This blog was first posted on the website of the Built Environment Forum Scotland on 30 January 2014.
Community participation has increasingly been embraced by the heritage sector. However, there has been much less analysis and evaluation of what the concept means and what it achieves. An in-depth look at community involvement is therefore welcome. It was provided during the Thematic Week hosted by the renowned Raymond Lemaire International Centre for Conservation at the Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven during January.
Comparisons with intangible heritage
What can built environment heritage learn about community involvement from the field of intangible cultural heritage? Frank Proschan from UNESCO highlighted just how central working with communities had now become in his field. The Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage adopted in 2003 had been a watershed. Through UNESCO, the global community accepted that intangible heritage was no longer something to be defined, categorised and archived by experts. Instead, in a radical shift of perspective, it could only be properly valued and conserved by the communities who inherited or created that heritage.
This fundamentally changes the relation between heritage, governments, experts and the general public. Experts can no longer declaim on what is heritage or set hierarchies that place some types of heritage above others. Rather communities define what is heritage, heritage defines a community, and all heritage is equal. Heritage belongs to the people, not to the government. The benefits of any commercial exploitation of the heritage should go the community whose heritage it is.
Wim De Vos, from the Museums section of the Belgian Science Policy Office traced a similar trajectory of change in the world of museums. In the 1950s they were places for top-down education, with a strongly national focus. In the 1970s, the idea that museums could serve communities began to appear. Today, led by Scandinavian countries, museums are part of the creative economy. De Vos cited a particularly interesting example, the Baksi Museum (http://en.baksi.org) in Eastern Anatolia, a rural region in Turkey that haemorages men to urban centres in search of jobs. The museum operates as a counter magnate, offering not just cultural resistance, but also workshops (re-)building traditional skills with the women left behind, and aiming to create income for the local people.
A changing context for built environment conservation?
Faced with these challenges the field of built environment conservation can easily appear to be rooted in an earlier age. Buildings and sites are still categorised by experts into hierarchies. Governments play a key role in managing sites and in regulating development of properties that are in the private sector. Conservation is typically seen as the enemy of development rather than its driver. However, a series of presentations showed that such perceptions are flawed. Not only are private and non-governmental bodies owners and managers of heritage (BEFS’ members the Historic Houses Association of Scotland and the National Trust for Scotland are examples), but the relation between heritage conservation and the public is also changing.
Professor Stefano Della Torre from the Politechnico di Milano argued that local empowerment should be one of the outcomes of any building preservation project. Such work usually involves public, and getting people involved can create added value – “relational capital” built up by people working together for a shared purpose.
“Heritage values are often seen as a top-down imposition, from professionals speaking a language of their own”, said Della Torre. “Planned conservation practices should introduce a systemic approach to decision making, giving the utmost importance to community involvement.”
He went on to exemplify his thesis by reference to a major multi-site Italian restoration project “Distretti Culturale”. It invested 60M Euros over 6 sites, but with strict conditions. To qualify for the funding there had to be a vision that connected the building work to the wider economy, and the development of social capital. All the projects pushed people to network and make alliances for the future.
New times, new technologies
My own contribution to the week raised questions about who participates and on what terms, pointing to the underpinning power relations. The economic crisis and austerity measures across Europe are changing the parameters under which built environment conservation has been carried out, with governments less willing to do what they have done in the past and looking increasingly to “empower communities”. The shift from welfare states to “project states” is creating new, more entrepreneurial engagements in managing heritage from some communities. Also the rapid pace of development of information technology is opening up new ways to involve communities, e.g. through apps or crowd sharing or even crowd funding. Co-production of heritage management could be the way ahead.
A further important change is the recognition that historic buildings and sites also need to be inclusive places. Ann Heylighen, a researcher and designer at KU Leuven, told how she had conducted audits of the historic campus site from the perspective of different forms of disability. The fundamental point in this approach is that it saw the users – people with impairments – as the experts.
There were numerous other interesting contributions, mainly describing examples of participatory approaches. These ranged from restoration of a graveyard in a village in Ecuador to a moving account of the destruction wreaked on historic buildings and places during the war in former Yugoslavia and the difficult process of post-conflict reconstruction.
What role for communities in conserving historic built environments?
Like all good conferences, this one raised more questions than is resolved. There was a sense that built environment heritage professionals had come late to the issues of participation: the contrasts to the cultural relativism from the intangible heritage field were notable, and so was the feeling that the social science literature on “community” and “participation” could enhance understanding. We need to move beyond the notion that a “community” is homogenous, and that all conflicts can be resolved by inviting participation.
In an event a few months ago, Heritage Canada called on those dedicated to built environment conservation “to lead and reconceptualize a new way of delivering heritage protection.” As I suggested at the end of my presentation, it is time to focus not just on the “special” buildings and places, important as they are, but on the entire built environment legacy. We need to explain why conservation-based management of such environments is the basis for successful places and sustainable communities. Last but not least, we should demonstrate that looking after buildings and public spaces can be an activity driven by the mass of ordinary people, a form of solidarity between generations and between places, and part of the process of supporting jobs, social inclusion and enjoyment of cultures.
