Roots and Futures: Scaling-up and sustaining co-produced, placed-based heritage with marginalised communities in heritage policy and decision-making

Roots and Futures is a collaborative partnership between community enterprises, heritage organisations and academics which has explored the place-based heritage of Sheffield's industrial heartland. Since 2020, we have been working with Sheffield's Pakistani, Yemeni and Somali communities to share memories and stories and explore themes and priorities for the city's heritage. The project has shown a deep appreciation for the significance of the past in building a sense of belonging, but reliance on white, northern heritage narratives has created barriers to engagement with traditional heritage-focused spaces and activities. A community-expressed need for greater knowledge of the past is rooted in a shared sense of place at the neighbourhood scale, a desire for more personalised and diverse stories of Sheffield's past and access to more creative ways of engaging with the past embedded within familiar landscapes. This project will devise and explore routes to realise these community-expressed needs, embedding learning from Roots and Futures via new partnerships with regional decision makers in local government and heritage strategy. It will critically engage with issues of support and sustainability in community-centred place-based heritage, connect key stakeholders in city governance with new audiences by sharing extant data and brokering new partnerships, and test a model for community-centred research in heritage embedded within extant urban governance structures. The inclusion of diverse and representative community voices in local governance is a challenge affecting all decision-makers, however Sheffield's position as City of Sanctuary uniquely recognises the need to embrace the growing diversity of our cities. Sheffield is also the first city in England where a voluntary organisation has published a community-led heritage strategy, thereby offering the ideal crucible for a project which can also be replicated in the future in other cities.