Heritage Preservation Under Sustainable Development and Community Inclusion: Semiotic and Discursive Mapping of Saint Petersburg

Abstract

The policy of representing a World Heritage site has always been the prerogative of the government. However, modern social and technical agents are becoming more and more important participants in the discussion, defining the policy of communication in the political space. There was a need to identify and understand new communicative and discursive principles and requirements. Having explored all sorts of different sociological methods over the past five years through a program called “St. Petersburg through the eyes of young people” we have analyzed more than 1000 artefacts on heritage preservation, community inclusion, urban identity, culture and discourse. The city code developed within UNESCO on the basis of cultural values can be found in the naive representations of the students in their images who have incorporated this ideology through contact with the city and through learning. We show the opposition of the discursive and the non-verbal in the representations of the city. Theoretical review confirms the relevance of these trends: The context/environment influences heritage and its revitalization, while finding new uses and repurposing heritage has a stimulating effect on the environment and its development. Created discursive map can be used to highlight individuals’ and the community’s values, on which its place identity is based and which carry fundamental cultural meanings and interpretations. Similar research projects and maps show mapping as a tool that can be easily used in city planning and that can act in cooperation with residents, which is a way to realize community inclusion in city politics. and the spread of social networks in particular, many processes within the life of the city, such as the interaction of government and society, non-institutional communications, have gone faster. They can be described as networks of interactions of various social actors, including technical agents.