How Cultural Heritage can Contribute to Community Development and Wellbeing

Community wellbeing as an element of happiness research is a rather nebulous concept because first of all it is not clear how collective wellbeing amounts to more than the individual wellbeing of its members and second because it is not clear at what level ‘community’ takes place (see Phillips and Wong, 2017). While usually referring implicitly to a geographical location, community can also refer to the kinds of networks of affective connection and social ties that constitute people's lives – and in a globalized and digitally connected social world these can be increasingly complex and manifold (Rainie and Wellman, 2012). Elsewhere we have described the ways in which information technology impacts on these local affiliations (Wallace and Vincent, 2017). Here we look more explicitly at one aspect of community wellbeing – that of cultural heritage. In doing so we argue that wellbeing is a property of communities rather than only of individuals. This therefore goes beyond the conventional view of happiness as an individual phenomenon.