Social Landscape Characterisation: a people-centred, place-based approach to inclusive and transparent heritage and landscape management

Abstract

Landscapes are composed of physical places, affording meaning-making and value creation from everyday heritage based on personal experiences, life histories, memories, traditions and heritage practices. Individually held values form the basis for attachment and connection between people and places. Place attachment develops into a sense of place, belonging and identity. Despite the Burra Charter and Faro Convention’s aspiration to include people in the assessment process, individual, subjective or emotional connections to place are often overlooked within heritage decision-making. When places are altered, neglected or damaged, such connections can be lost, and the quality of place diminished. Most changes to landscapes happen as part of the planning process, which is not currently able to account for individual connections but based on views expressed in the language of the Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD). This paper presents a method to meaningfully integrate insider or individual knowledge into the framework of local planning and decision-making while at the same time addressing subtleties and fluidity of such personal views. The people and place-centred method of Social Landscape Characterisation collects, analyses and visualises invisible or hidden value communities based on the same meaning (category value) or location (place value) as shared values across wider landscapes.