Search results

The main objective of this paper is to analyse the roles of the artists’ collective in the creation of socially shared knowledge, concerning Gdansk Shipyard's heritage protection during the urban regeneration process over last ten years, since 2002.

The empirical section of the paper is based on a single case study concerning the artists collective’ ability to build a complex network of social relations, to research cultural heritage of the Gdansk Shipyard, to translate this knowledge into symbolic languages through art-based work and to transmit knowledge to the wider public with an aim to engage in an open dialogic public communication.

The case study draws on insights from participant observation carried out on the premises of the Gdansk Shipyard between years 2000 and 2008 and interviews with individual artists from the collective, conducted between years 2004 and 2006. Data was also drawn from archival research. The exposure in public media was also examined over last ten years, including Internet websites as well as newspapers and magazines’ content.

The case study research indicates that methods and techniques applied by the artists’ collective in researching the shipyard's historical heritage and communicating their findings to the wider public have been more effective than the official planning methods of expert-led post-industrial urban regeneration. Over the last ten years, the artists have succeeded to transform the negative perceptions about the values of the shipyard's cultural heritage and engaged local citizens in the preservation of the historical identities of the place. In 2012, the Mayor of Gdansk has invited representatives of the artists’ collective to the newly established Young City Stakeholders’ Board in order to utilize their knowledge of the shipyard's cultural heritage and their capacity to mediate between various groups involved in urban regeneration planning process as well as to communicate with the wider public.

Despite persistent views in literature that equate public engagement in the planning process of urban regeneration with a kind of “modern utopia”, we argue that participatory process is not only possible in practice but also can be highly effective and democratically ethical.

The purpose of this paper is to address the challenge for knowledge exchange between disciplines that study past urban landscapes, such as archaeologists, historians and historical geographers and disciplines that work on new urban landscapes such as architects and spatial planners. It presents the design, deployment and evaluation of a heritage instrument, the “digital cultural biography” (DCB), which aims to allow future-oriented disciplines to make more historical and heritage informed decisions.

The paper makes three contributions. First it presents a methodology to disseminate geographic information across disciplines by applying the biography of the landscape research strategy. Second it translates this methodology to a digital instrument, the DCB, which makes it possible to configure the historical and heritage features diachronically as well as spatially. And third it evaluates the added value of this instrument by organizing a design concourse and applying various evaluation methods. The Roman neighbourhood of Testaccio functions as the use case for this study.

The research shows a high potential to use digital tooling based on geospatial technologies to support the dialogue between future and past-oriented disciplines.

The paper discusses how the recently developed biography of the landscape method can be used as a tool for collaboration between heritage managers and spatial planners. Moreover, for the first time it applies and evaluates digital tools and geospatial technologies to support this approach.