Collaborative Heritage for Local Democracy, an experimental research project

Can collaboratively produced histories help enrich and enliven our democratic culture? This is the question being explored in a new collaboration between Helen Graham, Director, Centre for Critical Studies in Museums, Galleries and Heritage, York Explore Libraries and Archives and York Past and Present facebook group.

The idea for the experimental project – to run over three weeks in November 2015 – emerged from the ‘How should heritage decisions be made?’ research project, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Connected Communities programme and specifically an event ‘York: What has heritage ever done for us?’ run in June 2015 as part of the AHRC Connected Communities Festival.

The big idea behind the Histories Behind the Headline project was beautifully put by Victoria Hoyle, City Archivist at the June event:

I would like to see [the city archives] used more as a resource by Council officers and also by residents, to access information about how the city governs itself. […] I would like to think that there is a future where ‘look it up in the archive’, ‘visit the archive’, ‘have you thought about the archive?’, is the first step in designing solutions to problems and celebrating our past achievements.

This relates also to a more driven and engaged approach to heritage and archives as part of the city’s democratic life which, Victoria argued, requires a different approach to ‘cataloguing’ and ‘digitising’, one we’re going to try out as part of the project:

Rather than prioritising our decisions about how we make the archive accessible based on what was important in the past, we think perhaps about new priorities, about what is important now, and being more responsive. So, for example, if there is a debate in York at present over housing and sustainability and the green belt, perhaps the archive relating to that material should be prioritised for accessibility?

The Histories Behind the Headlines project will take housing, an urgent issue for York, and will conduct an open exploration. This will involve digging up from the city archives pictures of housing long gone, exploring environmental health reports and looking at the city’s history of innovative social housing designs and calling for personal photos and memories to explore how housing and making a home in York has changed.

In order to provide a variety of interpretative perspectives on the issue we will also invite politicians, archaeologists and historians to offer opinion pieces that help us understand how we’ve got where we are, including a guided walk by John Oxley, York’s City Archaeologist ‘Hearth and home: housing in medieval and modern York’ on 7th November, 2pm. The project will conclude with two workshops – 20th (3-6pm) or 22nd November (1-4pm) – to explore what we’ve learnt and the implications for local decision-making.

The team involved are approaching this as a pilot that might lead to a more sustained project in the future.