4. Heritage Work: Understanding the Values, Applying the Values

The proposition that social value (also known as “associative” value or intangible cultural heritage) should be part of the constellation of heritage values that can imbue particular places with significance is not new. However, it has begun to be more routinely asserted, mainstreamed, and internationalized in heritage practices. In this context, this paper reflects on the work of heritage, particularly the elicitation of values from communities and the implications this work can have for conservation outcomes.

Arguably all heritage values are “intangible” and all meanings applied to heritage places are socially constructed and selected. Consideration of different values is embedded in many formal systems of heritage recognition. The examination and application of “historical” and “aesthetic” significances are well established in Western-derived systems. These have their own knowledge bases, standards, and methods, particularly when applied to architecture and archaeological material. Therefore, the conceptual expansion of heritage designations of places (including sites, areas, and landscapes) on the basis of their associative meanings invites questions about how these values are asserted, portrayed, and respected.

In the name of inclusion, heritage concepts have expanded to include … almost anything! (see Harrison 2012; Silberman 2016), and new methods have emerged to ensure that the intangible dimensions are given weight alongside the values that are commonly applied to the fabric of heritage places. However, the suite of outcomes foreshadowed by the processes of conservation has not changed substantially for the last century or so. The consequences of heritage designation (particularly on the basis of social value) are therefore somewhat narrowly imagined, and changes in methods to identify values with communities may need to be augmented by new means of achieving their safeguarding and transmission.

This paper is based on a belief that the experience of heritage practice can lead in addressing these challenges. It focuses on how practitioners work with the many people who hold perspectives on the heritage values of particular places—or in other words, the elicitation of values from those who hold them. Thus it begins with the idea of “social value” and considers the impacts of significance thresholds before briefly presenting three cases drawn from current practices in southeastern Australia.¹

Constructing Heritage Values

This paper and the discussion of how values are understood in heritage practice is situated within an Australian context, and is informed by experiences of applying the Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance (the Burra Charter) for close to four decades.² The Burra Charter (Australia ICOMOS 2013a) was intended as a localized adaptation of the Venice Charter (ICOMOS 1965) and associated international doctrinal frameworks for heritage conservation to Australian practice (Logan 2004). Values-based management was not the invention of the Burra Charter, but despite its parochial purposes, the charter is often credited with the promulgation of this approach and its wider use (Jerome 2014). The core message of the Burra Charter is that a very sound understanding of a place should enable the full array of its values to be articulated in a statement of significance, which is then the touchstone of policy development and decision making.

Values-based systems of formal heritage assessment and protection are constructed around frameworks that shape the ways that places and objects are designated as heritage. One clear point of departure from the articulation of historical and aesthetic significance in the Venice Charter has been the inclusion of social value in the Burra Charter from its beginning in 1979.³ The importance of this difference to the internationally sanctioned canon should not be underestimated.⁴ For example, Sharon Sullivan has said that the inclusion of social value provided the foundation for practitioners to begin to explore the traditional knowledge of Aboriginal people in New South Wales in the late 1970s, well before any formal policy or legal requirement (Sullivan 2004; Buckley and Sullivan 2014).

In their essay in this volume, Erica Avrami and Randall Mason point out that schemes of value sets sometimes treat individual value categories as silos when in fact significances are derived from the interplay among values. Nevertheless, as table 1 illustrates, each of the well-known values frameworks within Australian heritage practice creates space for social value to be articulated within statutory and non-statutory contexts for places and objects, and within both natural and cultural heritage regimes.

While these frameworks have a degree of coherence, there are others that pose additional values. For example, Randall Mason (2008) proposes a framework that places heritage values and socioeconomic values together. Including a wider set of potential values could usefully reflect the inescapable social and political nature of heritage, although it could also pose practical complexities, especially when trying to decide which values “count” most. The Burra Charter process takes a midway position, proposing a sequence whereby the values that comprise cultural significance are considered first, before incorporating the wider issues and constraints arising from socioeconomic values.⁵ However, the means by which these are effectively included in heritage work is a continuing challenge.

Despite its early inclusion within the Burra Charter, social value was poorly operationalized compared to other values, and in the early 1990s was the subject of an important exploration by Chris Johnston (1992; see also Walker 2014; Johnston 2014). Social-value methods have continued to be relatively underdeveloped, and heritage assessments often make assumptions and conclusions about social value without specifically researching it. An obvious further weakness is that social value is yet to be widely assessed or applied outside Australia, and there is some confusion about how it should be, as well as how it should be incorporated into heritage management.⁶

The Burra Charter Practice Note on “Understanding and Assessing Cultural Significance” explains the use of social value according to the three specific dimensions.⁷

Social value refers to the associations that a place has for a particular community or cultural group and the social or cultural meanings that it holds for them. To understand social value, ask:

• Is the place important as a local marker or symbol?
• Is the place important as part of community identity or the identity of a particular cultural group?
• Is the place important to a community or cultural group because of associations and meanings developed from long use and association? (Australia ICOMOS 2013b, 4)

When considering the methods for determining social value, there is sometimes confusion between the engagements with people to articulate social value versus the need for participation in decisions and inclusion in the management of heritage places. All are critically important, but social-value assessment (for example, through cultural mapping) and community consultation are not the same thing, even if they might involve some of the same people or employ overlapping methods.

Academic criticisms of the Burra Charter and values-based management are pertinent because they focus on the ability to democratize heritage practice and the processes of representation. For example, while the articulation of social value necessitates a different and decentered role for heritage experts, Emma Waterton, Laurajane Smith, and Gary Campbell (2006) use critical discourse analysis to show that the voice in the Burra Charter (or indeed any device of its kind) serves to shore up rather than devolve the authority of experts. They conclude that the Burra Charter is less supportive of diversity and community-centered practice than it claims. Ioannis Poulios has criticized values-based management itself because it insufficiently considers the needs and rights of the present generation. He prefers the term “living heritage” (2010, 175–78). However, there are many counterexamples where mindful application of values-based management and skillful facilitation of social-values methodologies have had empowering outcomes.

These critiques call for more focused attention on the articulation of social value, foreshadowing methodological improvements. It must be acknowledged that currently there are shortcomings. For example, the Burra Charter is better equipped to deal with some kinds of places than others (Buckley and Fayad 2017), and its assertion that values are “inherent” or “intrinsic” to the place itself is debated by Australian practitioners (Byrne, Brayshaw, and Ireland 2003, 55–58; but see also Walker 2014). In this volume, Avrami and Mason summarize an emerging status quo, saying that “values are not fixed, but subjective and situational.” Future changes to the Burra Charter and its accompanying Practice Notes may therefore see changes in these areas.

Localizing Heritage and the Effects of Significance Thresholds

The commonly applied significance thresholds can have an impact on the recognition of social value. It is often the case that social value is more rigorously researched, articulated, and respected at the local significance threshold, and more challenging and generalized at other scales of assessment. Methods for mapping attachment when working directly with local communities seem better developed, compared with approaches for determining social value at the state or national threshold.

An example is the Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens in central Melbourne, which was inscribed in the World Heritage List in 2004. This place has four separate statements of significance, all using values-based approaches derived from formal systems of regulation but saying different things. The 1880 and 1888 international exhibitions were held here, the largest events ever staged in colonial Australia. These were consciously intended to introduce the world to Australian industry and technology. The World Heritage List citation says that this place is important as a surviving manifestation of the international exhibition movement that blossomed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showcasing technological innovation and change and promoting a rapid increase in industrialization and international trade through the exchange of knowledge and ideas (UNESCO 2017).

But most Melbournians would not mention these reasons if asked about the place’s significance. They would instead speak of its architectural merits, particularly the elaborately restored 1901 interior decorative scheme (fig. 4.1a and fig. 4.1b); the fact that it was built by David Mitchell, father of Dame Nellie Melba, an internationally famous Australian operatic soprano; or that it is where everyone has taken their school exams or graduated from university. They would recall that the first moments of the independent nation of Australia occurred at this place, with the initial meeting of the Australian Federal Parliament in 1901—something not mentioned in the World Heritage designation, but prominent in the National Heritage List citation (Department of the Environment and Energy [Australia] 2017a). The building was also used as a migrant reception center, influenza hospital, wartime military facility, and in 1956 an Olympic Games venue (Department of Planning and Community Development [Victoria] 2011). While heritage listings at the national and state levels do recognize the social value of this place, these are expressed in a generalized way that does not clearly distinguish between past (social history) and present (social value) associations. Policy directions arising from these value statements mostly concern interpretation and continued public use, quite a different level of detail when compared with the values attached to the historical and aesthetic values of the building and garden designs. It is unlikely that studies of the social value of this place have been conducted, despite it being the only place in the state that has reached the pinnacle of heritage thresholds through its inclusion in the World Heritage List.

fullscreen Figure 4.1a

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The point that can be drawn from this example is that whether or not the intangible dimensions of heritage places are recognized can vary according to the significance thresholds we work with.

What’s New?

The dialogue about values and methods of eliciting them was captured by the Getty Conservation Institute’s values study (de la Torre et al. 2005). What has changed since that time? The following points provide a snapshot of what has moved and what is new in the intervening decade of global heritage practice that is relevant to the call for a better toolbox:

• Human rights. Rights-based approaches to heritage practice are being sought, particularly in relation to the rights of Indigenous peoples. While heritage recognition can have the effect of validating identity claims and rights, it is also the case that heritage designations, management, and decisions can have outcomes that violate or overlook human rights. Enhancing awareness of human rights by practitioners and decision makers is therefore a key driver of change (Disko and Tugendhat 2014; Logan 2012; Oviedo and Puschkarsky 2012).

• Global environmental crises. Natural disasters and the irreversible effects of climate change are now key policy drivers. They are applying new and complex pressures on the ability of heritage places to be conserved, and directing more attention toward what is at stake, including intangible cultural heritage.

• Nature-culture convergences. Denis Byrne, Sally Brockwell, and Sue O’Connor describe the conventional divide between nature and culture as an “ontological marker of Western modernity,” leading to heritages of “people-less” nature and “nature-less” culture (2013, 1). This is a dimension where innovation can be practice led, informed by localized heritage concepts and governance arrangements, but equally faces entrenched institutional arrangements throughout the world.

• Historic Urban Landscape (HUL). Urban heritage conservation has posed great challenges to conservation approaches and mechanisms, which led to work by UNESCO to synthesize global experience and innovation. The 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the HUL has been a source of innovation at the level of city planning and citizen engagement (Buckley and Fayad 2017).

• Digital technologies and citizen science. There are many ways that digital applications and social media are being used to support heritage practice, including documentation of heritage and articulation of its values. As Hannah Lewi et al. explain, these “create both repositories and digital communities” and build on citizen science initiatives and engagement processes that not only enhance the usual work of heritage, but also “open up new forms of consumption and production of heritage related interpretation and content” (ranging from a high to low “curatorial presence”) and create possibilities for a “digitally enabled heritage citizen” (2016, 13).

• Critical heritage discourse. The recent rise of scholarly work in heritage studies has been remarkable (see Harrison 2013). The critical heritage discourse challenges practice, especially in relation to its engagement with people and constructions of “community.” Critical heritage studies has the potential to make substantial constructive contributions to practice and to pressing social issues and global transformations (Winter 2013).⁸ But a two-way dialogue between scholars and practitioners is not yet well established, limiting the ability of the critical heritage discourse to usefully point to blind spots, new possibilities, and the value of theory.

Case Study: Port Arthur Historic Site

Port Arthur Historic Site, located in southeastern Tasmania, is one of eleven sites included in the World Heritage List as the Australian Convict Sites (Australian Government 2008), and was one of the case studies included in the previous values work undertaken by the Getty Conservation Institute (Mason, Myers, and de la Torre 2003). At that time, there was a new conservation plan prepared for the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority (see Mackay 2002). Although the conservation plan has been superseded by a newer one (Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority 2008), the work done at that time to investigate the values is evident in today’s management tools, and in the international, national, state, and local heritage listings for Port Arthur.

Starting in 1830, Port Arthur was established as a secondary punishment settlement for the seventy-five thousand convicts transported from various parts of the British Empire to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). It was a significant place of colonial industry and illustrates changing philosophies in the nineteenth century about punishment and reform (fig 4.2). Exploration of the social value of Port Arthur was part of the preparation of the conservation plan. It involved the identification of a series of different “communities” (including the heritage community, which often expresses strong associations and opinions about the future of this place). Writing about the planning processes, Richard Mackay commented that the consultation processes were a “signature” of the Port Arthur Conservation Plan, necessitated by the recognition that associations with the site were multilayered, with specific policy implications (2002, 14).

Port Arthur Historic Site, Tasmania.

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In addition to the site-wide evaluation, a social value assessment was undertaken by Jane Lennon (2002) for the site of the former Broad Arrow Café in the period following the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, when a lone gunman killed thirty-five people and injured many other visitors and staff of the historic site. The café was one of the locations where people died, and there were different views about what should happen to it. The Port Arthur massacre was the worst act of murder and violence in Australia’s twentieth-century history. Reacting to the widespread surge of sorrow and outrage, Prime Minister John Howard introduced significant gun control laws that ban private ownership of automatic and semiautomatic weapons, considered by many to be a powerful legacy (Davies 2016).

For the past twenty years, the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority has interpreted and managed the narrative about this event in ways derived from the social value work done by Lennon (see also Mason, Myers, and de la Torre 2003; Frew 2012). The former café building has been retained as a ruin within a memorial garden that was established in 2000. The sensitivities of those most directly harmed—including many staff working at the site—have been paramount. The memorial garden is quiet and subtle (fig. 4.3). The story is not always mentioned in the introductory tour of the historic site, and information is available on request but not routinely handed out. The name of the gunman is never spoken.

View of the Port Arthur Historic Site memorial garden in 2016. The garden was established at the site of the former Broad Arrow Café in 2000. This Huon pine memorial cross lists the names of the victims. It once stood at the water’s edge at the center of the historic site but was moved to the memorial garden in 2001 (see Frew 2012).

fullscreen Figure 4.3

The twentieth anniversary of the massacre was marked in April 2016. Some survivors, families of victims, and first responders have said it is possibly now time to reflect again on how we transmit this story at Port Arthur. The methods are not new, despite the skillful and empathetic facilitation that is required, but it requires time. Some early work to reflect with those most directly affected has begun, assisted by the site’s Community Advisory Committee, but the key point is that social value, like all heritage values, is not static. Because the values in this example are anchored in direct experience, their transformation over time should be anticipated, and periodically revisited.

Case Study: Nature/Culture and Budj Bim

Social-value methods require the ability to work across diverse cultural contexts, including those that do not frame values according to dominant Western ontologies. This is frequently evident when working with Indigenous peoples who do not perceive a duality between nature and culture, and see spiritual and other cultural values as embodied in the landscape itself.

Early in 2017, Australia’s prime minister announced that the Budj Bim National Heritage Landscape would be added to Australia’s World Heritage tentative list. This proposal has been developed by the Gunditjmara, the Traditional Owners of Budj Bim. Budj Bim is a continuing cultural landscape, featuring complex and extensive works of hydraulic engineering that have been dated to more than six thousand years (McNiven et al. 2012). The creation of a network of stone weirs and channels enabled a plentiful supply of eels and fish, allowing the Gunditjmara to live semi-permanently on the edges of a large wetland on the vast basalt plain of western Victoria.

In 2002 the Gunditjmara proclaimed their World Heritage aspirations as one of several objectives in the Lake Condah Sustainable Development Program (McNiven and Bell 2010). Alongside this goal was another, to re-flood Lake Condah (Tae Rak), the large water body and wetland that had been drained for more than a century. The engineering works were completed just as a long period of drought broke in 2010. The recovery of the ecological health of the landscape through its rewatering has been impressive (Bell and Johnston 2008; McNiven and Bell 2010) and underpins both the revival of associated cultural traditions and the future economic sustainability of the community.

The lake and the Budj Bim landscape are of immense archaeological significance and continuing scientific potential, but are also the places that have “sustained generations of Gunditjmara” (Bell and Johnston 2008, 8). The Gunditjmara have worked with ecologists and heritage specialists to document their traditional ecological knowledge and heritage values in order to promote their objectives for land justice and World Heritage.

International instruments for biodiversity and the rights of Indigenous peoples have encouraged the development of “rights-based” approaches to nature conservation. As a consequence, natural heritage practitioners worldwide have undertaken innovative cultural mapping and participatory planning with the aim of introducing cultural knowledge and attachments into environmental management and governance (see Brown, Mitchell, and Beresford 2005). In Australia, more than sixty-five-million hectares of protected areas (approximately 40 percent of the total national reserve system’s area) are managed directly by Traditional Owners as Indigenous Protected Areas (Department of the Environment and Energy [Australia] 2017b). Budj Bim is therefore one of many examples where Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have undertaken their own cultural mapping and values documentation processes in the face of heritage frameworks that are not an ideal fit due to the separate treatment of nature and culture (Bell 2010). The Gunditjmara have formed partnerships with many specialists and practitioners, demonstrating the possibilities for significant shifts in the roles of heritage experts.

Increasingly, communities are doing their own heritage documentation and maintaining their own data systems, enabling community control over the cultural knowledge used in values-based processes. Geospatial tools have assisted with these documentation approaches, but technology has also enabled the growth of community-centered digital archives that could contribute to major shifts in heritage work, especially (but not only) for Indigenous peoples. Two examples from Central Australia are the Mukurtu open-source content management system and community archive platform (Christen 2015), and the Aṟa Irititja digital archive. These provide places for communities to keep digital knowledge, and to apply cultural protocols and specific Indigenous “ways of knowing” (Thorner and Dallwitz 2015, 53).

Case Study: The Historic Urban Landscape Approach, City of Ballarat

UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) was adopted by the UNESCO General Conference in 2011 (UNESCO 2011; Bandarin and van Oers 2012) and has had some transformative impacts on heritage practice in cities in different regions of the world (World Heritage Institute of Training and Research for the Asia and the Pacific Region 2016). In 2013 the regional Australian city of Ballarat became the first municipal government to formally join a global pilot phase for the implementation of the HUL (Buckley, Cooke, and Fayad 2016). Located north of Melbourne in Victoria’s Goldfields region, Ballarat is a fast-growing regional city with a strong record of heritage conservation relating to its mid-nineteenth-century gold-rush streetscapes and architecture (fig. 4.4). The city of Ballarat has put the HUL (and, thus, heritage) at the center of its forward-looking strategy, which is a response to projections of significant population growth (City of Ballarat 2015). A key component was a widespread community survey called “Ballarat Imagine,” which asked, “What do you love, imagine and want to retain?” The council has invested in an impressive array of community-centered tools, which have become widely used throughout the council structures.

The city of Ballarat in central Victoria is known for its extensive nineteenth-century streetscapes. The Mechanics’ Institute building, here shown as it looked in 2016, is a typical example.

fullscreen Figure 4.4

Two websites enable people to contribute their own content. Historic Urban Landscape Ballarat features an ongoing invitation for people to contribute to understanding what is valued about Ballarat, a story-based time capsule and “memory atlas,” and the capacity to share research, images, and other materials.⁹ Visualising Ballarat is an HUL spatial mapping portal.¹⁰ These tools aim to make spatial information, stories, and visual materials available to anyone who wants to use them, and allow for many contributors, making better value of the resources collected. The whole-of-organization commitment to these methods has been key to their success (Buckley, Cooke, and Fayad 2016).

Current planning is focused on specific parts of the city, including the area known as Ballarat East. Cultural mapping techniques have been used to draw out the values expressed by the communities of Ballarat East. These include both the heritage values and other issues and aspirations that can inform change. One small component has been led by Steven Cooke of Deakin University, involving the application of “visual methodologies” to understand values and attachment within Ballarat East.¹¹ Participants wearing digital recording glasses film and narrate their routes as they walk through the area (fig. 4.5). This method has enabled insights that complement the other cultural mapping methods, such as knowledge of local routes, small sight lines, musings about undeveloped spaces, and small details of fencing, curbing, and vegetation that are often too subtle to register in traditional heritage studies.

The author wearing the audio and video recording “glasses” used in the Ballarat East study, 2017.

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There are opportunities for the outcomes to be incorporated into the planning system; a local area plan is being developed and will guide change over the coming decade. Efforts to collect widely inclusive and values-based understandings about Ballarat East are central to the local area plan. This example demonstrates the extension of traditional heritage study methods to incorporate community-based methods in order to develop new strategic and statutory arrangements for changing urban areas.

Some Concluding Thoughts

Given societal expectations that heritage work should be transparent, democratic, and able to be validated, the development of methods to identify social value has been slow. Colleagues and political decision makers alike sometimes express doubts about the legitimacy of social value within heritage evaluations; meanwhile, many communities are doing their own heritage work. There is a growing casebook of creative work that can suggest approaches and directions for eliciting values with communities and inspire new possibilities.

In some respects, we have yet to perfect a vocabulary for describing place attachment, and social value is sometimes misunderstood as a socioeconomic or utilitarian quality. A small start to improved practice might be to rethink how we describe place attachment for people. Engaging with people in heritage work raises ethical and practical issues that have yet to be sufficiently addressed within professional practices, including:

• Representation/essentialism. There are common pitfalls to seeing communities too simply, portraying identity as fixed and one-dimensional.

• Diversity and visibility. Who is heard and seen in heritage values work, and who is not? How is diversity accounted for in social value and other heritage assessments?

• Accumulation. As our definitions of what heritage can be expand to better reflect cultural diversity, is there a danger of having “too much” heritage? Denis Byrne, Helen Brayshaw and Tracy Ireland discuss the “fear of proliferation of meaning” if widespread attachments to place are respected (2003, 57). Rodney Harrison has referred to this as a “crisis of accumulation,” pointing to the need to consider a broader spectrum of management outcomes than those normally included within conservation (2012, 579).

• Scale and repeatability of methods. Projects like “Ballarat Imagine” show the possibilities of large-scale processes for identifying social value, including for urban areas. Yet many studies seem unlikely to be repeatable, lessening their apparent validity.

• Fluidity of heritage values. If values are dynamic and situational, how can decisions rest on values assessments? With the increased mobility of many peoples—including through environmental, economic, and military displacements—where does the social value go? In situations of demographic change, how do new residents begin to form place attachments?

• Validity and affordability. It takes time, expertise, and resources to conduct social value assessments. Digital technologies offer a better shelf life for the studies that are undertaken, increasing their efficiency while at the same time raising new issues such as how to manage vast quantities of digital data.

• Connecting values with conservation outcomes. The usual models for heritage conservation attach decision making to place, and to land-use planning and decision-making processes. But these are not the only processes that might be important. There are many examples where the values are well identified, but the processes of change cannot easily reflect them. The array of conservation processes—maintenance, preservation, restoration, reconstruction, adaptation—has not changed for nearly a century. The intangible cultural-heritage focus on cultural processes (rather than products) might usefully lead to an expanded set of conservation outcomes.

Three suggestions are offered in conclusion. First, expertise needs to be recognized and specialists are needed, no more or less than for physical conservation. There are opportunities to both take from and contribute to the developing scholarship of heritage studies. Byrne, Brayshaw, and Ireland recommend approaching heritage as “social action” and the use of the principle of “attachment” in the management of heritage places, and propose a corresponding shift in the role of heritage professionals, focusing on facilitation, advice, and connectivity (2003, 143).

Second, there is room to experiment and improve methods of community engagement, especially as the possibilities related to digital technologies are embraced to engage with many more people, different voices, and meanings, and to keep values knowledge so that it is usable and not easily misappropriated. There might be new experts entering the field of heritage work, such as social scientists, digital humanities specialists, and archivists.

Finally, it is important to remember that not all heritage is associated with place, and that the field of intangible cultural heritage offers expanded opportunities for collaboration. The rapid take-up of the 2003 UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage (UNESCO 2003) has demonstrated the potential for greater use of anthropological methods of documentation, but the two communities of practice are not well acquainted. Ultimately heritage work and future practice can move toward methods and outcomes that are both more diverse and more converged.