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This chapter explores how York’s city archives can be used to open up different kinds of democratic relationships. It focuses on archival collections relating to Hungate, an area of York that was designated a ‘slum’ and demolished by the council during the 1930s. The chapter looks at health inspection records, explores maps and the 1911 census, and reads angry letters from people whose lives were being affected by local government decisions. Seeing the breakdown in relationships between local people and local government — and the way in which this is reflected in cynicism towards the council today — has led to the development of a conceptual intervention this chapter dubs the ‘Utopian Council’. The Utopian Council seeks to imagine and stage a more positive and reciprocal relationship between the council and local people.
A key value offered by collaborative research is to recognise the powerful role relationships play in the development and legacy of knowledge. The project ‘How should heritage decisions be made?’ put the social dynamics between the collaborative team – comprised of researchers, practitioners, funders and community activists – at the heart of the project’s methodology. Thinking of this research as social and relational also reflects an interest in thinking about heritage in the same way. Taking this approach is helpful because the concept of heritage is often bound up with big and abstract aims, to be ‘forever and for everyone’. These very scaled-up ambitions often lead politically towards the professional management of heritage ‘on behalf of’ a larger public. It is shown that for participation in heritage decision-making to be increased these larger ideas – ‘stewardship’, ‘scale’, ‘significance’ and ‘the future’ – need themselves to be socialised and, through this, made more amenable to participation. The same methodologies were diagnosed for increasing participation in heritage for our own, equally relational, approach to legacy: to act, connect, reflect and situate.
