Storytelling can be included in a variety of public settings, including streets and sidewalks.On Atlanta’s “Sweet Auburn” Street, artists and landscape architects collaborated with the community to produce sidewalks with inscribed quotes, panels, and artworks commemorating the stories of struggle and everyday living in the segregated Black community.Even unused boarded-upbuildings provide opportunities to tell the story. And, the story is a powerful one with deep meaning for us today, as exemplified by a family photo opportunity in front of Martin Luther King’s birthplace.

Storytelling can take many forms and can even be told separate from specific places. Iowa’s Silos & Smokestacks National Heritage Area produced an engaging series of audiotapes similar in format to an NPR feature. Voices of famous Iowans (Herbert Hoover, Billy Sunday and others) are mixed with descriptions of farmscapes and life in small towns. The Silos tapes have been very popular with visitors and residents.

Festivals, special events and activities provide reason to invite the public, but they are also an important part of the community’s own heritage. Galesburg, Illinois has grown its popular “railroad days” into a three-day annual celebration that attracts 60,000 visitors. Waverly, Iowa (population 1,200) holds a draft horse sale that brings buyers from all over North America. Being there is very special experience, since it is not really a “tourism attraction.”That is likely to change, as the New York Times travel section did a feature on it several months after this trip. And, celebrations can bring a lot of heritage development threads together.At a waterfront festival on the Chesapeake Bay, a high school class was proudly displaying the beautiful replica of a Hooper Island Drake Tail they had built, continuing a tradition of regional boat building.

Perhaps the most important quality of heritage development is the fact that it touches on so many dimensions of community life, and in so doing, affords an invaluable opportunity for working together, collaborating to craft the larger regional vision, then planning and taking many actions over time.

Heritage development is not “the true path,” if such a path really exists. What this asset-based approach to community development does is provide missing links between what the community was, and what it is going to become in an era of global change; between its traditional economy and its emerging one; between old timers and new comers; between those who hold on to the past and those who seek to change it; between citizens and their elected leaders: between professional planners and historians and “just folks.” yes; letter-spacing: -1.75pt">  Heritage development offers conversation among residents, planners, and developers.

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