ABSTRACT
Heritage-related discussions often lack respect towards local communities, which are easily crushed with the buzz killer that locals suffer from the NIMBY syndrome stating that local communities must come from under their so-called church tower. However, when considering the re-development of heritage places, the sense of rootedness or the nature of emotional bonds between people and places cannot be excluded. These aspects are easily placed in the same row as historical continuity and stability, identity and enclosure while setting aside a more conservative idea about the meaning of place. However, the interaction with built heritage addresses the past, present and future simultaneously, while emphasizing stability and dynamics, enclosure and openness. Hence the impossibility of classifying the meaning of heritage places unequivocally along the conservative (static) or progressive (dynamic) dimensions. It contains both.
The current chapter delves deeper into the topic of the interrelationship between local inhabitants and the heritage landscape as a future-oriented generating force by investigating the different planning policies in the two neighbouring hamlets of Noeveren and Hellegat, which are both situated in the post-industrial riverfront of the Rupel in Flanders. In Noeveren, it is specifically the understanding of the easements, historical rights over land originally installed to guarantee a short four-hundred-metre walk between the workmen's houses and the factories and clay pit, that is key to the contemporary policy issues surrounding (social) sustainability and future development. They underline the cultural and social meaning of the heritage site as a slowly grown historical example of the so-called 20-minute neighbourhoods (Melbourne) or the superblocks in Barcelona, mini city quarters of 400 ×400 m in which living locally is the new way of living. Unfortunately, in Hellegat, proposals for new developments of multi-family housing in inappropriate locations along the green and vacant northern riverbank overlook and turn their backs on the living community. They neglect the spatial and social fabric and reframe the formerly collectively used space by explicitly delimiting the private plots due to different landscaping or by using hedges and fences, thus obstructing an ancient right-of-way, which grew over time. This act alienates the local people from their living environment. Additionally, the material remains of the industrial past risk becoming isolated artefacts because they increasingly lack their relationship with the landscape. The different planning processes in these hamlets raise interesting questions within the aforementioned discourse about the conservative and progressive visions on the meaning of a (heritage) place: what option is active, evolving and generating and which one is passive, fixative and annihilating? The answer is obvious: due to the neglect of grounded knowledge in restoration and development plans cutting into collectively used heritage places, as is the case in Hellegat, these heritage sites turn into something that is only passively subject to change. This is in contrast to Noeveren, where the cultural landscape became an active driver of positive change.
