Resurrected Footprints: Re-Interpreting Lost Heritage in Contemporary Landscape Architecture

Drawing on tangible and intangible heritage, landscape architects are reinterpreting the footprints of lost historic features to add authenticity to new design interventions, using heritage and memory to build a sense of place in an ever-changing urban landscape. The term ‘resurrected footprints’ was coined to describe this observed approach.
As an act of remembering, this approach relies on cartographies of the past being drawn up through subsequent layers of urban development into the contemporary public realm with new palimpsest-interpretations of lost or destroyed features. Illustrated with a range of case studies, this paper examines how effective and appropriate this is as a way of acknowledging heritage in contexts where material remains have been lost or destroyed by subsequent waves of development.
Frequently cited as a way of establishing a sense of place, this design approach is thought to lend legitimacy because the design decisions come ‘from the site’. Drawing on landscape architectural theory and practice, the paper suggests this approach is a professional reaction to late twentieth century placelessness, but notes that there is little evidence to show that it contributes to a sense of place in practice.
Resurrected footprints are, by design, often undecipherable in their built form. With little or no interpretation, many resurrected footprints remain obscure. Are they crude references to old maps with tenuous links between past and present, or subtle invitations to discover a place’s story? This paper invites clients and designers to examine why and how lost heritage is incorporated into contemporary urban landscapes.