Chosen Legacies

Heritage in Regional Identity

Linde Egberts

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317166832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Geografía

The urge for regional identity has not declined in the process of globalization. Rather, heritage is used to develop regional distinctiveness and to charge identities with a past. Particularly helpful for this aim are creation stories, Golden Ages or recent, shared traumas. Some themes such as the Roman era or the Second World War appear easier to appropriate than, for example, prehistory.

This book assesses the role of heritage in the construction of regional identities in Western Europe. It contains case studies on early medieval heritage in Alsace and Euregio-Meuse Rhine, industrial heritage in the German Ruhr area and competing memories in the Arnhem-Nijmegen region in the Netherlands. It presents new insights into the process of heritage production on a regional level in relationship to processes of identity construction. The theoretical analysis of "heritage" and "regional identity" is innovative as these concepts were hardly analysed in relation to each other before. This book also offers insights into policy, tourism, spatial development and regional development to policymakers, politicians, designers and professionals in the heritage and tourism industries.

Chapter 1

REGIONAL IDENTITY AND HERITAGE

World

n.& v. [Old English (also weorold) = Old Frisian wrald, warld, Old Saxon Werold (Dutch wereld), Old High German weralt (German Welt), Old Norse verolt, from Germanic base cognitive with Latin vir man + Germanic base of OLD n., hence meaning ‘age or life of man’.]¹

Oxford English Dictionary

Introduction

“Der Pott kocht” was the slogan used to promote the Ruhr region from 1998 onwards.² It refers to the region’s industrial past and to its familiar nickname in Germany: Pott is shorthand for Kohlenpott: “coal scuttle”. By stating that it “boils” (kocht), the slogan emphasises change, economic opportunities, and new activities in the region. It also points towards the importance of heritage as a component of the region’s identity in times of dramatic transformations. Finally, it illustrates how the past can be appropriated in marketing strategies to help modify the image of a region in the present and future.

Regional identities are continuously shaped by re-using heritage, and so have they in the past. But how is this process shaped, by whom and to what ends? This book aims to analyse how heritage works in the construction of identity on a regional level.

Long before the concept of regional identity came to be widely used, it was common practice to relate historic places, landscapes and other heritage to regions and to the identity of people. In the last three decades, region and identity have been joined to create the concept of regional identity. It is an essential element in the renewed interest in regionalism and occupies an important place in geography.³ Heritage is inextricably intertwined with regional identity in scholarly discussion, as well as in spatial planning, governance and politics. The frequency with which these concepts are jointly applied suggests that their relationship has been thoroughly studied and extensively analysed both in theory and in case studies. Despite the apparently self-evident way in which these notions are combined, the understanding of the role of heritage in the construction of regional identities is still in its beginning stages.

The concepts identity, region and heritage are embedded in complex discourses that span multiple fields of research. Their positioning, application and interpretation has changed in the course of time and reflect larger changes in the discourse of such disciplines as geography, history, heritage studies, archaeology, anthropology and sociology. Taking most of this background into account, I explore the triangular relationship between the concepts of region, identity and heritage.

Three different approaches underlie the analyses of the role of heritage in the construction of regional identities, all of which are situated in Western Europe. After laying a conceptual foundation in this chapter, my first perspective is on the role of heritage from one particular period in different regions in present-day Europe, in order to see how similar heritage changes and takes on different meanings in the course of centuries of appropriation and re-interpretation. I discuss early medieval heritage in two regions in depth – Alsace in France and the Euregio Meuse-Rhine – whose territory extends to three countries (Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands), as they both have a strong presence in historical studies on the Carolingian era. I analyse how heritage from this period has played a role in the narratives of regional identity in the recent past and how it continues to do so today.

The second perspective is the examination of the role of heritage in a dynamic, urban network that has been conceived as a region for only a relatively short time. I focus on how heritage is appropriated to shape an identity for a new region and how competition between various heritage themes and forms of authenticity interferes with the overall process of unification within the region. My case study is the Arnhem-Nijmegen region, in the eastern Netherlands, a highly dynamic, rapidly urbanising, polycentric region, where heritage is in an identity arena full of competition.

The third approach is diachronic and focused on the Ruhr area, which has been conceived as one entity for over a century and has gone through immense structural change. The evolution of the role of heritage is particularly interesting in this case, because it is the chief symbolic vector of the new regional identity that took form after the closure of the coal mines and steel industry, a process which began in the late 1950s. Much has been written about industrial heritage and the identity of the Ruhr region, but few attempts have been made to survey the changes in the memory of the industrial era and its changing role in the construction of a new regional identity over the last five decades. Furthermore, since most of the writing on this topic has been available only to those able to read German, this analysis conveys an understanding of the role of heritage in the Ruhr to a broader audience than has been reached until now.

The value of combining these seemingly idiosyncratic approaches is that they enable a multi-perspectival analysis of the role of heritage in regional identity, in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Each chapter makes a different ‘cross section’ of the field, which sheds light on a particular aspects, but leaves other aspects in the dark. It is the combination of three different approaches that enables me to do justice to the multiple dimensions and complexity of the field. For example, the study of early medieval heritage in Europe focuses on the historical conditions under which particular heritage is preserved and re-appropriated, but much less attention is paid to the undeniable competition that takes place between this and other heritage themes in the current political arena in which regional identity is negotiated and constructed. Therefore, the case of Arnhem-Nijmegen offers additional insight into this kind of competition between politicians, citizens, heritage experts, designers and other stakeholders, in which heritage is appropriated and embedded in future spatial developments. What this analysis lacks is again compensated for by the case of the Ruhr area, namely an analysis of how regional identity discourses are constructed and the ways in which heritage appropriation changes in the course of time.

Map 1.1 Euregio Meuse-Rhine, Alsace, Arnhem-Nijmegen region and Ruhr region in Europe

With its focus on heritage practices and regions in Western Europe, this book is limited in addressing the role of heritage in regional identity in other parts of the world. As will become clear, the concept of heritage itself indicates ways to give the past a place in the present that originate from Western culture. Therewith, the outcomes of this research are not universally applicable elsewhere. Nevertheless, the background of these specific regional cases is formed by processes of globalisation and universalisation. Industrialisation, increased mobility, international trade and communication change how regions are perceived, shaped and researched. Moreover, globalisation is strongly intertwined with the urge to treasure the particularities of individual regions, in a cultural, historical, physical, social and economic sense. This regionalism is a counter-reaction to, but also a feature of globalisation.⁴ Inherently, the particularities of regions differ, including the ways in which the past is given a place in the present. In that sense, this book can not only be seen as a study of a small number of regions, but also as an exploration of how heritage practices become specific and simultaneously comparable from one region to the next in a globalising world.

Methods and sources

The investigation of spatially based notions of identity requires a combination of approaches in order to arrive at a clear view of the role heritage plays in the construction of these identities. My research explores – and is, at the same time, part of – a complex domain where none of the concepts it grapples with is free of debate and all are subject to multiple interpretations. By treating historic sources with caution, making my own observations in the field and using content analysis I allow myself to draw conclusions, while I acknowledge my double role as observer of as well as contributor to narratives of identities at the same time.

Historical sources have an ambivalent role, since they constitute external reference points for the analyses of heritage practices and, at the same time, form a part of the subject being studied. Historical analyses function as a backdrop, allowing us to see what parts of history are selected for present and future aims, and what parts are left out in contemporary and recent heritage practices. Therefore I start every chapter by sketching an historical context on the Middle Ages in Europe, Arnhem-Nijmegen and the industrial era in the Ruhr region respectively. However, these analyses also figure as constructive forces in the processes via which heritage is constructed and becomes a component of regional identity. I acknowledge this difficulty and have tried to keep these two roles of history as clearly separated as possible. I did this first by basing the historical frameworks as much as possible on the acknowledged authoritative sources and, second, by including historical sources as elements of heritage practices only when their role in these practices is both highly relevant and clear. An example of this is the publication Spurensicherung/Relevés d’empreintes/Speurwerk; an archaeological publication that describes as much as constructs an identity for the Meuse-Rhine region, based on the past.⁵

The sources of this research not only disclose heritage practices; they are themselves the product of these practices. Acknowledging the ambivalent character of my sources includes awareness of their selectiveness in what they call to memory. As much as I would have preferred to do so, it is impossible to pay equal attention to the processes of forgetting, which are no less relevant than those of remembering. These sources create a kind of authorised discourse.⁶ The telling and re-telling of certain aspects of the past assumes a dominant position; demolition, counter-reactions and those who did not want to remember – or whom others did not want to be remembered – are silenced. The analysis of the processes of remembering and forgetting is inherently problematic; for it is itself a form of remembering, and things that are forgotten are obviously much harder to trace than the things that are actively remembered.

In a sense, the same counts for the 11 semi-structured interviews I have used, in order to acquire a more multifaceted image of contemporary heritage practices than desk research alone would allow me to. And again: I am aware of the selectiveness of my sources, as mainly heritage professionals, policymakers, politicians and a single representative of a group of citizens were included. The information they provided is limited, selective and contributes to the construction of a particular heritage discourse that this book is also part of. This book naturally suffers from the same shortcoming; it passes on what is actively and unconsciously remembered and leaves out much of what is already forgotten or doomed to oblivion.

Visiting, participating in events and taking photographs is one way in which I attempt to draw my own conclusions regarding the use and meaning of places – and these did not always coincide with what we may call the authorised discourses. Being ‘in the field’ – which in many cases was an urban area – and making observations there have contributed greatly to my obtaining a clearer picture of the meaning and use of places than would otherwise have been possible. The photos in this book are therefore not intended so much to enliven as to visually enhance my line of argumentation.

In order to enrich my exploration of the use of historical themes and heritages, I assembled a considerable amount of statistical data on the website of the Arnhem-Nijmegen City Region and submitted it to a content analysis, thereby obtaining a clear overview of the different ways in which historical themes are referenced on the region’s promotional websites. Content analysis was originally developed as a tool for communicatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of maps
• Foreword
• 1 Regional identity and heritage
• 2 Early medieval heritage in present-day European regions
• 3 Battlefields of competing heritage
• 4 Dynamics of memory in the post-industrial era
• 5 Creation stories, Golden Ages and shared traumas
• Bibliography
• Index