When the river disappears: emotional attachments and heritage-making in a changing landscape

Abstract

This study offers a better understanding of how post-mining communities emotionally connect to local places they lost and how emotions guide everyday heritage making related to those places’ past, present, and future. Our empirical case focuses on the disappearance of the Sztoła, a small river in Bukowno, located in the Małopolska region of Poland. Using place attachment theory, everyday heritage and solastalgia as an integrated analytical lens, we draw on interviews and analysis of social media. We find that grief, nostalgia, and hope are central to how people experience and narrate place loss. Nostalgia for childhood memories and riverside leisure reinforces attachments, while grief over the river’s loss materializes in collective mourning rituals that sustain its presence in local memory. At the same time, hope and uncertainty animate future imaginaries, revealing heritage as not only preservation of the past but also emotional investment in what might emerge. Our findings advance the understanding of emotional engagements as active forces in heritage-making, particularly within disrupted landscapes. We argue that environmental policies must move beyond material preservation to recognize emotional attachments as critical for navigating environmental change. Incorporating these dimensions into participatory landscape planning can support more inclusive, future-oriented responses to environmental change.