Heritage, Conservation and Communities

Engagement, participation and capacity building

Gill Chitty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317122340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Public participation and local community involvement have taken centre stage in heritage practice in recent decades. In contrast with this established position in wider heritage work, public engagement with conservation practice is less well developed. The focus here is on conservation as the practical care of material cultural heritage, with all its associated significance for local people. How can we be more successful in building capacity for local ownership and leadership of heritage conservation projects, as well as improving participative involvement in decisions and in practice?

This book presents current research and practice in community-led conservation. It illustrates that outcomes of locally-led, active participation show demonstrable social, educational and personal benefits for participants. Bringing together UK and international case studies, the book combines analysis of theoretical and applied approaches, exploring the lived experiences of conservation projects in and with different communities. Responding to the need for deeper understanding of the outcomes of heritage conservation, it examines the engagement of local people and communities beyond the expert and specialist domain.

Highlighting the advances in this important aspect of contemporary heritage practice, this book is a key resource for practitioners in heritage studies, conservation and heritage management. It is also relevant for the practising professional, student or university researcher in an emerging field that overarches professional and academic practice.

1 Introduction

Engaging Conservation – practising heritage conservation in communities

Gill Chitty

Public participation and local community involvement in heritage conservation have taken centre-ground over the last two decades. Arguably recognised as the new norm, and as established principles in planning and cultural policy, they are less well embedded in contemporary conservation practice. In the UK, Power of Place (English Heritage 2000) was a watershed for this change in focus, although internationally the shift towards recognition of cultural pluralism came much earlier, underpinning the evolution of the Australia ICOMOS Burra Charter from 1979 and international principles on social inclusion and diversity embedded in conventions and charters from that decade onwards (ibid.; Australia ICOMOS 2013; UNESCO 2005). The current UK Government White Paper on Culture, just published at the time of writing, acknowledges still ‘the challenge of creating more cultural opportunities, particularly for those whose chance to experience culture is more limited’ (DCMS 2016:13). However, its focus is firmly on what ‘culture’ can do for society and the economy rather than on recognising and nurturing what communities do to enrich and creatively shape their own culture and heritage. In this volume, drawn from the 2014 Engaging Conservation conference and collaborations at the University of York, we bring together ideas and experience from people working in cultural heritage conservation to look critically and honestly at the progress we have made – see, for example, Keith Emerick on ‘Ending the tyranny of Ruskin and Morris?’ (2014: 219–37) – in democratising our practice and the changes that are still to be negotiated.

Unquestionably, with a shift in emphasis towards privileging social values and inclusive heritage processes, conservation practitioners are increasingly aware of this agenda. The movement towards it has been a gradual one. At the international level, it might be traced back to Local Agenda 21 policies, enacted in the years following the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, with its focus on citizenship and communities acting at the local level in socially and environmentally sustainable ways. Working in government during the 1990s, no one could be unaware of its direct impact on both central and local policy in the UK, reflected by environmental and heritage government agencies (Countryside Commission et al. 1996; English Heritage 1997). This direction of travel was encouraged by debate on the creation of public value: Mark H. Moore’s work at Harvard, its appropriation in New Labour public policy and a re-examination of the value of culture to society in the mid-2000s (Moore 1995; Jowell 2004; Holden 2004; Clark 2006). At international level, the ICOMOS Stockholm Declaration (1998), recognising ‘the right of everyone to partake freely in the cultural life of the community’, was soon followed by the Council of Europe Framework Convention on the Value of Heritage for Society, Faro (Council of Europe 2005) and the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Diversity of Cultural Expressions (UNESCO 2005). The global movement in thinking about culture, society and sustainability is outlined more fully below, in Chapter 3, ‘People-centred approaches’ (Wijesuriya, Thompson and Court, pp. 34–49), and is reflected in new Principles for Capacity Building for ICOMOS International Training Committee (CIF 2013). Community-driven conservation and local empowerment have become major themes for the international community ‘placing people at the centre of the cultural debate’ (ICOMOS 2014: 2).

Locally led, active participation and social relevance are, then, dominant characteristics of the twenty-first century’s democratised cultural heritage practice. Whether at global or at local scales, it is recognised as being, above all, about human interactions. Evaluation of its outcomes in the UK shows demonstrable social, educational, well-being and personal benefits for participants, as well as tangible outcomes, which are being carefully measured and critically examined (e.g. HLF 2015; Neal 2015). This sits alongside an expanding body of critical and theoretical literature around authority and heritage work, especially in archaeological practice (Graham et al. 2000; Merriman 2004; Smith 2006; Smith and Waterton 2009; Waterton and Watson 2011; Moshenka and Dhanjal 2012) and as considered by other contributors to this volume. The role of the expert practitioner in heritage work continues to be problematised, questioned and repositioned – see for example see John Schofield’s Who Needs Experts: Counter-mapping Cultural Heritage (Schofield 2014).

Community engagement in conservation practice, in contrast with the community focus in archaeological and heritage work, has received relatively little attention in terms of widening engagement until recently. By ‘conservation’ here, the focus is on the care of tangible cultural heritage: buildings, structures and remains in which material interventions are made with the intention of safeguarding and revealing aspects that are valued. The most recent iteration of the Burra Charter retains its classic definition of conservation as ‘all the processes of looking after a place so as to retain its cultural significance’ (Australia ICOMOS 2013: 4). But, just as heritage is contingent and dynamic, perpetually newly created in practice, so it is in conservation. In an initial project workshop on Engaging Conservation, participants arrived at a definition of conservation ‘as the management of creative continuity and socially cohesive heritage practice (rather than the management of change)’. In discussion following his keynote (below p. 31), Jukka Jokilehto suggested that there might be ‘less emphasis on managing change, more on managing continuity through change’, and a move for conservation practice towards what Smith has characterised in heritage work as a form of ‘social practice’:

The product or the consequences of heritage activities are the emotions, experiences and memories of them that they create... What is also created, and indeed continually recreated, are social networks and the historical and cultural narratives that underpin these binding relations.

Smith 2012: 3

Conservation work might, for example, be reframed with its community networks as actors, co-creating material forms and new participative experiences of (re)making heritage through its conservation, as explored in the ethnographic work of Jones and Yarrow (2013: 23). In established practice, conservation has been mainly concerned very practically with methods and treatments for structure, monument or place, and the outcomes of that intervention. But, as Erica Avrami has questioned: ‘what if conservation principles focused instead on how people engage in decision-making about their heritage and the process of participation?’ (Avrami 2011: 182, emphasis original).

Notwithstanding some excellent, innovative working in this area, conservation practice in the built historic environment still remains largely an expert, professional domain: a field in which specialist practitioners and decision-makers consult with local people and (sometimes) facilitate their involvement. A reading of the present UK Heritage Lottery Fund website, as a point in time for this critique, illustrates the separation that heritage conservation practice still perpetuates. ‘Community heritage’ is about people: ‘projects that help local people delve into the heritage of their community, bring people together, and increase their pride in the local area’. It includes actions like ‘revive a long-lost tradition or craft... share forgotten folk-tales… celebrate the lives of people commemorated on a war memorial… reveal the stories of the area’s diverse groups… discover the origins of the place where you live’ (HLF 2016a).

‘Conserving historic buildings’ in contrast ‘helps to save the places people value and provides communities with much-needed facilities’. It engages interestingly both with the risk of loss and the value of utility, with material structures and practical tasks: ‘repair and transform a historic building... help volunteers try their hand at building conservation… take a historic building off a Buildings at Risk register… regenerate a historic town centre’ (HLF 2016b). These are tasks that might well seem beyond the means or capacity of a local society or community group without bringing in the experience and knowledge of others.

The focus of the Engaging Conservation workshops and conference was, therefore, around the question of growing more meaningful community engagement in this area. How can we be more successful in building capacity for local ownership and leadership of heritage conservation projects, and genuine participation in decisions and in practice? How effective are attempts at wider public engagement with what heritage conservation aims to achieve for public benefit? The case studies explored in this volume are not framed as a ‘models’ for forms of community participation but, rather like the case of Rione Sanità in Naples (p. 43), as ‘real-life examples [that] might help identify some key capacities required for successful management’. Looking beyond the UK to examples in Europe and to Asia provides innovative and fresh perspectives on conservation as cultural practice.

In the years ahead, we can expect there will be increasing reliance on the voluntary and community sector. Given the prevailing economic environment, public resources for heritage conservation have been and will continue to be significantly reduced, nationally and globally. Through the Engaging Conservation project we wanted to look at the challenges and benefits in this new landscape of local activism. What works well and why? What we can we learn by sharing approaches and practical experience at a local and at international level? In workshops we explored notions and definitions of community that are problematic. They can be self-defined, exclusive and potentially self-interested or parochial. Equally, they may be empowering, locally legitimate and altruistic in their goals. However, it was also clear that expertise is valued. It may not be that the role of the conservation expert is over, but certainly time that expert roles should be renegotiated: ‘as commodity rather than authority, as facilitator rather than fixer?’ (Chitty 2014).

Teaching heritage conservation to practitioners and postgraduates it is evident that we lack the same body of literature and critical theory around material conservation practice as has developed around heritage practice (as Nigel Walter explores, below p. 51). Looking for a recent critical overview for student reading, and finding very little, was an impetus to gather this thinking and these conference papers for a volume marking a point in evolving practice. Moreover, understanding how practice must and is adapting to a climate of consensual, collaborative, citizen-centred endeavour, should be rooted, I would argue, in lived experiences. It is not enough to theorise or critique outcomes and attitudes, but to examine meaningfully what happens in or results out of practice, pushing boundaries, observing and learning.

This collection of papers from the conference has a strong York focus in the case studies and in the contributors, many of whom are based in York or practise here. The Engaging Conservation project uses the historic city as a site for creating new understanding of how we can build capacity. Evolving new ways for anyone who wishes to be involved in conservation to have a voice is necessarily grounded in local practice and networks, as compellingly retold in ‘Living with history in York: increasing participation from where you are’ (Brigham et al. below p. 143).

Approaches to community engagement, participation and capacity building

In Part 1 of this volume are nine chapters examining larger issues of principle and approach on these themes of community engagement and capacity building. Presenting different institutional and stakeholder perspectives, they range from international policy to critiques of current practice by a heritage architect and heritage professional. Approaches developed in India for documenting intangible cultural heritage and national policy in England, for example, offer contrasting positions, reflective of distinctive cultural traditions and institutional practices.

Jukka Jokilehto’s opening ‘think piece’ is written from a lifetime’s experience in international heritage conservation working with the World Heritage Committee. His historical perspective on the evolution of community-led and conservation practice in a World Heritage context reflects on the questions around engaging conservation with societal values: that ‘aesthetic recognition of a work of creativity in human consciousness, the significance of an element of heritage within its cultural context, and the diversity of cultural expressions — are all fundamental to what is at stake when discussing the role of heritage community in the management of its place’ (Chapter 2, p. 22). Using case studies from Azerbaijan to Yemen, he illustrates how effective conservation and community involvement have (or indeed have not) interacted on the international stage. Conservation of heritage is not feasible without this interaction but, as he highlights, now demands recognition of the interests of multiple communities of stakeholders, a careful understanding of the complex interplay between them and the place of capacity building as an instrument of social equity. How should the role of the expert change in such initiatives and is the evolution of skilled expert facilitators to work in this new landscape of conservation practice keeping pace?

This question is the central concern in the keynote paper from Gamini Wijesuriya, Jane Thompson and Sarah Court (Chapter 3), illustrating the important role that ICCROM¹ has played, and continues to develop, globally in this arena. Engaging communities, they write, is about strengthening their ability to participate meaningfully in the process of making conservation and management decisions for themselves and their heritage, and in the process of implementing them. ICCROM, as one of the three advisory bodies to the World Heritage Committee, has pioneered new approaches and its Living Heritage, people-centred principles place the living dimension at the core of decision-making. Looking at capacity building in terms of the World Heritage management system – and this is applicable to heritage management at any scale – the approaches presented here encourage heritage practitioners to frame every specific conservation process as a contribution to society, in social but also in economic and environmental terms. The case study of Rione Sanità in Naples illustrates how local community action is transforming a neighbourhood with benefits for both the residents and the heritage. Communities can no longer be considered as just another ‘category of stakeholders, but must be a sine qua non within the heritage discourse’ (see p. 38) in which practitioners arguably have a subsidiary role as facilitators and technical advisers.

Nigel Walter’s engagingly titled ‘Everyone loves a good story’ (Chapter 4) investigates further the paradox implicit in the role of professional practitioner and community enabler: that conservation practice, in remaining expert-led, is increasingly out of place in a climate of greater public participation. Conservation, he argues, with its focus on managing change, lacks an equally rigorous rationale to take account of how heritage is created, and therefore of how change can positively enhance an evolving and inclusively owned historic environment. Drawing on his professional experience with parish communities in England, Walter takes the work of Poulios (2014) with the communities of a group of monastic sites at Meteora, Greece. Poulios envisages a shift to viewing communities and sites as an inseparable entity, moving the focus of conservation from ‘preservation’ towards a continual process of ‘creation’. Walter sets the orthodoxies of expert professional practice alongside community engagement with the adoption of plural, value-based conservation approaches, and highlights the tensions between the dual epistemologies of heritage studies and conservation practice. Arguing that the communal value of an historic building is better understood as an ongoing community narrative, rooted in dynamic living traditions, he proposes an alternative, narrative approach which mak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Engaging Conservation – practising heritage conservation in communities
• Part 1 Approaches: community engagement, participation and capacity building
• Part 2 Case studies: engaging conservation in community practice
• Index