Where Memory Settles: Terroir, Material Memory, and Practice of Place

This article examines how memory, knowledge, and lived experience become embedded within material environments and continue to shape engagement with historic wooden neighbourhoods. Drawing on the WoodiSH project (Wooden Cities: Memory, Sustainability and Craft in Historic Neighbourhoods), the article develops the concept of terroir as a framework for understanding historic built environments as material ecologies of memory. The analysis combines perspectives from material culture studies, phenomenology, Tim Ingold’s concepts of meshwork and wayfaring, and theories of embodied cognition. While the WoodiSH project provides the empirical context through studies of historic wooden neighbourhoods in Trondheim, Pori, and Vilnius, the article is primarily conceptual and uses observations from heritage environments and craft education as analytical entry points. The article argues that memory is not located solely in individual minds but remains materially present through traces of repair, maintenance, adaptation, and everyday use. Observations from the WoodiSH project and educational activities in traditional building crafts suggest that such traces enable residents, craftspeople, and students to recognise how previous actions and practical knowledge remain embedded within materials and places. Historic wooden neighbourhoods are therefore understood as terroirs of memory: environments in which knowledge and experience continue to be enacted through ongoing engagement with material traces. The article contributes by extending terroir beyond its traditional association with viticulture and by demonstrating how material memory becomes accessible through embodied engagement with historic environments. It further proposes a pedagogy of material sensitivity in which learning develops through observation, participation, repair, and practical involvement with heritage environments.