Assessing the social values of dynamic urban heritage

Abstract

Anyone involved with urban archaeology will be familiar with the multi-layered deposits of historic features that make up our cities, and the meanings, stories and practices related to them. Policy and guidance frameworks increasingly recognise the importance of these tangible and intangible heritage assemblages in mediating people’s dynamic relationships to place. For instance, echoing UNESCO’s Historic Urban Landscape Guidebook (2016), Scotland’s National Planning Framework 4 describes the historic environment as ‘physical evidence for human activity that connects people with place, linked with the associations we can see, feel and understand’ (2023: 150). Policy frameworks have also moved away from the idea of urban heritage as a victim of development and instead attempt to reposition it as part of the ongoing transformation of cities through values-based approaches and expectations of public benefit. Questions remain, however, about how to capture the social values of diverse publics and incorporate them into planning processes, including development-led archaeology, so as to create more equitable and socially sustainable urban development and regeneration. In this short article, we introduce an innovative mixed-methods approach for assessing social values, which was developed as part of the ‘Deep Cities’ project (see Bonacchi et al 2023; Jones et al 2024).