Nostalgia, Innovation, and the Sense of Belonging

Our 2023 fieldwork in Abu Dhabi, aimed at deepening our understanding of living heritage practices, became increasingly engaging as it revealed an inherently charismatic core. The practitioners interviewed for this study believe that innovation that does not consider local context is unsustainable. Similarly, traditional practices that fail to follow the dynamics of a rapidly evolving society do not seem to foster a sense of belonging to Abu Dhabi. Instead, the synthesis of collective memories and traditional know-how and innovation, both technologically and societally, is perceived as the golden thread of Abu Dhabi’s living heritage. But what underpins this intricate balance between tradition and innovation? What are the key drivers that enable individuals to actively engage with and sustain their heritage practices?

The more we advanced in our interviews with Abu Dhabi-based heritage practitioners, the more we understood that our research needed to go beyond simple identification of the actors, objects, and practices. Instead, it had to explore a domain that was elusive and difficult to define. It took time for us to uncover the force behind the tensing magnetism of our fieldwork. As we repeatedly revisited the interview transcripts, we gradually realized that these texts were imbued with the practitioners’ emotions in profoundly intimate ways. This discovery shifted our focus toward the emotional attachments to cultural heritage - through objects and how this heritage intertwines with our identity and daily life.

Heritage practitioners express their value systems through their creations, everyday objects, and the practices that lead to the production of these artefacts. These pieces evoke personal responses through a spectrum of emotions that reflect the practitioners’ value systems. Emotional attachment does not focus exclusively on whether we use traditional or new ways to express living heritage. Instead, it creates valuation patterns for heritage, benefiting communities and building networks for knowledge exchanges. Analysing the intersection of emotions and language facilitated an understanding of how the interviewees create narratives that symbolize their emotional investment in issues affecting their everyday lives.

Drawing Parallels Between Heritage and Healthcare

The appraisal-based framework we developed enabled the investigation of emotions, such as hope, empathy, disillusionment, and their influence on ‘heritage drivers’ – the individual motivations for engaging with heritage. Individual heritage drivers related to personal well-being include values developing from inspiration, creativity, personal welfare, individual inclinations, and preferences. Community-focused groups of individual heritage drivers encompass the desire for interaction, the need to belong to a community, to build relationships and mutual respect through shared heritage practices. Finally, individual heritage drivers connected to the broader ecosystem include those elements of civic responsibility, recognition, economic income, and international exposure.

Our paper's innovative interdisciplinary approach draws parallels between heritage and healthcare. We positioned the three groups of individual heritage drivers within wider policymaking frameworks by applying value-based decision-making principles, a model predominantly used in healthcare policy frameworks. In the healthcare sector, value-based decision-making emphasizes the importance of shared social values at the micro level. These values help shape and guide macro-level policies, ensuring that they are acceptable, prioritized, and efficient. Additionally, the healthcare system faces complex challenges, particularly regarding budget allocation for cost-effective treatments, which can impact access to care for vulnerable populations. Similarly, the cultural heritage sector experiences comparable challenges, where stakeholders’ conflicting priorities can impede clear agenda-setting and policymaking. These shared issues make the value-based approach from the healthcare field highly applicable and valuable for this study.

The inductive adaptation of value categories from health policy to Abu Dhabi’s living cultural heritage can be summarized as follows: (1) Goal-related values, which focus on achieving the best heritage practices for all, tailored to their needs; (2) Governance values, which pertain to the interaction between political actors within the heritage domain and local networks to support living heritage as a public good; (3) Situational values, which depend on specific circumstances and vary with heritage legacies, national and international trends, and social moods, shaped by territorial and urban factors – such as the spatial concentration of heritage entities; and (4) Technical values, which address efficiency or financial sustainability concerns, often tied to the development of an integrated statistical indicator system.

Value-Based Metrics: Bridging Local Dynamics and Global SDGs

Our study responded to the importance of measuring the impact of living heritage regulations and their relevance to grassroots ‘heritage drivers’ at a local scale. Indeed, each policymaking area that embeds the living heritage valuation can be partially operationalized through the relevant set of indicators. Here, the interviewees’ emotions – both positive and negative – can become criteria for choice and prioritization of indicators. For example, if an individual heritage driver (e.g., personal history transmission) is heavily associated with negative emotions (e.g., loneliness and disconnection from younger people), statistical indicators focused on community development should come first. 

The value-based metrics for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) will obviously arise from this approach. For example, heritage-related indicators operationalising community development can potentially support internationally compatible metrics for SDG11, focusing on Sustainable Cities and Communities and SDG 4 on Quality Education. Enhancing the family and business grassroots networks of living heritage can contribute to the assessment of SDG 9 on Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure and SDG 10 on Reduced Inequality. A sense of belonging to Abu Dhabi correlates with SDG 8 on Decent Work and Economic Growth, SDG 11 on Sustainable Cities and Communities, and SDG 4 on Quality Education.

The regional and international living heritage mapping would provide an initial assessment of progress toward the UN SDGs and highlight existing policy gaps and data collection, thereby facilitating the further development of a value-based indicator system. The ongoing use of this approach would allow for the assessment of dimensions previously regarded as 'intangible' or 'symbolic'. To enhance this framework, future research should incorporate the perspectives of other critical territorial actors - such as local associations, regulatory bodies, and adjacent cultural and creative sectors. This approach would expand our understanding of the heritage ecosystem, shifting from merely describing value sets to achieving a deeper and more comprehensive grasp of the value systems ingrained in living cultural heritage.