Walking Through Memory: How Community Walking Tours Activate Urban Kampung as a Living Oral Archive

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-624-6_29How to use a DOI?

Keywords

living oral archive; community walking tour; urban kampung; embodied heritage; Surakarta

Abstract

Community walking tours in urban kampung areas have emerged as a significant form of heritage practice in Indonesian cities, bringing together guides, residents, and participants through shared movement across historically layered spaces. Many existing studies tend to position walking tours primarily as tourism products or community-based initiatives, while this paper asks how they activate urban kampung areas a living oral archive. Using qualitative field-observation approach, the study examines three Soerakarta Walking Tour routes: Margoyudan, Laweyan, and Kampung Sewu. Data were collected through direct observation of guide-resident-participant interactions and spatially situated storytelling and analysed to identify the mechanism of narrative activation. The finding shows three mechanism: spatial anchoring, when the objects and architectural details triggers narratives through bodily presence; transfer of narrative authority, in which resident’s sharing of living knowledge; and productive interruption, is participants’ question and memories which redirect narratives to unexpected aspects of the local past. These explain that the living oral archive isn’t a fixed repository of memory but situated and co-produced process of remembering which continuously renewed through embodied encounters among people, places and multiple voices. By conceptualizing walking tours as practices through which cultural memory is actively produced, this study contributes to heritage and oral memory studies.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yustin Sartika
AU  - Sri Kusumo Habsari
AU  - Deny Tri Ardianto
AU  - Andre Noevi Rahmanto
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/19
TI  - Walking Through Memory: How Community Walking Tours Activate Urban Kampung as a Living Oral Archive
BT  - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on History, Social Sciences, and Education (ICHSE 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 424
EP  - 439
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-624-6_29
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-624-6_29
ID  - Sartika2026
ER  -