A Post-industrial Walk in Genk: Engaging with Heritage Through Participatory Design

Walking through heritage that people still live in

In this publication, we explored how industrial heritage can be understood through the everyday experience of the people who move through, use and transform a post-industrial neighbourhood. Heritage is often presented as protected buildings, monuments and official stories. Our participatory-design workshop in Winterslag, Genk, asked a wider question: what becomes visible when people walk, record and map a living former mining landscape together?

Winterslag carries a complex history. Coal production began in 1917, followed by four miners’ settlements from the 1920s. After the mine closed in 1988, key structures were protected and parts of the site became home to culture, education and creative industries. C-Mine now has a cinema, design school, exhibitions and theatre. Around it, the cité remains an inhabited neighbourhood whose homes have changed over generations, including through families with roots in southern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

Making different readings of one place visible

This creates a tension we wanted to investigate. The area is valued as garden-city and social-housing heritage, but everyday adaptations can be seen as reducing heritage value. We argued that participation can expand heritage beyond official monuments to include informal practices, temporary appropriation, routines and the meanings held by different communities. It can also reveal where expert and non-expert views do not line up.

Participants from social and cultural history, social design, graphic design, digital heritage, architecture and urban design walked through Winterslag in groups. They recorded routes with notes and smartphone photos, then placed their observations on a shared map. Their attention ranged from landmarks and typologies to craftsmanship, boundaries, infrastructure, mining relics, wind turbines and nature. The map did not produce one authoritative account; it exposed contrasting expectations.

Some people found the neighbourhood ordinary or unexpectedly affluent, while others struggled to see the cultural diversity they had expected. Those responses showed how assumptions about ‘working-class heritage’ can hide subtler forms of value. We do not suggest that experts should stop interpreting heritage. We suggest that management needs better ways to engage with residents, personal reference points and open-ended stories. Walking and mapping together made heritage an ongoing negotiation between history, daily life and the neighbourhood’s future.