Managing the Imagined Spatialities of Protected Sites: (Un)Bounding Industrial World Heritage via Mental Maps

Mark Alan Rhodes, Kathryn L. Hannum and Zoē Ketola

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2025, vol. 115, issue 10, 2626-2641

Abstract: Heritage sites often rely on defined boundaries for the management and interpretation of heritage discourse. Just as communities, regions, and nations can use space for defining, othering, and legitimizing, so, too, do heritage managers. Although heritage sites are (b)ordered—similar to communities and nations—we can also follow a path whereby a fuzzy understanding of these spatial boundaries dominates a heritage designation, highlighting the dialectics of intangible and tangible heritage within a protected area. More complex conceptualizations of conservation and how heritage can or should be managed, interpreted, or marketed increasingly lead to more creative strategies for performing heritage work. Three such examples include industrial World Heritage Sites in León, Cornwall, and Wales. Each of these World Heritage Sites includes three to ten spatially disparate areas across large tracts of land and encompasses varied and significant elements, unique communities, and political units. To understand these complex spatialities, their management, and their perceptions, we ask how heritage stakeholders interpret the simplest geography of these protected areas—their boundaries—using mental maps. Stakeholder geographies shape and reflect spatial understandings of these protected areas. In this article, we explore what heritage areas are included or excluded in stakeholder perspectives and why, as well as consider the alignment of these areas with official site boundaries. Using mental mapping and a comparative spatial analysis, we observe, via a small sample of stakeholders, the spatial fuzziness of geographically disparate protected areas.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2025.2464803

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