Historic urban landscapes on social media: The contributions of online narrative practices to urban heritage conservation

In this study, I address the call in UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape to explore how communication technologies can be used to conserve urban heritage. To date, the relevance of social media for the implementation of this recommendation has received little attention. This is surprising, because city oriented social media platforms contain a wide range of memories, historic audiovisual material and stories related to the urban past. This article presents a qualitative content analysis of the social media activities and policy documents of 19 Dutch heritage projects and organisations. On the basis of this analysis and a literature review, I discuss how social media contribute to the conservation of historic urban landscapes through the online narrative practices of storytelling and mapping. The narratives shared on social media reveal the diverse layers of heritage values attributed to these urban landscapes. Furthermore, storytelling and mapping can be used to actively involve people in urban conservation, providing insight into the attachments that citizens have to their urban environment. Moreover, the very accessible forms of social media enhance public knowledge of historic urban landscapes.