Making room for citizen voices in urban heritage management: the social production of heritage in post-industrial contexts

The social production of heritage is manifested through citizens’ participation in valuing and preserving their historic urban landscapes. This paper argues that practice of urban heritage management seems insufficiently developed for capturing the distinctiveness of a place, including its social and experiential values, as well as concerning its functional dimensions. This epistemic lack is particularly evident in postindustrial contexts. In this paper, we discuss the new and emerging research in heritage activation that expands the urban conservation agenda, and incorporates production of values associated with the sites’ local histories and the ways local people experience, appropriate, as well as redefine heritage of postindustrial sites. We draw on the examples of citizen-led engagement in the co-creation of the socially shared knowledge concerning the cultural heritage futures of the former Gdansk Shipyard site and the Wieczorek Coal Mine in Katowice, both in Poland. We question in what ways these bottom-up, participative processes enhance an overall understanding of the challenges facing urban conservation, reducing the effects of major cultural disconnection that threaten urban futures. The paper ends with some critical reflections on how arts-based methods can be accommodated and adopted alongside existing praxis of heritage management regarding industrial heritage sites.