Place, Identity and Wellbeing: Bradford and Beyond

This paper presents ongoing collaborative, place-based research between the University of Bradford and partner organisations, exploring the importance of identity, and the role of heritage and culture, for wellbeing, cohesion and resilience. It discusses three 'parent' projects: Fragmented Heritage; Virtual Bradford; and Continuing Bonds, and seven interlinked subsidiary projects: Curious Travellers; Building Resilience through Heritage (BReaTHe); Saltaire: People, Heritage and Place; Dying to Talk; Continuing Bonds: Creative Dissemination; the Continuing Bonds Toolkit, and Reimagining Tanzania’s Townscape Heritage, showing how digital heritage, alongside arts-based creative methods, is crucial to the role that the past can play for communities today. For instance, Saltaire: People, Heritage and Place (AHRC Place-based programme) has used digital twin technologies to explore heritage, alongside creative workshops with school learners, exploring their journeys, routes, and narratives, work which is also being developed with our partners at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, in response to the UN year for the Creative Economy. Key to our approach has been a focus on ensuring legacy, with reuse of data to address local needs. Faithful 3D reconstructions of heritage sites, drawing upon the Curious Travellers methodology, were developed as part of the Fragmented Heritage project (AHRC Digital Transformations Theme Large Grant). Examples include the use of this work to inform the physical reconstruction of monuments by conservation architects in the aftermath of natural disasters or conflict. Furthermore, when reconstructions are used as a focus for collating intangible heritage through cultural heritage festivals, they help communities to use their cultural heritage to build resilient futures, such as in the Bagamoyo Festival in Tanzania, and in Building Resilience Through Heritage (BReaTHe) cultural heritage festivals in Azraq, Jordan. Separately, in Continuing Bonds and Dying to Talk, we have used funerary archaeology and creative methods to build resilience around death, dying, bereavement and loss, with audiences ranging from health and social care professionals and students, to school children, the latter co-producing resources with and for young people, used in Festivals of the Dead (with Continuing Bonds methods also now being used to explore topics of gender, identity, and diet/ eating disorders). These projects work towards normalising talking about death and loss, building resilience. Collectively, these projects have resulted in participants building and reflecting on their senses of identity and belonging, while valuing routes and origins. Through experiential and creative methods, they have enriched connections: to people, place, and our pasts, and thus have helped to improve wellbeing.