Human-Centered Built Environment Heritage Preservation

Theory and Evidence-Based Practice

Jeremy C. Wells, Barry L. Stiefel, Jeremy C. Wells, Barry L. Stiefel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429014062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture générale

Human-Centered Built Environment Heritage Preservation addresses the question of how a human-centred conservation approach can and should change practice. For the most part, there are few answers to this question because professionals in the heritage conservation field do not use social science research methodologies to manage cultural landscapes, assess historical significance and inform the treatment of building and landscape fabric. With few exceptions, only academic theorists have explored these topics while failing to offer specific, usable guidance on how the social sciences can actually be used by heritage professionals.

In exploring the nature of a human-centred heritage conservation practice, we explicitly seek a middle ground between the academy and practice, theory and application, fabric and meanings, conventional and civil experts, and orthodox and heterodox ideas behind practice and research. We do this by positioning this book in a transdisciplinary space between these dichotomies as a way to give voice (and respect) to multiple perspectives without losing sight of our goal that heritage conservation practice should, fundamentally, benefit all people. We believe that this approach is essential for creating an emancipated built heritage conservation practice that must successfully engage very different ontological and epistemological perspectives.

PART 1

Defining a Human-Centric Built Heritage Conservation Practice

CHAPTER 1

Bridging the Gap between Built Heritage Conservation Practice and Critical Heritage Studies

Jeremy C. Wells

Practitioners have long criticized higher education for its “ivory tower” perspective, in which scholars appear to be far removed from the trials and tribulations of the everyday professional. From this high vantage, it may be all too easy to critique the behavior, values, and choices of others because the scholar is removed from the messy reality of the “real” world. As David Demers (2011) summarizes, universities perpetuate a system in which scholarship is published in venues that are the least accessible to those who might benefit the most from it: Most professionals do not have ready access to the refereed journals or university-press books in which academics are required to publish and are, therefore, largely unaware of theoretical developments in their own field, especially in fields that relate to the social sciences. In addition, universities often penalize researchers for adopting topics that are too applied or close to professional practice. This situation creates an environment in which scholars who wish to change practice end up talking to themselves and not the practitioners for whom their knowledge is meant to benefit.

Cultural heritage conservation is one such field where a group of academics are increasingly studying practice with the overt goal of improving how professionals relate to, understand, and benefit the public. These “critical heritage studies” scholars closely examine the practice, policies, and limitations of heritage conservation work from museum studies to built heritage conservation. Often these scholars adopt an emancipatory goal in their work, criticizing practice through the lenses of critical theory, constructivism, post-colonialism, and post-structuralism, characterizing much of the heritage conservation practice as hegemonic, top-down, positivistic, and oppressive while espousing the goal of empowerment centered on social justice (Aaroz, 2011; Cane, 2009; Harrison, 2013; Hutchings & La Salle, 2015; Kaufman, 2009; Lixinski, 2015; Logan, 2012; Milholland, 2010; Pendlebury, 2009; Schofield, 2009, 2014; Silberman, 2016; Smith, 2006; Smith & Campbell, 2015; Sullivan, 2015; Waterton & Smith, 2010; Wells, 2010, 2015a, b; Winter, 2013; Zancheti & Loretto, 2012). Most importantly, critical heritage studies represents the largest, most cohesive group of scholars generating empirical evidence with the overt aim to improve or change heritage conservation practice to benefit larger numbers of people. While there are academics from other areas engaging in similar work, only critical heritage studies scholars have focused their emancipatory efforts under the singular umbrella of the Association for Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS). According to the ACHS, 800 people, mostly associated with institutions of higher education, attended their 2016 conference in Montreal, Quebec, and nearly 2,000 members are represented on their website (www.heritagestudies.org).

A major caveat, however, is that there is little evidence that critical heritage studies research is actually changing practice. Moreover, in their “critical” stance of practitioners, these scholars may be engaging in the same hegemonic activities that they are simultaneously criticizing and, in the process, alienating those actors who they most need to engage. This chapter will, therefore, examine the nature of the critical heritage studies movement, how it generates empirical evidence that fails to affect practice, and the ways to bridge the gap between these scholars and practitioners.

What Is Critical Heritage Studies?

Before exploring the characteristics of critical heritage studies, it is important to define “heritage studies” and how it is different from its critical variant. In particular, in the United States, heritage studies is often synonymous with public history and has few commonalities with the social science foci inherent in critical heritage studies. In its most widely adopted use in the United States, heritage studies is the teaching of local history to primary and secondary school students facilitated by field trips to historic house museums and sites. This usage differs from its definition in Europe, Canada, and Australia, where heritage studies is associated with museum studies and cultural heritage, or the meanings associated with heritage rather than (as in the United States) the facts associated with heritage.

In a US-based context, therefore, the difference between heritage studies and critical heritage studies lies in the focus on facts versus meanings, respectively. In one of the earliest explorations of this polarity, David Lowenthal (1985) exposes the impossibility of accurately recovering the complete, tangible qualities of the past through scientific principles because of the lack of objective, factual evidence, yet built heritage conservation practice assumes the opposite. Moreover, Lowenthal is emphatic that the way in which everyday people understand, use, and experience heritage is anything but objective, and has more in common with folklore and storytelling than history (i.e., facts of the past). In this way, Lowenthal’s work is very much a product of the post-modern turn in historiography that rejected the possibility of being able to objectively understand, much less to recreate or restore, the past. Realizing that knowing “history” is actually an act of interpreting multiple possible realities, critical approaches to historiography embraced the idea of uncertainty, especially from different cultural perspectives (Foucault, 1972; Furniss, 1999; McCullagh, 2004). Or, in more simplistic terms, history from the perspective of the conqueror is very different from history from the perspective of the conquered. Heritage studies (and its parent discipline of public history) fails to adopt this ontological perspective; however, public history remains a largely positivist endeavor that has yet to adopt the post-modern of its more theoretical peers in the academy.

One could argue that it is because the academy deprecates public history as being too applied that heritage studies in the United States retains the positivistic roots of its parent discipline’s past. To be sure, public history has long focused on the collection of as many facts as possible to create simplistic, singular interpretations for mass public consumption that deny multiple interpretations of reality and extra-cultural perspectives. In the United States, one of the most public manifestations of public history is the preparation of National Register of Historic Places nominations. Keeping in mind that the goal of historical positivism is “to discover the laws ruling the temporal sequence of historical facts” (Erdmann, Kocka, Mommse, & Blänsdorf, 2005, 17), instructions for preparing a National Register nomination (National Park Service, 1997) are as follows:

A person wishing to prepare a nomination needs a thorough knowledge of the property. By physically inspecting the property and conducting historical research, applicants can gather facts such as the physical characteristics of the property, date of construction, changes to the property over time, historic functions and activities, association with events and persons, and the role of the property in the history of the community, State, or the nation.

The applicant is then instructed to assemble these facts into an objective account, organized by temporal sequence, of what “really” happened in the past; the more accurate the account (i.e., more facts), the more significant the property can become. Other forms of public history that manifest in museums and historic sites around America share similar emphases on the objective collection of facts and typically singular interpretations.

How, then, does critical heritage studies differ from heritage studies? In the literature on heritage studies, there is a general consensus that history is “the raw facts of the past” (Aitchison, MacLeod, & Shaw, 2000, 96), while heritage “is history processed through mythology, ideology, nationalism, local pride, romantic ideas or just plain marketing” (Schouten, 1995, 21). The meanings of heritage are, therefore, subjective (often emotional) and rooted in the present and are defined by social, cultural, and individual processes. In other words, the meanings of heritage can be understood through contemporary sociocultural and experiential values, not the facts promulgated by public history and its adherents. Lowenthal (1985, 410) argues that in the realm of human experience, we create heritage; to most people, heritage is, therefore, more important than history and is a product of human invention and creativity:

The answer is that a fixed past is not what we really need, or at any rate not all we need. We require a heritage with which we continually interact, one which fuses past with present. This heritage is not only necessary but inescapable; we cannot now avoid feeling that the past is to some extent our own creation. If today’s insights can be seen as integral to the meaning of the past, rather than subversive of its truth, we may breathe new life into it.

Heritage is also intimately related to people’s relationship with place as Laurajane Smith (2006, 75) alludes when claiming that “heritage is about sense of place.” In the 1970s, the humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977, 194, 198) noted that the practice of historic preservation and public history essentially have nothing to do with how people are affected by place or attached to place. Not much has changed in practice since Tuan made this observation, primarily because the activities of historic preservation are largely dictated by rules and regulations, which, once established, are very difficult to change. The values associated with historic preservation practice have, therefore, become ossified and have not adapted to the changing values of society over the many decades since these rules and regulations were originally codified (Wells & Lixinski, 2016).

It is a revealing exercise to examine the curricula and faculty associated with “heritage studies” degree programs in the United States. Upon examining courses offered and faculty specializations, these programs differ little from self-ascribed public history programs. There is no social science-based coursework that discusses sociological, anthropological, and psychological aspects of people’s relationship to heritage nor are there faculty trained in any of the social sciences. Undoubtedly, upon graduation from such a program, a student would likely have excellent skills in archival research and conventional museum interpretation but know little about the sociocultural dimensions of heritage, including stakeholders’ emotional relationship to place. Largely absent in the readings and topics of these courses are literature on folklore, critical heritage studies theory, and related perspectives from the social sciences. In comparison, a look at the heritage studies degree programs in Europe, Canada, and Australia reveals a core component of social science-based coursework and an acceptance of the multivariate nature of the meanings of heritage. Typically located in departments of anthropology and museum studies rather than history departments, students learn that facts may have rather little influence on everyday people’s understanding or attribution of the meanings and values of historical places and landscapes.

The core literature of heritage studies is also substantially different from critical heritage studies. In fact, it is difficult to evince any kind of theoretical basis to heritage studies in American practice beyond the positivistic view of history. In contrast, in its short existence, critical heritage studies has a rich theoretical base starting with David Lowenthal’s (1985) The Past Is a Foreign Country. Other key authors and their relevance are as follows:

• Randall Mason (2002, 2003, 2006): Built heritage conservation practice focused on the objective qualities of fabric with ignorance of other kinds of intangible values. Practice should incorporate a “values-based” approach to conservation. Many of these values can be informed through the use of social science-based methods.

• Bagnall (2003): Everyday people’s assessment of the authenticity of the historic environment is based on their ability to engage in a kind of performance with the past that generates emotionally authentic meanings.

• Laurajane Smith (2006): Introduced the concept of the “authorized heritage discourse” (AHD) in which expert practitioners control the positivistic meanings of heritage. The AHD describes a system in which the only valid way in which lay people can share meanings important to them is through the language and meanings of the expert.

• Waterton, Smith, and Campbell (2006): The values of heritage conservation experts are not more scientific, objective, or neutral than other cultural values associated with heritage. The values of experts are just another set of cultural values among many.

• Schofield (2009, 2014): Heritage consists of the “everyday” and the “ordinary” and not the monumental. Heritage is therefore not rare and unique, but rather it is ubiquitous. Because heritage is based on the meanings and experiences of everyday people, everyone is, therefore, an expert on heritage; the control of meanings should not be entirely in the hands of experts.

• Harrison (2013): Heritage conservation practice should seek to break down the artificial divide between the layperson and the expert practitioner; practice should, therefore, emphasize a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach. Authenticity is defined by the everyday experiences of people and not historical facts. The supposed divide between natural and cultural heritage is artificial; it is instead best viewed as a continuum.

In sum, critical heritage studies fully embraces the post-modern turn in the pluralistic quality of the meanings associated with heritage and seeks to understand and balance power in the relationship between various actors. It does so by using social science research methodologies to produce data that, when analyzed, provide empirical evidence that could influence practice.

The Relationship of Critical Heritage Studies to the Practitioner

The literature in critical heritage studies is quite clear in that its aim is to understand and change practice and it often does so by focusing on the practitioner. But, as Tim Winter (2013, 533) acknowledges, this nascent field has a tendency to alienate practitioners because it treats them as objects of study rather than as rational actors with equal standing. In this way, the emancipatory goal of critical heritage studies is subverted by subjecting practitioners to the same kind of hegemonic practice—control of meanings by experts—that its adherents promulgate.

In the inaugural 2012 meeting of the ACHS, Gary Campbell and Laurajane Smith penned a “manifesto” for the nascent organization and invited others to respond (see www.criticalheritagestudies.org/history/). This manifesto is presented as fluid and open to discussion, but as of October 2016, remains unchanged on the ACHS website with the exception that the authors’ names have been removed. While acknowledging that this manifesto clearly does not represent the perspectives of all individuals associated with the ACHS or critical heritage studies in ge...