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

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.

This AHRC Follow-on project is based on original research whose aim was to highlight the historic character of the cultural landscape in Naxos and the eastern Mediterranean. It will go beyond this work by using the latest thinking in heritage management but also new digital and creative methods to establish: (a) a co-created management plan and (b) a toolkit that can guide people through important concepts & processes of heritage management and relevant data, such as the results of our previous project. The objective is to facilitate effective knowledge exchange and empowerment of the non-specialist public.

Such exchanges will provide clear benefits to academics, policy-makers and heritage professionals by using the data provided by the stakeholders and also by embedding co-creative practices in their approaches to heritage, simultaneously deepening the knowledge of all parties. Various European and international treaties comment on the urgency and importance of engaging stakeholder communities in heritage management (Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity 2001, Faro Convention 2005, Fribourg Declaration 2007). The European Landscape Convention 2000 relates directly to them, accompanying emerging results of networks such as CHeriScape project that make clear that there remains significant distance between the above stakeholders. This pattern is particularly visible in disadvantaged and rural communities.

In the proposed project, our team will work closely with stakeholders and the general public of Naxos developing a collaborative management plan of the area, re-using the results of our previous AHRC project and disseminating widely our new results through a symposium, an exhibition, academic publications and a mini-documentary. The data of the project will also be submitted to a public code repository (e.g. GitLab) and Newcastle University Code Version Repository for further use. Through this process, we will outline a wider methodology for future work in Greece and beyond. Specifically, we will implement an innovative toolkit to boost bottom-up participation in heritage management in rural areas, iterable in similar cases in the UK and elsewhere. Its modular and expandable design, incorporating open-access deliverables will also be adaptable in both rural and urban environments.

To facilitate these impacts, we will use ethnographic tools (face-to-face meetings, dialogue workshops, symposium), innovative digital techniques (digital toolkit) and creative approaches (children's art workshops, exhibition). The team will collect quantitative and qualitative data relating to people's engagement with the project. For online resources these will take the form of usage statistics (Google analytics) and comments; for face-to-face and creative interactions, we will count the number of participants, collect feedback forms and minute discussion in the final symposium.

The immediate target audience for the project will be local people, tourists and researchers on Naxos (estimated total audiences of interested citizens on the island c.3,500 and c.10,000 tourists in 2017). These figures could increase significantly in future given the potential reach of the project methods (and toolkit) beyond Naxos after 'proof of concept' in this project. The toolkit, developed in open-source software and publicly available, could be easily applied in relevant cases (i.e. to develop a co-created management plan for heritage resources and act as a communication platform) but also could be customised to fit relevant scenarios (i.e. decision making processes over local plans).

It is also worth noting that the project and its digital deliverables fall directly under the Digital Agenda for Europe-2020 strategy and the general aspiration 'to better exploit the potential of ICT for economic growth and innovation', especially related to the pillars concerning research and innovation, digital literacy and benefits enabled by ICT.