Stories from North of Main: Neighborhood Heritage Story Mapping
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Stories from North of Main: Neighborhood Heritage Story Mapping Siobhan M. Hart 1
& George
C. Homsy 2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This article discusses the use of ESRI’s ArcGIS Story Map application for heritage place-making in a small, diverse, deindustrialized urban neighborhood in Binghamton, New York. “Stories from North of Main” is a Story Map that weaves together the multiple meanings residents attach to neighborhood places by layering audio, images, and text to create stories of work, home, and community life, past and present. Story Maps make visible and legible the place attachments of newcomers and long-time residents in changing city neighborhoods. These place-based stories can offer an alternative to elite-driven heritage and counter the negative narratives attached to marginalized neighborhoods. Keywords Place-making . Urban heritage . Digital cultural heritage . Story map
Cities are always changing–physically, socially, economically, and environmentally. UNESCO recognizes that “urbanization is preceding on an unprecendented scale” and is often coupled with uncontrolled development (UNESCO 2012:51). UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (2011) urges heritage practitioners and urban planners to move beyond a focus on physical preservation in order to take into account local community values and the “entire human environment with all of its tangible and intangible qualities” (UNESCO 2013:5). This approach diverges from earlier tactics that marginalized some perspectives on and time periods in a city’s past by emphasizing singular stories of achievement and grandeur. Instead UNESCO recognizes a city as “a continuum in time and space,” a place affected by and meaningful to different groups of people (UNESCO 2013:9). UNESCO’s
* Siobhan M. Hart [email protected]
1
Department of Anthropology, Skidmore College, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866, USA
2
Sustainable Communities Program, Department of Public Administration, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, USA
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
recommendations are a reflection of growing global attention to urban heritage, the materiality of urban places, and the stories, memories, and experiences of city dwellers. How can the spirit of such broad directives be applied in the thousands of small neighborhoods in small cities? What can heritage practitioners, urban planners, and residents of these places do to make legible and visible multiple and changing place attachments? Here we describe the methods and results of one possible pathway: an inclusive approach to understanding small city neighborhood change through placebased storytelling. As an archaeologist and urban planner collaborating on heritage and sustainability research in a small city, we find resonance with Shannon Lee Dawdy’s (2016:33) description of the landscape and materiality of urban life as a “tangle of brick and mortar, concrete monuments, vacant lots, speed bumps, litter, streetfr
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