Community involvement in the restoration of historic urban parks : with a specific focus on the Heritage Lottery Fund's Urban Parks Programme grant-aided park restoration projects (original) (raw)
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Community archaeology is increasingly popular and it is often viewed as a straightforward endeavour: local people come together, often with the involvement of heritage professionals, tosurvey, dig and generally examine the archaeology of a site or area. Seemingly it ‘does what it says on the tin’. In reality, community archaeology is incredibly complicated (see Marshall 2009; Smith and Waterton 2009). Bottom-up projects, driven by local community groups, inevitably need expert help and the support of the heritage profession throughout the process. Thus a hierarchy of knowledge is created, complicating the community’s ownership and control over the project and their local heritage. Meanwhile top-down projects, driven by professional archaeologists, often engage with and enlist community groups for their work, but such a process can be equally alienating for the communities. Ultimately, community archaeology is always going to be an intervention into an existing social context where people are already actively producing and negotiating identities and where the past is plural and contested; constantly being remade, debated and negotiated (Greer et al 2002; Isherwood 2011; Jones 2015).
2018
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2018
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