Recovery as community practice: materiality, memory and heritage

Historic preservation has traditionally prioritized architectural fabric and canonical narratives, often marginalizing the social relations, labor histories, and power structures embedded in heritage sites. This paper advances recovery as a distinct analytical and governance-oriented framework in heritage and planning, moving beyond restoration, resilience, and adaptive reuse by foregrounding relational repair, redistribution of interpretive authority, and heritage as civic infrastructure. Drawing on the 1705 Stone House at Mabee Farm Historic Site (Rotterdam Junction, New York) as a case study, I examine how technical conservation interventions (e.g. masonry stabilization, fenestration remediation, landscape integration) intersect with interpretive and community-based practices, including rotating exhibitions, participatory programming, and the naming of documented enslaved individuals. Through archival research, built-fabric assessment, and analysis of interpretive programming, I identify three constitutive dynamics of recovery: Material re-reading of space, Redistribution of agency, and Structural constraints, including archival silences, funding precarity, and commodification, which delimit the scope and durability of recovery. By framing recovery as an analytical, methodological, and normative framework, this study shifts attention from object-centered preservation toward ongoing processes of social and spatial repair. It further explores implications for heritage governance, planning regulation, and infrastructural decision-making, advocating preservation practices that cultivate shared custodianship, plural memory, and future-oriented civic engagement.