Deep Mapping the Hood: An Experiment in the Public Reuse of Archaeological and Heritage Content to Enhance Neighbourhood Cohesion.

Over the last decade, Localism - the politics and practice of devolved decision making, has dominated. This governance structure contains an inherent requirement for strong, collective public participation by 'The Community' to maintain the power balance between commercial and social interests. However, at the same time, economics driven regeneration and development in towns and cities has enabled and promoted a highly mobile and migratory urban population.

This longitudinal, multi-discipline and mixed methods research focuses on two 'ordinary' inner-urban neighbourhoods; areas where repetitive, utilitarian late 19th century and early 20th century 'worker housing' architectures still dominate. Within this context, it explores and evaluates the latent potential of archaeological and heritage archival content, representing a forgotten, lost past, to disrupt an existing sense of place and force new people and place connections when exploited through a public-led digital storytelling practice, enabled by 'pocket' technologies. The results of these studies are used to critically reflect upon and generate insights into the impact, sustainability and scalability of such an approach and the extent to which it is enabled or blocked by current civic and historic environment management attitudes, policies and practices,