Sustaining public agency in caring for heritage: critical perspectives on participation through co-design

This thesis explores how heritage organisations in the UK are attempting to build capacity and sustainability in community groups involved in caring for heritage places during austerity. It is based on a broad interdisciplinary reading of critical perspectives on public participation. From this vantage point, I argue that the forms of participation facilitated by participatory initiatives in the sector are constrained by perceptions of public deficits and legitimate heritage expertise, which in turn are bound up in established definitions of heritage and its cultural significance. As a result, participatory initiatives reproduce the characteristics of network governance and incumbent democratisation, whereby community groups who share professional values are asked to augment professional capacity, as opposed to more critical forms of democratisation that foreground public agency. By critically engaging with my three case studies, Archaeology Scotland’s Adopt-a-Monument scheme, Bristol City Council’s Know Your Place interface and associated projects and my own co-design project with three community groups in Yorkshire, I demonstrate how public agency is limited in practice in each case, despite individuals’ critical intentions. In response, I argue that increasing and sustaining public agency in caring for heritage requires carefully designing participatory projects in ways that foreground participants’ skills and interests. My analysis demonstrates that in order to realise such interventions, they must be based in reconceptualised definitions of heritage and more nuanced understandings of participation deficits and legitimate heritage expertise. In doing so, my thesis contributes to the growing body of scholarship that argues increasing public participation is not a critical intervention in and of itself, but a means by which control can be both retained and relinquished

Value from Development-Led Archaeology in the UK : Advancing the Narrative to Reflect Societal Changes

This paper explores how current challenges in the development-led system of archaeology in the UK are widely applicable elsewhere. Using the UK model, we explore the legislative and structural frameworks that enable archaeological work and the pressing need to better provide benefit for the wider public from that work. We believe that there is a focus on outputs rather than outcomes, which has perpetuated the idea that contracting archaeology is a product of development rather than a process that can instigate social value. We argue that the shift to public benefit and social value in UK policy should be encouraging practitioners operating within this industry to pay more attention to the links between their standard contracting practice and the benefits they deliver to people through their work. We explore why this could be a way of meeting policy priorities but also an opportunity to bridge the gaps between expert-identified heritage values and societal needs

Identifying Opportunities for Integrated Adaptive Management of Heritage Change and Transformation in England: A Review of Relevant Policy and Current Practice

This report aims to summarise relevant statutory frameworks and policy guidance from the assumed perspective of an owner or manager anticipating the challenge of managing unpredictable (and sometimes inevitable) change to the form and fabric of designated heritage assets. In doing so it contributes to the development of the concept of adaptive release, defined as an active decision to accommodate the dynamic transformation of a heritage asset and its associated values and significance. The scope of the report is limited to assets and landscapes with statutory designations in England, with a focus on the way in which current policy and legal frameworks may constrain or facilitate decision-making around the accommodation of adaptive release and similar approaches

Heritage Futures

Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the future, or on behalf of future generations, but the precise relationship of such practices to the future is rarely reflected upon. Heritage Futures draws on research undertaken over four years by an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers and more than 25 partner organisations to explore the role of heritage and heritage-like practices in building future worlds. Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management. 'I suspect this book will prove to be a revolutionary addition to the field of heritage studies, flipping the gaze from the past to the future. Heritage Futures reveals the deep uncertainties and precarities that shape both everyday and political life today: accumulation and waste, care and hope, the natural and the toxic. It represents a uniquely impressive intellectual and empirical roadmap for both anticipating and questioning future trajectories, and the strange, unfamiliar places heritage will take us.’ - Tim Winter, University of Western Australi

Heritage Futures

Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the future, or on behalf of future generations, but the precise relationship of such practices to the future is rarely reflected upon. Heritage Futures draws on research undertaken over four years by an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers and more than 25 partner organisations to explore the role of heritage and heritage-like practices in building future worlds. Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management. 'I suspect this book will prove to be a revolutionary addition to the field of heritage studies, flipping the gaze from the past to the future. Heritage Futures reveals the deep uncertainties and precarities that shape both everyday and political life today: accumulation and waste, care and hope, the natural and the toxic. It represents a uniquely impressive intellectual and empirical roadmap for both anticipating and questioning future trajectories, and the strange, unfamiliar places heritage will take us.’ - Tim Winter, University of Western Australi

The significance of values : heritage value typologies re-examined

A critical discussion of value typologies for heritage conservation and management is offered, from the perspective of objects and urban conservation, in light of a review of published literature on heritage values. It is suggested that value typologies are often designed and implemented without understanding the implicit consequences of the inclusion and omission of ‘values’. It is also suggested that typologies often fail to prompt the necessary questions to develop satisfactorily detailed understandings of heritage significance, resulting in decisions being based on implicit, rather than explicit, value assessments in practice. Mindful of the problems associated with ‘universalising’ context specific typologies, a broad framework for assessing and communicating significance is proposed. In order to encourage holistic approaches, the framework is designed to combat the false dichotomies of cultural/natural and tangible/intangible heritage; it is hoped this will make the framework widely applicable. Without downplaying the necessity of diverse participation in assessing significance, the framework is designed to identify aspects of weakness and preference in cases where adequate consultation is not possible

Understanding Public Benefit from Development-led Archaeology

Dr Sadie Watson's UKRI Future Leader Fellowship is a multi-faceted research project, intended to assess and maximise public benefit provision from archaeological work that happens through the planning-led development system. Sadie worked closely throughout lockdown with Dr Harald Fredheim who led on this first phase of the research. This report is an accessible mixture of academic research, our experience of the archaeological sector, and an investigation of other sectors that could be useful in terms of how they measure their public benefit and impact. It is very much intended as a conversation starter, and we have worked further on various aspects of it since we initially wrote it – it was the catalyst for much of what has followed