Paper short abstract:

Acknowledging that historic places are both material entities and emotional constructs, the paper explores the impact of recognising people’s diverse and dynamic relations to places for an understanding of how the past figures in the present.

Paper long abstract:

A significant element in people’s sense of belonging and community relates to the cognitive and affective meaning of place and its material manifestation. This applies in particular to places that are understood to be in one way or other ‘of the past’. Memories and practices, whether collective or personal, are as a rule emplaced, set in a place that is composed of specific physical features. This is why memorials are designed and sites of memory promoted and revered. Proponents strive to affix specific meaning to space and matter in order to promote particular knowledge and particular sentiments, hoping to cement the trinity of meaning, matter and place.

Recent toppling of public statues around the would remind us (once again) that such unions are precarious. It further reiterates that places have different meanings for different individuals and groups, and that associating meaning and place is a continuous cultural process. The paper outlines some of the key issues and challenges that this observation poses to prevailing understandings of urban heritage. The objective is to interrogate the relation between cultural heritage (as embodied in the historic urban landscape) and place attachment that is formed through experiences, reflection and sensory engagement with the built environment. The paper argues for the merit of considering the multiple and (sometimes more, sometimes less) dynamic understandings that people contribute to place and how such an approach can contribute to a sustained comprehension of how the past figures in the present.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines local people-place relations in Reykjavík’s centre. By way of walking interviews, offering direct physical encounter with the built environment, the research seeks to capture assessments and obtain understandings of residents’ place attachment in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Paper long abstract:

The city-centre of Reykjavík forms the oldest part of the city. In terms of buildings, the area is a diverse mix of small colourful wooden houses and larger scale concrete, steel and glass buildings. Side by side, new and old houses, buildings under construction, ones that have been relocated or recently renovated, as well as replicas of old houses make up central Reykjavík.

The paper explores the subjective connection residents have with the area. The paper addresses people-place relationships with a special focus on place-attachment with regard to the material aspects of the city-centre. Particular attention is paid to emotional connections to older buildings with the aim of shedding light on the value of built heritage in the minds of ordinary residents. The objective is to give insight into how locals form place attachment to this part of the city.

The research is based on qualitative research with residents, who live in or have frequented the city-centre for extended periods of time. Walking-interviews were conducted with several informants, following a particular route through the city-centre, with the objective of capturing the multifaceted experiences and effects that are mobilised in direct physical encounter with the material aspects of the urban environment, and are added to layers of individual experiences, memories, preferences and meanings. The paper charts the ways the participants are emotionally attached to the area and how their place-attachment is influenced by personal experiences and memories that shape their attitudes in conjunction with authorised narratives on local material heritage.

Paper short abstract:

The paper will provide a critical analysis of urban folklore narratives from Riga, Latvia. A focus on narrators’ anxious bonds with the city, the geography of distress (locations marked by emotionally disturbing collective or individual experiences) will be highlighted.

Paper long abstract:

The paper seeks to analyse the sense of a place, as it shows in urban folk narratives with a special focus on the narrators’ anxious bonds with the city. The study will illuminate Riga, capital of Latvia, its ambivalent everyday heritage and geography of distress virtually mapped by these stories. The critically examined source of the research is the wide body of folk narratives recorded and stored by the Archives of Latvian Folklore, ILFA, UL, during the 20th century and in the first decades of 21st century.

The personal experience stories, urban legends, and other narratives told both by townspeople and city guests reveal a variety of place-related disturbing experiences, such as as getting lost, being robbed or deceived, encountering with the supernatural in an uncomfortable way among others. On one hand, these stories, which lack neither the narrative elements of traditional ghost stories nor the poetics of criminal news and rumours published in the evening newspapers, represent Riga’s modern city dynamics and inherent social anxiety. On the other hand, they reveal the collective memory of burdensome historical and political events which Rigans were involved in, including the Russian Revolution of 1905 in Latvia, World War I, and World War II. In addition, there are locations marked with individual unpleasant experiences, survived by various narrators, their family members, or more distant acquaintances like “an old woman”, “one maid”, “some merchant”, etc.

Paper short abstract:

The paper is focused on relations between contemporary inhabitants of Western Polish territories, that before World War II belonged to Germany, and pre-war materiality. We analyze the “repeated” patterns of people, objects and places, as well as emotions they evoked.

Paper long abstract:

The paper is part of the ongoing research on pre-war materiality and its meanings for the contemporary inhabitants of Western Polish territories (Wrocław, Szczecin cities). The regions, before World War II belonged to Germany, were incorporated into Poland as a result of the Allied Leaders' Agreements.

We will focus on particular approaches and emotions that occur among our interlocutors, while recognizing the “repeated” patterns of people, objects and places. For instance, by discovering that an apartment is inhabited by people sharing the same profession that its pre-war owners had. Another such case was when a previously unidentified man, whose picture hangs at the entrance to the exhibition of the Ethnographic Museum in Wrocław, proves to be a prominent, pre-war folklorist. Such findings evoke feelings of satisfaction, and they are desirable and welcomed with enthusiasm. Our aim is also to present the objects' agency in re-establishing the past "proper order of things", that may be visualized by a painting that re-appeared in the same place on the wall as it hung in the past. We analyze these forms of interpreting past objects and places, (searching for and creating links between past and present), not only in a term of a lucky twist of fate but rather as a source of legitimizing the past takeover and reinforcement of the act of ownership among the next generations of settlers. Our analysis is based in heritage and emotion studies (Jo Labanyi, among others), we also consider people-object-place relations, taking into account social class perspective.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the practice of a community-based urban folklore project, considering conceptualisations of place in its inception and activities, and how shifts in methodology have emphasised different aspects of extraordinary and mundane experiences of the urban environment.

Paper long abstract:

Established in 1996 as the Northside Folklore Project, the Cork Folklore Project has been carrying out collection, access provision and dissemination of oral testimony relating to the city of Cork, Ireland, for 25 years. Its foundation began with consideration of the nature of the urban landscape, physical and social (where and what is the Northside?), and down through the years different collection projects have foregrounded the experience of place by Cork locals born and bred, and from further afield. Whether infused with the freshness of experience of a new migrant, or through the eyes of a child of 70 years ago, the present and vanished landscape of the city can be explored in our holdings and dissemination through remembered sounds, smells, and experiences, in testimony in which emotion, humour and the energy of performance exist alongside pauses, silences and reflection. At a time when the phrase ‘placemaking’ is incorporated into its directorate titles by Cork City Council, and when explorations of place attachment feature strongly in arts practice, we reflect on the role of oral testimony in explorations of the relationship between people and place. Do current curated dissemination strategies or interventions do more than just scratch the surface?