Heritage as Placemaking
The Politics of Solidarity and Erasure in South Asia
Heritage as Placemaking: The Politics of Solidarity and Erasure in South Asia (HaP) was a four-year research project that investigated the role of placemaking in shaping, narrating, contesting, and erasing cultural heritage in South Asia. HaP’s interdisciplinary, international research team was based at four institutions in four countries: the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (Heidelberg, Germany), Social Science Baha (Kathmandu, Nepal), SOAS University of London (United Kingdom), and Colombo Institute for Human Sciences (Colombo, Sri Lanka), with collaborative projects in the social sciences and humanities that cut across regional, disciplinary, and institutional borders. The project’s research agenda aimed to explore how people, institutions, and collectives participate in the formation, preservation, decay, and erasure of heritage, which was realized through a commitment to four central theoretical strands: Decolonization, Erasure, Bureaucracy, and Commoning. Researchers from each of the four institutions engaged with multiple theoretical strands through field sites in Nepal, North India and Sri Lanka.
In addition to its research and publishing outputs, HaP remained committed to fostering accessibility and engagement from diverse publics through the project’s robust outreach and engagement initiatives, as well as its lecture and podcasts, International Schools, research and student blogs and more. The project was funded by a grant of 1.4 million euros by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond in Sweden and ran for a period of four years (October 2021 – September 2025).
Through a relational and comparative case study approach with field sites in northern India and Nepal, HaP explores how people, institutions, and collectives participate in the formation, preservation, decay, and/or erasure of heritage. The project contributes to a critical reflection of heritage production beyond developmentalism and preservation. It is situated in the fields of critical heritage studies, new area studies, and transcultural urbanization studies, and the theoretical implications of its empirical work seeks to build a new model of enabling heritage through place-making. HaP’s research is united, supported, and structured through its development of four theoretical pillars: decolonization, erasure, commoning, and bureaucracy. Each subproject and researcher engages with multiple of these theoretical strands, and each of the four years of the project focuses on the theoretical development of one of them. Essential to each strand is their ability to function both separately and simultaneously as tools of analysis: heritage placemaking can be at once understood as a project of decolonization, a condition for commoning, entangled with bureaucracy, and a potential politics of erasure.
Funding
Heritage as Placemaking was funded by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.
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