Spatial and Critical Approaches to Industrial Heritage Landscapes

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As the number of post-industrial sites around the world grows, communities are increasingly confronted with the complexities of managing post-industrial landscapes and politics of commemorating heritage. This is particularly true in former mining areas, where community identities rooted in industrial pasts must contend with the erasure of the tangible vestiges of their mining history for safety and environmental reasons. The Spatial and Critical Approaches to Industrial Heritage Landscapes (SCAIHL) project aims to explore the heritage of post-coal mining landscapes through a spatial lens in order to expand understandings of the intangible heritage practices associated with coal mining landscapes and to evaluate the ways this heritage is mobilized by political ideologies. SCAIHL utilizes an interdisciplinary methodology that incorporates ethnographic, participatory, and spatial analyses to evaluate three primary questions: what roles do coal mining heritage play in political movements?; what are the spatial uses of coal mining heritage with regards to political movements?; and how can industrial heritage landscape management practices be used to foster inclusion and resilience?. To answer these questions, data from three separate case studies will be evaluated and compared. The case study sites are the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania (USA), the South Wales coalfields (UK) and the Ruhrgebiet (Germany). Fieldwork will be carried out in Wales and the Ruhrgebiet to answer these questions; data for Pennsylvania was previously gathered in 2019 as part of the doctoral fellow's PhD research. This project will advance knowledge on the intangible heritage aspects of industrial landscapes, particularly the use of spatial data in theoretically-informed heritage research rather than simply for physical heritage management strategies. Additionally, it will enhance heritage methodologies by incorporating data from three culturally-different sites within a comparative approach.