Co-creating heritage: bottom-up planning for heritage management in rural areas

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A Management Plan (MP), the default means to assess tangible cultural heritage resources and associated intangible values, provides a periodically revisable document describing strategic goals over the resources in question, their context and their overall state in terms of conservation, interpretation and promotion. The preparation of a MP can be a complex, time-consuming process and commonly the management bodies lack the resources to develop an in-depth assessment of local communities' views and aspirations for the heritage in question. In these pressing circumstances, the professionals contracted to prepare the MP tend to focus on the obvious needs of the site/landscape/building, skimming through the complicated universe of social/cultural values that reside at the local level. Thus, local communities, even though acknowledged, are not likely to be meaningfully involved. Their priorities and visions degrade into blanket directives, frequently sourced from limited-time focus groups. These issues are aggravated in rural areas, where structural problems and difficulties of everyday life (for example, time-consuming commuting, 'urban' mentality of interviewers) tend to bluntly generalise local perceptions and further mute marginalised voices of people such as women, children, precarious workers and immigrants. Similar issues were highlighted in the CHeriScape network project, one of the ten projects funded under the transnational pilot call of the Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage, that located cultural values within a people-centred context, debating heritage as an arena for negotiation that encourages participation by a wider public. CHeriScape identified a wealth of techniques to put these ideas into practice, most of them with co-construction at their heart that tend to work best at the local level. The challenge of 'going local in a global world' is tackled in this proposal by the use of the RES.CO.PART tool, an innovative mobile application, which also draws its inspiration from our original AHRC project. RES.CO.PART is designed to promote the efficient involvement of communities as stakeholders and has the form of a mobile application, functioning as a probe for collecting ethnographic information, related to places/sites of interest. The AHRC report "Understanding the value of arts & culture" provided a strong incentive to revisit the results of our original AHRC research, in the light of the CHeriScape mandates, through the use of the RES.CO.PART tool. Our proposed project will attempt to identify ways that can make cultural heritage and landscape more relevant to the local communities of Naxos, attempting to formalise, at the same time, a broader methodology applicable in other rural areas of the UK and beyond. For this reason, a co-created management document for the cultural resources of the case-study area will be developed through participatory and creative activities, re-using collected data and involving both prominent and marginal stakeholders. The data collected in the process will also be used to build an innovative, open-source and easily customisable digital toolkit that will allow the efficient interaction of heritage professionals and interested parties in heritage management, documenting the emerging cultural values and promoting their applicability in real-life decisions on heritage resources.The case study selected for the development of the toolkit is the island of Naxos in Greece. The data collected in our previous AHRC funded project will be used to initiate the dialogue with local stakeholders that have already been identified and engaged during our 2006-7 research and subsequent fieldwork in the area. Their participation in the scheme will allow us to develop a collaborative management document for the area but also provide the necessary insight to formulate the outputs of the toolkit with reference to the traditional sections of a MP.