Heritage-Based Storytelling and Narratives: the Added Value of Engagement in Placemaking and Heritage Communication

This chapter reports on efforts of digitally enabling city dwellers to better understand and valorize their intangible and built heritage. Drawing on experiences from research conducted in Lourinhã, Portugal, and in Penyagolosa, Spain, it aims to provide a reflection on the added value of heritage-centred storytelling and its contribution to placemaking. Storytelling methodology, as demonstrated through these two studies, facilitated and enriched by appropriate digital means, can increase the social value of cultural assets and contribute to future resilience. Collecting stories and narratives associated with heritage assets is intrinsically connected here with approaching these heritage sites as public spaces. Thus, these surveys were developed as part of a placemaking process that offers local knowledge towards new interpretations of the heritage sites. Digital advancements offer new opportunities to engage people with their own heritage, culture and environment. Digital mobile technologies can be used as tools that leverage storytelling and placemaking to make narratives about public spaces and heritage more attractive, rich and accessible and, by doing so, to contribute to the resilience of places. The added value of the presented approach lays in the capacity to create an inventory of social memories and perceptions attached to heritage assets. The proposed approach, encompassing storytelling and placemaking, enables cultural bearers and city dwellers to engage with the past and future conditions of common pool resources (public spaces and heritage assets). This chapter looks at how digital technologies can be used to build bridges between people, spaces and heritage and to encourage different generations and various cultures to participate and share narratives and stories yielding greater insights into identity and collective memories. This chapter discusses the concept of heritage as a layered reality, emphasizing that it encompasses various social and cultural elements. It suggests that heritage is not solely defined by physical objects or structures, but also by intangible aspects that evolve over time. Ultimately, it proposes that social memories and perceptions are valuable components of heritage assets. By incorporating narratives and stories shared by individuals about specific places, heritage can be enriched in a way that is tied to the unique characteristics of those locations.