Planning Creativity: Participatory Heritage and Decision-Making

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Planning Creativity will transform the potential impacts, audiences and legacy of the AHRC Changing Landscapes network grant, 'Decommissioning the Twentieth Century' (AH/T005971/1). An innovative digital platform will reveal the cultural capital of decommissioned sites to mathematical modelling, spectacular co-created art alongside high-quality print material will empower communities to engage with and challenge assumptions about the heritage value of large industrial complexes, and a legacy network of stakeholders in sites of decommissioning will build the capacity of communities to understand, participate in, and where relevant challenge planning processes.Digital humanities - industrial heritage - decommissioning - 3D modelling - participatory research - co-creative - interdisciplinary - data-driven planning - empowerment.We will build an online, interactive 3D model of Chatterley Whitfield Colliery as a proof-of-concept to engage communities, speak to the mathematical models now often used in landscape change decision-making, and offer a new tool for heritage organisations managing inaccessible or dangerous sites. As well as enabling a virtual tour of the physical site, the online model will enable us to digitise and map at a structure-level the data derived from the original project, relevant historical documents and records, and online submissions of memories, documents and images by wider public stakeholders in the site. This process will encourage community participation in planning by making such participation more accessible, but also results in a flexible and data-rich research tool which retains the complexity and diversity of arts- and humanities-derived material, yet enables, for example, the use of heatmapping or culturomics to derive data suitable for data-driven decision-making. We are aware that such processes have the potential to disempower communities or replace genuinely participatory planning by 'black-boxing' decisions within models that appear arcane. In order to reverse this possibility, the project first seeks to increase the capacity of community stakeholders in decommissioning to understand, participate in, and challenge decision making by building a legacy network of such communities, brought together, alongside decommissioning contractors, heritage representatives and planning experts at a large 'Creative Decommissioning' event in June 2021. Second, we will demonstrate how publicly-exhibited co-created art can encourage and deepen community participation in planning processes. Working with co-creative artists, we aim to project original artwork derived from the data of the original project onto the remaining structures of Chatterley-Whitfield Colliery, and produce a high-quality artistic pamphlet to bring the outputs of workshops at Fawley Power Station and West Burton B Power Station. The process and projections will be photographically documented and exhibited at the 'Creativity in Decommissioning' event, alongside the interactive 3D model.