"ABSTRACT Baltimore’s historically working-class neighborhood of Hampden, like many urban neighborhoods, is contested-heritage terrain. Traditional community members worry about encroaching real-estate development, middle-class...
more"ABSTRACT Baltimore’s historically working-class neighborhood of Hampden, like many urban neighborhoods, is contested-heritage terrain. Traditional community members worry about encroaching real-estate development, middle-class hegemony, and economic transformation. Meanwhile, area merchants, developers, and planners (ab)use representations of working-class people’s history to market the area’s real estate, service, and retail economies. Problematic representations of other people’s pasts are often coupled with discourses on progress that simultaneously recall and dismiss workers, casting out “those people’s history” in favor of an empty history of old buildings and facades. The historical archaeology project in Hampden seeks, through community-based practice and aggressive public dissemination of information, to repopulate the neighborhood’s history and reassert the right of its traditional community to possess heritage. The material history of the place is used as a starting point for community engagement with the ultimate goal of countering damaging fantasy representations of the place’s past with realistic ones."
