Urbino belonging: Exploring place-based community heritage with digital & participatory methods

What we understand and choose as heritage is a question rooted in our individual and collective notions of identity and feelings of community. Critical heritage studies highlight the links between heritage and recognition, emotions, and the everyday lives of people and communities. We introduce a methodology for a digitally facilitated and participatory study of place-based community heritage. Inspired by Participatory Data Design and Photovoice methodologies, the Urban Belonging App enables participants to communicate phenomenological aspects of urban spaces by sharing, signifying, and evaluating pictures of familiar places in the city. A quali-quantitative analysis of the app’s data best exploits its multi-dimensionality: the characteristic of being both countable and measurable and semantically rich and relational. The case study illustrates how the methodology is used to study community heritage in an exploratory and descriptive way. Most valued and recognised heritage places, as well as less conventional understandings of heritage in Urbino, Italy, are identified. Two participants show how heritage differently embeds with everyday experiences, memories, and feelings of community. Its adaptability and ability to capture the contested and phenomenological nature of heritage and to operationalise complex definitions of community qualify the methodology to enable systematic research on bottom-up, situated heritage values.