The People's Pier: The popular culture of pleasure piers and cultural regeneration through community heritage

“人民码头”是一个研究项目，调查社区码头作为社区中心的新兴形式。它侧重于码头和社区连通性的两个相关方面；首先，如何通过采取集体行动来保护像码头这样的当地遗产资产来加强社区的信心；其次，如何利用社区码头及其流行文化遗产来建立不同群体之间的积极关系，并赋予社区权力。然而，再生过程是复杂的，并不总是包容的；它们既可能造成分裂，也可能不公平。因此，该项目也将探索码头周围作为社区空间的断开和冲突的过程。社区所有制企业通常被视为现有社区的集体努力和围绕共同利益团结起来的能力的结果。该项目采取了不同的观点，考虑了社区如何通过社区所有权和相关过程（如集体行动来“拯救”和发展码头）联系和出现。这些过程包括连接和分离，可以理解为一个社区本身的过程。此外，该项目旨在探索如何利用海滨休闲码头丰富的流行文化遗产，作为造福社区的资源。在此过程中，拟议的项目在互联社区计划中开辟了新的研究领域。它将流行文化置于社区建设的核心，并肯定流行文化是社区文化遗产的一部分，从而挑战传统的遗产观。这项研究是与两个社区合作伙伴合作进行的，他们正处于实现恢复、发展和可持续经营社区企业码头目标的不同阶段：黑斯廷斯码头慈善机构和克利夫登码头和传统基金会。我们共同确定了他们面临的一些紧迫和更长期的挑战。这些措施包括：在草根倡导者的核心小组之外开展活动，吸引各自的当地社区参与；随着码头作为一种新型空间的开始，不同潜在受众和利益相关者之间的紧张点——作为城市社区空间的码头；他们的策略是让这些历史环境的流行文化遗产与当代观众产生共鸣，而不仅仅是对维多利亚时代码头魅力鼎盛时期的怀旧。从这个角度来看，我们正在建立“连接社区”的观点，即遗产就在我们的社区中。但该项目不仅仅是回顾，它主要感兴趣的是如何通过其流行文化遗产丰富社区码头的当前和未来体验。该项目还刻意寻求与整个码头的过去相结合的方式，通过强调他们最近的战后文化历史，这往往被忽视。这项研究的背景是关于文化主导的再生的广泛争论。随着英国海滨度假的消亡和其他沿海工业的衰落，英国海滨度假胜地的当地社区几十年来一直与物质解体、经济衰退和社会剥夺联系在一起。黑斯廷斯码头社区股份计划的成功，以及其他类似的社区所有权项目，表明当地海滨社区采取行动，积极促进再生。虽然政府投资的范围更广，或者海边旅游的趋势使这个项目成为背景，但我们主要感兴趣的是当地社区组织在最具标志性的海滨地标娱乐码头周围动员起来所表现出的非凡的复原力，例如克利夫登和黑斯廷斯的社区码头，以及为产生、维持和发展社区参与而开辟的潜力。

'The People's Pier' is a research project that investigates community piers as an emerging form of community hubs. It focuses on two related aspects of the pier and community connectivity; first how communities of place may be strengthened in their confidence by taking collective action to safeguard a local heritage asset like the pier and second how the community pier and its popular culture heritage can be utilised to build positive relationships across different groups and empower the community. However, regeneration processes are complex and not always inclusive; they can be both divisive and inequitable. The project will therefore also explore processes of disconnection and conflict around the pier as a community space. Community ownership enterprises are often regarded as an outcome of an existing community's collective effort and ability to rally around a common interest. This project takes a different view by considering how communities connect and emerge through community ownership and related processes such as collective action to 'save' and develop the pier. Such processes involve both connections and disassociation and may be understood as a community making processes in themselves. Further, the project seeks to explore how the rich popular culture heritage of seaside leisure piers can be used as a resource for the benefit of the community. In doing so the proposed project opens up new areas of enquiry within the Connected Communities programme. It places popular culture at the heart of community building and it affirms popular culture as part of a community's cultural heritage, thus challenging traditional perspectives on heritage.This research is conducted in collaboration with two community partners who are at different stages of realising their goal of restoring, developing and sustainably running a community enterprise pier: The Hastings Pier Charity and The Clevedon Pier and Heritage Foundation. Together we have identified some of their immediate and more long-term challenges. These include: activities to engage the respective local community beyond a core group of grassroots advocates; points of tension between different potential audiences and stake holders as the pier begin life as a new type of space - the pier as an urban community space; strategies around making the popular culture heritage of these historic environments resonate with contemporary audiences beyond a nostalgia for the Victorian heydays of pier enchantment. Taking this view, we are building on the Connected Communities perspective that heritage is in our communities. But the project is not just looking back, it is primarily interested in how the current and future experiences of the community piers can be enriched by its popular culture heritage. The project also deliberately seeks to find ways of engaging with the whole of the piers' past, by giving emphasis to their more recent, post-war cultural history, which is often overlooked. The research is set against a background of wider debates about culture-led regeneration. Following the demise of the British seaside holiday and the decline of other coastal industries, the local communities of Britain's seaside resorts have for decades been associated with physical disintegration, with financial decline and social deprivation. The success of the Hastings Pier community shares scheme, and other similar community ownership ventures, suggests however that local seaside communities take action that actively contributes to regeneration. Whilst the broader scope of government investments or trends in seaside tourism contextualize this project we are primarily interested in the remarkable resilience demonstrated by local community organisations mobilizing around the most iconic of seaside landmarks the pleasure pier, as exemplified by the community piers of Clevedon and Hastings and the potentials that opens up for generating, sustaining and developing community engagement.