Introduction
Heritage - Heritage is all about the management of our relationship with time. The balance of the past and the present has significant implications for this relationship, which is reflected in definitions of heritage as 'a contemporary product shaped from history' (see Harvey 2001: 327) or 'a creative engagement with the past in the present' (Harrison 2013: 4).
Utopia - Like heritage, utopia is suggestive of a particular experience of time, most often a better or alternative future. As Ruth Levitas writes, utopia is 'society imagined otherwise, rather than merely society imagined' (2013: 84). Utopianism, then, always speaks to the idea of the world figured differently and, in doing so, sheds light on current limitations and opportunities.
The following pages bring heritage and utopia together in order to draw out the multiple temporalities embedded in notions of the past and the future, and their impact on how we live in the present.
This resource is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme.
