Mapping community identity: Safeguarding the memories of a city's downtown core

Abstract

The paper explores the crucial role communities' memories play in safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage of a city's historic core through the narration of stories associated with landmark buildings in the downtown. The physical regeneration of a city centre or heritage neighbourhood can occur if its community desires to revive collective memories of the historic neighbourhood in its heyday. Reference will be made to the state of Canadian downtown cores, specifically to a case study of the downtown of London Ontario, where a community-related project that aims to map layers of the lived experience of the city's hub is currently underway. Getting people to revive their memories about the heyday of the downtown core is an activity indissolubly tied to an attempt to shine the spotlight back on this area and reignite the community's enthusiasm for it. The present research project, co-funded by the Culture Office (City of London [ON]), is not simply a nostalgic attempt to recover narratives about an architecture that, to a degree, simulated realism; rather, the older layers of lived experience of these heritage buildings need to be brought back to the fore in order to better value present cultural expression and more-judiciously plan the future cultural profile of the city ‒ a profile that reflects both nostalgia for the missing truth and celebration of the possibilities it liberates.