The nameless local.

In dealing with monuments of small scale and local importance historical social, cultural, religious or political networks can be detected once we transcend the solely focus on the object. At the same time those buildings remain to have, up to today, an impact on the social and cultural stratification and an engaged community involvement is very often present.

These building are often considered modest heritage although they show great craftsmanship.
There is a well-known framework to cope with the material aspects of conservation and restoration of these buildings, but a framework for the intangible layers is lacking.
In the tackled heritage societal value was important and crucial. The buildings became collective by their use, local significance or representation. They became beacons, points of reference or meeting points. They form complex spaces of experiences, places of attachment and recognition.

Within managing heritage one is hardly focusing on the ‘nameless local’, i.e. the person or social groups that in most cases appropriated the building and its significance ‘in the meantime’, the time between the original occupation and the project of adaptive reuse of the monument. Forgetting about this informal actor is not difficult as they are often invisible or disappearing amid all other elements, especially if one focuses only on the materiality of the building as a historic data. This is enforced by the fact that there are no approved ways for it tracing this.

In this contribution some of the tested concepts and tools discovered in the search for and the development of strategies to develop historical buildings in their context differently by reading, mapping, unveiling and understanding their societal meaning for the individual and for the local community will be described.