The Power of Place Making: Exploring The Role of Sense of Place in Sustainable World Heritage Tourism Development at the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site (DVMWHS)

‘Place making’ is a concept used by both the tourism and heritage industries to develop cultural sites by leveraging unique aspects of local identity to generate a sense of place. Despite this crossover, there is little collaboration between the disciplines when approaching place making strategies. In tourism, deliberately shaping destination image to provide destinations with a strong identity is ‘top-down’ place making. ‘Bottom-up’ place making refers to an organically generated sense of place which springs from the actions of local communities and is often rooted in heritage practices. Tourism explores sense of place regarding how tourists create MTEs; heritage considers it from the point of view of residents, exploring ‘rootedness’ and a sense of belonging; and public history considers layering different stories about the past to create an inclusive yet distinctive representation of what ‘the past’ means to present-day communities. This thesis argues that a blend of all three approaches is key to generating effective place making strategies at WHSs. Involving communities in place making motivates them to be involved in cultural tourism-based activities, which in turn increases sense of place. This makes destinations more attractive to tourists and strengthens a site’s OUV attributes. Therefore, collaboration between multiple stakeholder groups is vital if this blended approach is successful. Nevertheless, the link between heritage and tourism place making approaches has not been thoroughly explored and there is evidence to suggest that mindset barriers exist between the two disciplines that block the development of collaborative, multi-stakeholder place making strategies. Public history approaches consider change over time and draw on multiple instances of perception and memory to generate meaning for contemporary communities. This creates context and understanding of past events, enabling them to inform current thinking and practice. Therefore, this research aims to investigate how sense of place is currently experienced at the DVMWHS by both resident and non-resident stakeholders to identify if there is coherence between top-down and bottom-up approaches that will best support whole site identity and encourage a multi-stakeholder strategy for place making. It will then apply public history practice methodology to this interplay of stakeholder place-based narratives and formal UNESCO OUV narratives, seeking to identify if multiple experiences of sense of place can be drawn together in a layered way to facilitate the formation of stakeholder management strategies for place making at WHS.

A total of 53 semi-structured interviews were conducted across four stakeholder groups: 7 cultural intermediaries, 11 visitors, 19 residents and 16 SMEs. In total, 85 participants across all stakeholder groups contributed to this study. By analysing qualitative data from a range of resident and non-resident stakeholders, this research identifies that resident stakeholders require different world heritage site narratives to those of non-resident stakeholders in order to develop place attachment that can translate into a coherent sense of place for the whole DVMWHS. Results indicate that narratives regarding the development of the site can engage local stakeholders and promote WHS support. This research supports previous findings that show communication between stakeholder groups is the biggest factor in tourism development success. It also goes further, examining how lack of communication can result in the development of co-destructive narratives that actively harm the site. Findings reveal that destination narratives at WHS need to be layered according to stakeholder group, and not just according to visitor preference and motivation. This study contributes to both heritage and tourism literature by identifying how bottom-up heritage place making and top-down tourism place making can create holistically sustainable heritage tourism sites by simultaneously considering financial, environmental and cultural sustainability factors through multi-stakeholder collaboration. It also contributes to public heritage literature by demonstrating how current public heritage practice could be used in place making strategies at world heritage sites through a co-produced, cross-discipline methodological approach. This study has implications for heritage destination managers, tourism development managers, public historians, destination marketing, SMEs and community heritage groups as findings can assist the co-creation of multiple site narratives that target specific stakeholder groups to maximise heritage tourism development support and suggest ways to draw these multiple narratives together for mutual benefit. By developing narratives specific to each stakeholder group, the benefit of the WHS listing will be understood more easily and mindset barriers can be addressed. This can help foster long-term, mutually beneficial relationships between stakeholders and heritage tourism destinations.