Heritage Unlocked - Flipbook - Page 37
Community maps as planning tools
Flora Samuel
‘Communities
need to be involved
in discussing
what heritage is
preserved and
how’
Cambridge is widely recognised as one
of the most unequal cities in Britain,
with terrible pockets of poverty, all the
worse for being right next to such rich
and highly enabled sections of society.
The Cambridge Room is an urban
room established to raise the quality of
Cambridgeshire’s built environment
through collective action. It is part of the
wider UK Urban Rooms Network, an
idea originally proposed by the
Newcastle-born architect-planner Sir
Terry Farrell, who argued that every
city should have an urban room for
communities, local authorities, practice,
and industry, to come together to talk
about their place. As part of a mapping
project delivered through the
Cambridge Room, we are documenting
intangible forms of heritage, such as
social and cultural histories, and using
collective map making to bring more
people into the conversation about
planning and place.
Planning processes already rely on
social value maps, environmental value
maps and economic value maps, but it is
becoming increasingly clear that
cultural value must also be embedded.
Community made maps that capture
social and cultural heritage data offer a
powerful form of evidence that ensure
that lived experience and collective
memory sit alongside quantitative data.
In this sense, the act of mapmaking itself
becomes a process of debate, negotiation
and collective decision-making about
our futures.
In parallel, we are exploring how
these community-generated insights
can be layered onto other datasets to
produce a genuinely public map for
Cambridge. At present, much of the
city’s data is hidden behind paywalls or
held within private sector organisations.
It’s troubling how little the wider
community and city feature in
discussions about the university and its
colleges. The people who work and
study in the colleges also live in the city,
and if Cambridge wants to remain a
magnet for talent, it has to be an
excellent place in which to live. Our
research extends beyond Cambridge
through an exhibition at the Design
Museum, as part of Tools for Transition,
an initiative examining four Green
Transition Ecosystem research projects
from across the UK. Our contribution,
Public Map, focuses on making a very
deep, layered data map of Ynys Môn in
North Wales, where the processes for
planning and development decisions are
being rethought.
Working with young people, we are
gathering different types of data environmental, social and cultural - and
developing a new kind of map which
prioritises the cares and concerns of
future generations.
Data layers can come together in
unexpected ways, using sources from
different places that have never been
seen before together. As part of the
project, we introduced the idea of the
bard, an incredibly important figure in
Welsh tradition, to emphasise the role of
language and storytelling in shaping
sustainable behaviours and shared
responsibility for place.
Decisions about what heritage is
preserved, valued and carried forward
must involve the communities who live
with those outcomes. Intangible
heritage is just as significant as physical
heritage, and community mapping
provides a means to make it visible
within planning processes. Mapmaking
brings people together and invites
reflection on shared culture and identity,
making visible that which needs to be
treasured. Culture, identity and wellbeing are absolutely linked, and though
these are very hard things to capture,
I’m hoping that the public maps we can
create are a critical step on that journey.
The Bard by John Martinca.
ca.1817: celebrating Welsh
storytelling as a vital layer of
cultural identity
Community maps as planning tools
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