Walking, Recording and Collaborative Mapping: How Can We Advance PD Methodology by Engaging With Heritage?

Walking before deciding what heritage means

We developed this workshop because heritage is too often defined through specialist knowledge, official categories and decisions made at a distance from the people who use a place. The streets, buildings, landscapes and everyday practices that matter to communities rarely fit one authoritative account. We wanted to test whether participatory design could help people from different backgrounds notice a heritage setting together and make their different readings of it part of the conversation.

The method combines walking, recording and collaborative mapping. We used it at the 15th Participatory Design Conference in Hasselt and Genk in 2018 to explore a transdisciplinary way of working on inclusive spatial planning. Participants walked through a heritage context, recorded what caught their attention and then mapped their observations together. Walking makes a place bodily and immediate rather than an abstract plan. Recording holds on to individual encounters. Mapping puts those encounters alongside each other without pretending they must resolve into one story.

Making disagreement useful

That final step matters. Heritage is not only about preserving objects from the past; it is also about memory, inclusion, diversity and whose knowledge becomes visible in future plans. People looking at the same street can bring social history, architecture, community experience, planning, design or digital documentation to it. We treated those differences as material for learning, not as noise to be removed.

When participants documented and mapped their observations collectively, they could see where their readings aligned, where they conflicted and what the gaps revealed about the place. This gave us a way to challenge institutionalised assumptions without replacing them with a new single authority. It also created a practical setting in which people could discuss the political consequences of heritage choices: which stories are protected, which are overlooked and which futures become easier to imagine.

For us, the workshop is more than a map-making exercise. It is a small method for treating heritage as a living social practice. Inclusive environments need processes that invite people to notice, interpret and shape their shared surroundings before a final proposal is put on the table. We hope this approach helps participatory design contribute more critically and more openly to heritage-making and spatial planning.