suggests some very practical directions. Acknowledging the ongoing process of heritage fosters the continuation and increased relevance of heritage for people today. In writing Why Old Places ­Matter, I interviewed and quoted Sofia Bosco from the Italian preservation organisation Fondo Ambiente Italiani (FAI), who recounted that FAI had begun to engage people with places through activities because, if they didn’t, people

Emotional attachments to historic urban places  237 would cease to care about the places. The basic idea is that peoples’ connections to historic places were reinforced and strengthened by ongoing use, which created new memories and experiences. FAI discovered that people cared about and supported the sites more if they were actively engaged in using them and creating their own memories and emotional attachments to the place. If an old place is increasingly removed from ongoing use, fewer people will form attachments and its significance (and sense of authenticity) will begin to wither. Our emotional attachments to old places are like all relationships: one has to work on them. The emphasis on process highlights the relevance of these places for people today, and for an ongoing sense of authenticity of a living heritage. As concluded by Auclair and Garcia in Chapter 13, Far from simply transmitting an ancient – or ‘frozen’ – heritage, the creative process and artistic outcomes bring tangible and intangible heritage elements into contemporary reality. By connecting the past with the present, the works of art form a continuum between tradition and modernity. In contrast, the attempt by authorities to impose a certain version of heritage on an existing population results in negative impacts. As Bideau and Yan state in Chapter 8, The official discourse based on a selective and singular memory is not entirely accepted by the public, especially those engaged in heritage preservation. To them, the official claim about the history of the area is a representation of a static sense of time which ignores the historical values that are derived from later eras. One group of stakeholders ‘feel betrayed by the government and displaced by the present’. As I noted in Why Old Places Matter, places once recognised as significant for architecture or for a specific narrative of history are now being recognised for other areas of significance or for different themes of history. At ­Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the enslaved people who lived and worked at the place were once barely acknowledged, but now the attachments of the descendants of people enslaved there are considered highly significant. LGBT stories are now being reinserted into statements of significance for places where the LGBT experience previously could not be acknowledged (National Park Foundation, 2016). This suggests that people’s relationships with these places are not fixed in time, and may be ‘updated’ with contemporary meanings, through the lenses both of personal memory and identity and of collective memory and identity. As Madgin states in Chapter 5, Rather than seek to essentialise time and space through fixing heritage value in a static temporal and spatial container, the emoji-based research brought to the forefront the dynamism of the historic places in the emotional register of the participants, and how their responses to these places were not just bound up with the past but rather constituted through the past, present and future.

238  Thompson M. Mayes The processes described in these chapters go beyond the traditional processes of identifying heritage (usually through expertise in architectural history or documentary history) to reveal the deeper emotional attachments that these places have for people. As Madgin and Lesh state in the introductory chapter, seeing historic places as an emotional construct, rather than just as material legacies, can liberate us from identifying what matters to instead focusing on how heritage makes us feel and thus why heritage is important to the continuity of both place and person. That these scholars expressly ground heritage in the fundamental emotional attachments that people have to old places begins to shift the field, with important ancillary benefits, including the heritage field becoming more inclusive, more relevant, more authentic and more democratic. This could possibly even help to build stronger community attachments to heritage. All of these processes help the field begin to pivot towards the most fundamental reasons that these places matter: the sense of continuity, identity and memory, and the basic idea of belonging that is at the heart of place attachment – and of heritage. In 2012, Bernice Radle of Buffalo’s Young Preservationists began to place hand-made paper hearts on threatened older buildings as a way of showing appreciation for these places. The action sparked ‘heart bombing’, which spread across

Figure 14.1  A heart-bombing by The Young Ohio Preservationists at the Mount Vernon Avenue Commercial Building in Columbus, Ohio, 2017. Courtesy of Sarah Marsom (permission given).

Emotional attachments to historic urban places  239 the United States. As stated on SavingPlaces.org, three of the four first heartbombed buildings are still standing – ‘a testament to the power of showing places (and their communities) that someone cares about them’ (Rocchi, 2014). The Huffington Post picked up on the movement, and wrote, “Preservation” can sometimes come across as a complicated or academic process, but the truth is much simpler. At its heart, preservation is about love – love for buildings, love for places, love for history, love for community, and love for the people who rally together to protect all these important things. (Huffington Post, 2015) The techniques in this volume suggest the possibility of capturing more of the love people have for the old places of their lives (Figure 14.1).

References Akhtar, S. (2018). “Using Historic Preservation to Honor a More Diverse American Story”. https://forum.savingplaces.org/blogs/special-contributor/2018/04/27/using-­historicpreservation-to-honor-a-more-divers. Accessed 7 March 2020. Australia ICOMOS (2013). “The Burra Charter”. Avrami, E., MacDonald, S., Mason, R. and Myers, D. (eds). (2019). Values in Heritage Management: Emergent Approaches and Research Directions, Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles. Bonney, C. (2015). Beyond Aesthetics: Fostering Place Attachment Through the Design Regulatory Process. https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/1785/. Accessed 19 June 2020. City and County of San Francisco, Office of Small Business (2018). http://sfosb.org/­ legacy-business. See also https://www.sfheritage.org/legacy/legacy-business-­registrypreservation-fund/. Accessed 15 January 2018. Guerra, C. (2016). Cultural Mapping: Engaging Community in Historic Preservation. https://forum.savingplaces.org/HigherLogic/System/DownloadDocumentFile.ashx?DocumentFileKey=a56dd7f9-bbe4-3bc3-15be-3031089a99f2&forceDialog=0. Accessed 6 July 2020. Huffington Post (2015). This February, Heart Bomb the Historic Place You Love Most. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/this-february-heart-bomb_b_6624852. Accessed 7 March 2020. Los Angeles City Planning (2020). https://planning.lacity.org/preservation-design/­ historic-resources-survey. Accessed 7 March 2020. Maslow, A.H. (1943). A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370–396. Mayes, T.M. (2018). Why Old Places Matter: How Historic Places Affect Our Identity and Well-Being, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham. Michael, V. (2014). Diversity in Preservation: Rethinking Standards and Practices. https://forum.savingplaces.org/HigherLogic/System/DownloadDocumentFile.ashx?DocumentFileKey=f04a6056-5e84-a1d3-94d2-812344eaa98a. Accessed 6 July 2020. National Park Foundation (2016). LGBTQ Heritage Theme Study, https://www.nps.gov/ subjects/tellingallamericansstories/lgbtqthemestudy.htm. Accessed 19 June 2020. National Trust (England and Scotland) (2017). Places That Make Us, Wiltshire: National Trust.

240  Thompson M. Mayes National Trust (2019). Why Places Matter to People, Wiltshire: National Trust. National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States (2017). From Coffee Shops to Churches: Survey LA Documents the Vast Diversity of LA. https://savingplaces.org/ stories/from-coffee-shops-to-churches-surveyla-documents-the-vast-diversity-of-la#. XmO4m6hKjIV. Accessed 7 March 2020. National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States (2018). Preservation for People: A Vision for the Future, National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, https://savingplaces.org/stories/preservation-for-people-a-vision-for-the-future#. XhoJ8MhKjIU. Accessed 11 January 2020. Page, M. and Miller, M.R. (2016). Bending the Future: 50 Ideas for the Next 50 Years of Historic Preservation in the United States, University of Massachusetts Press, Boston and Amherst. Rocchi, J. (2014). Heart-bombs. https://savingplaces.org/stories/heart-bombs-2014-fiveevents-showed-historic-places-love#.XmKq_ahKiUk. Accessed 6 March 2020. Warnick, M. (2016). This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live, Viking, New York.

Index

Pages numbers in Italics refer to figures; bold refer to table; page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes numbers academic voice 3, 10, 11, 19, 57, 80, 83, 84, 101, 103, 144, 145, 159, 167, 198, 215, 236, 239 affect 7, 9, 17, 23, 25, 28–30, 43, 59, 71, 109, 119, 169, 172, 173 American Academy in Rome 228 archive 9, 11, 46, 51, 99, 103, 104, 105, 107, 109, 110, 116, 145, 183, 194–208 artists 183, 212–225, 235 attachments 2, 4–6, 8–12, 18, 32, 41, 43, 65–78, 84, 90, 91, 97–99, 103, 109, 110, 112–115, 117, 118, 121–126, 129, 131–134, 138–140, 145, 152, 159, 160, 162, 163, 169, 170, 173, 191, 195–197, 200, 212–239 Australia 1, 5, 45, 46, 48, 54, 65, 70, 143, 144, 152, 196, 200, 201, 205–207, 231 authority 101, 102, 106, 107, 109, 130, 167, 171, 185, 234 auto-­ethnography 8, 114–117 Ballarat 66, 69–71, 74, 76, 77, 144, 145, 147–149, 151, 152, 231 Beijing 42, 129, 130, 132, 134–139, 231 Bodies 69, 161, 171, 195–202, 204–207 Buffalo Young Preservationists 238 Burra Charter 1, 6, 143 censoring 106 collaboration 10, 70, 103, 109 community 6, 8, 10, 59, 66, 71–76, 84, 88, 107, 109, 112–115, 117–121, 123–125, 130, 131, 133, 143–145, 149, 151, 159, 171, 172, 178, 180, 183, 185, 194–198, 202, 207, 215, 217, 218, 220, 222, 224, 228, 229, 231–234, 236, 238, 239 criteria for designation 228, 235, 236 Cultural Heritage Protection Center 136

David Lowenthal 9, 59 digital heritage 145 digital history 97, 99 Drum and Bell Tower Square Restoration project 131, 135, 136 Edinburgh 43–46, 47, 48, 48, 50–54, 57– 60, 112, 117, 118, 122, 123, 159–174, 168, 168, 231, 234 EGIS 159–174, 231 emoji 80–92, 231, 236, 237 emotional attachment 1–18, 24, 28, 30, 32, 41, 59–60, 77, 84, 90, 91, 98, 101, 103, 124, 129, 131–134, 138–140, 159, 160, 162, 169, 170, 173, 195, 197, 198, 200, 212–239 emotions 7, 11, 18, 26, 29, 31, 42–44, 46, 52, 56, 59, 65, 80, 81, 83, 86, 89–92, 98, 106, 113, 126, 129–140, 172, 196–199, 201, 206, 208, 212, 214 England 9 environmental psychology 4, 6, 16, 17, 28, 124, 164, 230 environment-­behavior research 17, 24, 114 ethnographic research 133 ethnography 8, 112–127, 133–134, 179 everyday life 131, 146, 162, 172, 177–191 Facebook 41–45, 52, 58–60, 83, 105, 159, 164, 173, 180, 182, 183, 231 fMRI 25, 28–31, 231 functional areas of the brain 26 genius loci 6, 7 gentrification 99, 131, 143, 145 Gulou 129–140, 231 Gulou Preservation Team 137–138 gyms 195–198, 200

242  Index Heart Bombing 228–239 heritage 1–12, 16, 19, 20, 22, 31, 33, 41–44, 57, 65–69, 72–77, 81, 84, 86–88, 90–92, 97, 99, 103, 106, 109, 110, 112, 117, 118, 121–126, 130, 132, 135–137, 139, 140, 143–146, 148–150, 152, 153n6, 159, 162, 169, 171, 177–180, 183, 184, 190, 191, 195–200, 202, 208, 212–214, 216–225, 228–235, 239 heritage, loss 20, 41, 44, 140, 143, 229, 234, 235 historical photographs 107, 198, 200, 231 historic environment 2, 9, 20, 23, 24, 32, 33, 73, 75, 84, 87, 88, 92n1, 112, 116, 159–174, 174n2, 234 historic urban landscape 1, 7, 42, 43, 132, 144, 214, 230 history of conservation 5, 10 human geography 114 humanistic geography 3, 4, 6, 16, 18, 19, 28 intangible heritage 3, 6, 178, 221, 237 interpretation 3, 12, 21, 22, 32, 43, 83, 105, 113, 116, 117, 126, 133, 144, 145, 179, 181, 197–200, 220 Legacy Business Program 234 lexicon 2, 9, 66, 68–70, 73, 74, 76, 77, 83 liveability 70, 75, 143 lovability 65–70, 73–76, 78n1, 78n3, 236 mapping 24, 26, 145, 159–163, 166, 167, 169, 171–173, 178, 179, 233–235 Melbourne, Port 145, 149, 152 memories 3, 7, 16, 23, 27, 31, 52, 52, 54–58, 72, 74, 76, 102–105, 107, 113, 116, 118–120, 125, 129–140, 145, 152, 179, 180, 182, 183, 185, 190, 195, 197, 204, 213, 219, 220, 224, 234, 237 Methodology, 17, 18, 22, 32, 41, 46, 65, 66, 70, 78, 80, 98, 99, 110, 117, 132–134, 148, 151, 159, 160, 169, 172, 178, 180, 195, 197, 207, 213, 232 morphological analysis 180, 181, 191 music and dance 178, 182–186, 190, 191 National Historic Preservation Act 5, 228, 230 National Trust for Historic Preservation 230 neuroscience 16–33, 231 nostalgia 20, 43, 44, 59–60, 74, 77, 91, 105, 122, 124, 130, 139, 194, 204

observations 8, 60, 102, 115–117, 133, 177–182, 185, 186, 190 participation 99, 102, 103, 109, 110, 137, 144, 152, 159, 160, 169, 171, 213, 215, 221, 234 patrimonialisation 213 people-­centred 1–6, 8–10, 12, 65, 179, 198, 208, 212, 232, 236 perceptions 18, 23, 26, 31, 44, 60, 69, 75, 114, 152, 180, 182, 202, 212, 222, 224 Perth, Australia 43–48, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 57–60, 196 phenomenology 16–33, 67, 113 photographs 24, 31, 57–59, 85, 98, 103, 107, 181–183, 189, 194–208, 231, 232 photography 86, 199, 200 place attachment 2, 4, 5, 7–10, 16, 17, 19, 21, 24–26, 28, 29, 31, 33, 43, 44, 65–69, 71, 73–75, 78, 86, 98, 99, 103, 109, 110, 112–127, 143, 145, 146, 149, 150, 159–173, 178, 179, 189–191, 194, 195, 198, 207, 208, 217, 229, 230, 234, 236, 238 Porto-­Novo, Benin 212–225, 225n1, 231, 235 Preservation for People 230, 233, 235 protest 99, 100, 102, 105, 106, 130, 216, 218 psychology, memory studies 4 public art 47, 48, 49, 212–225 public history 97, 99, 110 public space 81, 116, 143, 177–191, 215, 222 qualitative 4, 5, 8, 11, 12, 17–24, 28, 31, 42, 65, 66, 70, 73, 77, 80, 113, 114, 146, 151, 172, 197, 213 quantitative 4, 5, 8–10, 12, 18, 19, 24, 28–30, 70, 71, 87, 113, 124, 146, 172, 179, 197 Quebec declaration 1, 6, 16 Raphael Samuel 9, 59, 103, 198 regional cities 75, 76 research methods 17, 18, 80, 83, 92, 103, 143–153, 180, 231 rural 5, 76 Scotland, 6, 44, 45, 50, 57, 61, 80, 81, 84, 87, 92n1, 112, 159–173, 231 sense of place 2, 6, 7, 16, 18–20, 25, 26, 29, 43, 72, 72, 75, 76, 144, 145, 152, 162, 212–225

Index  243 senses 2, 3, 6, 7, 16, 18–23, 25, 26, 28–30, 32, 43, 53, 55, 56, 67, 70, 72–76, 72, 78, 89, 100–102, 106, 107, 109, 112, 115, 118, 121–126, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139, 140, 144, 145, 147, 150, 152, 160–162, 170, 171, 178, 185, 195, 198–200, 202, 207, 212–229, 231, 233–235, 237, 238 Shadows on the Teche 235 social media 9–11, 41–61, 71, 78, 80, 81, 83, 84, 90, 105, 231, 235 social value 2, 6, 10, 65, 67, 69, 143, 177 spatial analysis 99, 159, 166 SurveyLA 232 temporalities 129–140 textual material 9, 65, 77 time 2, 6, 20, 21, 25, 28, 30, 31, 41–43, 45, 51, 52, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 65–81, 83–85, 88–91, 97–102, 104–107, 109, 110, 118, 120, 122, 124, 129, 130, 131, 132, 136, 138, 139, 146, 148, 161, 170–173, 177, 179–181, 183–186, 198, 200–202, 204, 206, 214, 216, 218, 220, 228, 230, 232, 233, 236, 237 Town and Country Planning Act (1932) 5 towns 44, 58, 66, 70, 72, 74–77, 90, 98, 101, 112, 116, 117, 123, 144, 162, 163, 168, 183, 217, 229

UNESCO 1, 7, 16, 42, 43, 67, 129, 144, 177, 178, 184, 214, 230, 237 United States (US/USA), 5, 16, 19–21, 45, 46, 134, 139, 196, 202, 204, 205, 228, 229, 230, 233, 235, 239 United Kingdom (UK), 20, 45, 46, 65, 98, 99, 159, 160, 162 unofficial histories 97 urban change 85, 101, 107, 112, 114, 116, 129, 132 urban form 178–180, 185, 188 urban heritage 41–44, 65–78, 144, 146, 152, 177–191, 213, 221, 235 urban history 4, 41, 97, 102, 112, 159–174, 195, 233, 234 urban renovation 212–225 Veracruz (The Port of Veracruz, Mexico) 177–191, 231 Victoria, Australia 6, 10, 47, 66, 70, 71, 74, 75, 77, 143–145, 152, 231 visibility 74, 151, 181, 182, 186, 188, 222 visual material 146 visual research methodologies 83, 143–153, 231 voodoo squares 212, 216, 223 Waidiren 133, 138, 139 walking interviews 115, 116, 126