Valuing Historic Environments: Concepts, Instrumentalisations and Effects

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Valuing Historic Environments Concepts,
Instrumentalisations and Effects

• Lisanne Gibson
• University of Leicester

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Valuing Historic Emvironments

• 1. What was it?
• House of Lords Science and Heritage Inquiry
• AHRC/ EPSRC Science and Heritage Funding
  Programme

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• 2. Why Instrumentalisation?

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• 3. Discussions of Value
• Pluralisation of value
• Cultural, economic, political and social
  consequences of the pluralisation of value
• Pluralisation of disciplines involved in
  establishing value in relation to historic
  environments

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• 4. The problem of multidisciplinarity and
  languages of heritage

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• Educating communities to research and defend
  their places of value is easier to justify than
  the determination that such places are to be
  protected by law against development. Such an
  approach avoids some of the dilemmas in that it
  does not measure, define, judge or paralyse
  places of social value. Rather it empowers and
  enables people to define themselves and places as
  part of the general development of democratic
  social life. (Kim Dovey)
• How might it be possible to empower communities
  in this way?