Walking, recording and collaborative mapping: how can we advance PD methodology by engaging with heritage?

Abstract

The aim of this workshop is to implement and evaluate an approach to transdisciplinary interaction, designed to address spatial planning in an inclusive manner. We propose to engage participants from different fields in an exercise of walking, recording and mapping as one combined participatory design (PD) methodology. Specifically, we reflect on the possibilities of pluralizing approaches to heritage making, by looking at how PD methodologies could be applied in this field. The workshop takes form as a participatory walking and data-collecting exercise with the finality to reflect on how creative processes that feed into fields determined by expert discourses, such as heritage making policies, could be enriched with the tools and methodologies of PD. Discussions about heritage are increasingly crucial to contemporary politics of remembrance and memorialization, which often intersect with wider political discussions on urban inclusion and diversity. Accordingly, and considering the main theme of the PDC 2018 conference, the workshop aims to foster a critical dialogue on how PD methodologies can support the creation of more inclusive urban environments that celebrate diversity and facilitate the development of alternative approaches to the making of heritage. During the workshop, the multidisciplinary approach to challenge and break into dominant institutionalized discourses is tested, discussed and refined. Moreover, we establish how this methodology could be implemented in response to wider concerns of PD and spatial planning.