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 at 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.
1. Exploring Emotional Attachments to Historic Places: Bridging Concept, Practice and Method, 2. Attachment to Older or Historic Places: Relating What We Know From the Perspectives of Phenomenology and Neuroscience, Part 1: Cities and Towns, 3. Longing for the Past: Lost Cities on Social Media, 4. Lovability: Getting Emotional About Heritage, Dr Ursula de Jong, 5. Emoji as Method: Accessing Emotional Responses to Changing Historic Places, Part 2: Neighbourhoods, 6. Narrating Places - Blurring Boundaries: Co-Creating Digital Histories of Place, 7. Living in and loving Leith: Using Ethnography to Explore Place Attachment and Identity Processes, 8. Re-Creating Memories of Gulou: Three Temporalities and Emotion, 9. Visual Research Methodologies and the Heritage of ‘Everyday’ Places, Part 3: Sites, 10. Building EGIS (Emotional GIS): A Spatial Investigation of Place Attachment for Urban Historic Environments in Edinburgh, Scotland, 11. Observing Attachment: Understanding Everyday Life, Urban Heritage and Public Space in the Port of Veracruz, Mexico, 12. It’s Only a Joke If You Don’t Take the Fitness Industry Seriously: Feeling Through the Archive of People’s Relationship to the Early-Twentieth-Century Gym, 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), 14. Emotional Attachments to Historic Urban Places: Heart-bombing Heritage
Rebecca Madgin is Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow. Rebecca’s work explores the emotional value of 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.
