Why Does the Past Matter? Emotional Attachments to the Historic Urban Environment

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The role of heritage within public policies has recently been elevated within both national and international contexts. The Scottish Government's strategy Our Place in Time began a process of "mainstreaming the historic environment across national government policies" (2014:13) whereas UNESCO's Historic Urban Landscapes approach (2011) was designed to integrate "the goals of urban heritage conservation and those of social and economic development" (2014:5). The potential for heritage to contribute to a range of agendas is therefore well recognised within public policy. However, despite this rhetoric there is still an acknowledgment that the heritage sector has not fully evidenced the reasons why the past matters to a range of individuals. This is clearly demonstrated by the Scottish Government, who within the same Strategy document, stated their need to "improve our understanding of the role and impact the historic environment plays in all aspects of our lives - for example, its role in identity, well-being and sense of place" (2014:15). This project sits firmly within this context as its central aim is to examine the range of factors that contribute to the development of emotional attachments between people and the historic urban environment and the extent to which these factors are considered within the designation and management of heritage in the UK. Contained within this context are three central research questions:RQ1: To what extent, and for what reasons, do changes to the urban environment expose emotional attachments between people and historic places?RQ2: In what ways, and for what reasons, do individuals express their emotional attachments to the historic urban environment during times of urban change?RQ3: To what extent, and how, are emotional attachments to place considered during the designation and management of historic urban assets?The central core of the project engages with the emotional turn within heritage studies through conducting an analysis of the ways in which emotional attachments form between people and their historic urban environment. Previously described as the "elephant in the room of heritage and museum studies" (Smith and Campbell, 2016) emotion is increasingly becoming an influential theme within heritage studies. The project is premised on the belief that changes to urban environments can unlock previously latent emotional attachments to historic urban buildings. As such a number of urban case studies are examined through a combination of documents from privately held and rarely accessed archives, and newly-created data from place-based oral histories and focus groups. This existing and new data will then be subjected to analysis to try to examine the extent to which, and reasons why, the past matters to a range of individuals from heritage professionals to non-heritage professionals, defined as those people who are locally embedded within the historic urban environment, such as residents and activists.