excerpts from Chris Johnston’s discussion of community attachment to place
Johnston, C. ‘What is Social Value?’, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra,
1992
excerpt one
Heritage assessment—the process of defining the cultural significance of a place—seeks to
understand:

the nature of the significance of a place, with the four terms 'social', 'historical', 'aesthetic',
'scientific' being used to reflect all aspects of the nature of significance; and

the degree of significance, with a variety of concepts being used from a geographical
comparison ('national','state','local') to terms such as 'early','rare', or 'seminal'.
In our practice of heritage conservation—in our creation of lists of special places judged
against explicit criteria—we have sought to be rigorous and scientific in our processes,
seeking to make our judgements on a rational and objective basis, in the hope of achieving
both community and political acceptance of our results.
While many would feel the pressure to become even more rigorous, others now suggest that
we, as heritage professionals, may have lost touch with the sentiments that inspire community
love of a place and therefore action for its protection.
The demand to know everything there is to know about our heritage now comes from those
seeking to change the physical environment. Their primary need is for certainty, so that
investment decisions are not detrimentally affected. To seek such certainty is understandable;
to expect it to exist is unrealistic, especially where developers are unwilling to undertake the
research, investigation and community consultation required to identify and assess heritage
values.
In each city, and certainly in many rural localities, communities have spoken up about places
that they value, despite the dismissal of such places as insignificant by the experts.
This deep sense of attachment to place has not been adequately defined by our current
heritage assessment methods. Our attachment to place is fundamental, but may be
unconscious in our daily lives until a place to which we are connected is threatened. Our
response to such a threat will be charged with emotion, as it is our emotions that are touched
by the connection. Lacking the defined processes and parameters decision makers prefer, and
that have become the basis of heritage assessment, it is no wonder that heritage professionals
can be easily caught off guard by a sudden and unexpected community uprising in defence of
place.
Each of the professional groups that evaluates aspects of the cultural significance of places
does so as a 'community' with shared interests and values, although not necessarily with
agreement on everything. Each expert community develops its own knowledge base, language
and criteria about what is valuable and what is not.
At present some values that represent the shared values of certain communities of interest are
adequately represented simply because they are incorporated into professional assessment
practice. However, other communities of interest remain unrepresented in the process, and
some views may never be represented by 'experts' as they do not lend themselves to
professionalisation.
Community planning, participation and advocacy may offer a more positive future direction to
enable particular communities to identify, clarify and advocate their own positions and values.
Our current heritage assessment practices are clearly too narrow, and fail to reflect the breadth
and depth of interest present in our society.
Social value has tended to mean all those values expressed by the community which fall
outside our current professional framework. To enable such places to be recognised and
protected, social value needs to come into the mainstream of heritage assessment.
Pragmatically, many of us also acknowledge that where we have succeeded in protecting
places, it is very often because the value of the place to a particular community has meant
powerful community action to support protection of the place.
excerpt two
What types of places have been recognised as havimg social value ?
Places of social value would be expected to be places that:

provide a spiritual or traditional connection between past and present;

tie the past affectionately to the present;

help give a disempowered group back its history;

provide an essential reference point in a community's identity or sense of itself (or
historical grounding);

Ioom large in the daily comings and goings of life;

provide an essential community function that over time develops into a deeper attachment
that is more than utility value (e.g. Victoria Market);

have shaped some aspect of community behaviour or attitudes;

are distinctive—the one clocktower in a town, or an architectural folly—features that lift a
place above the crowd, making it likely that special meanings have been attached to that
place;

are accessible to the public and offer the possibility of repeated use to build up
associations and value to the community of users; and

places where people gather and act as a community, for example places of public ritual,
public meeting or congregation, and informal gathering places.
Examples of places of social value suggested during this project can be grouped into
categories:
Public places — Most people identified 'public places' or the 'public face' of-all architecture
(i.e. the parts of the 'private environment' that are part of the public sphere including
streetscapes).
Places of 'meeting' — Informal meeting places e.g. Flinders Street Station clocks
(Melbourne).
Places of 'revert' end public entertainment — Types of places suggested included theatres,
showgrounds, cricket grounds, community halls, bushland reserves close to urban centres
beaches, piers, public parks and gardens. Specific examples in Melbourne- included Kooyong
tennis stadium and the Regent Theatre.
'Communities' — Localities such as Carlton, Melbourne, were seen as a special place that
people now visit because of the associations with Italian culture and alternative theatre. While
much evidence of this has disappeared, the locality remains identified with these two groups.
Advocates for the conservation of Queen Victoria Hospital, Melbourne, have stressed the
association of the hospital with a 'community of women', from its founders to its most recent
patients.
Places associated with recent significant events — Many significant places are associated
with events long past, and their heritage value may be seen as historic value.
However, more recent events and the places associated with them may have social value. An
example is the Moree Spa Baths which were entered into the Register of the National Estate
in 1988. The Baths were the focus of the 1965 Freedom Ride from Moree to Sydney. The ride
drew attention to discrimination in the town, and in particular the bans on Aborigines using
the Baths. The Baths are recognised as a symbol of community sentiment and of an event
which is part of very recent history.
Commemorative places — Memorials, as a class of places, arc considered likely to be of
social value, however the actual social value of each place may vary.
Places with special meaning for particular communities — Examples of a special
attachment to a place may include a long standing spiritual or religious attachment, or may
overlap with one of the above categories.
The essence of 'social value' is expressed in the above range of places.
Social value is about collective attachment to places that embody meanings important to a
community. These places are usually community owned or publicly accessible or in some
other ways 'appropriated' into people's daily lives. Such meanings are in addition to other
values, such as the evidence of valued aspects of history or beauty, and these meanings may
not be obvious in the fabric of the place, and may not be apparent to the disinterested
observer.
However, it is essential to recognise that each group or community will choose its own
symbols and reference points, and these may not accord with the above categories.
excerpt three
Social purpose of conserving heritage
Often, we think of heritage conservation as being an end in itself, expressing our desire to
retain certain places because we value them, but essentially apart from other social purposes.
However, many historians would argue that the process of exploring and interpreting the
meanings embodied in places is essentially a political as well as an historical and cultural
process.
The Mexican Committee of ICOMOS has prepared the Declaration of Oaxaca, a declaration
on 'Cultural heritage in daily life and its conservation through community support' which
seeks to respect a community's role in creating, maintaining and giving life and meaning to
places that become recognised as heritage, and seek to build a role for such communities in
conserving the place—both its meanings and its fabric.
The Declaration argues that those who create our heritage, and for whom it is part of their
daily lives, offer the best means for its conservation through the continuity of traditional
practices. The creation of specialist roles in defining heritage and practising conservation may
endanger the very heritage sought to be saved through the very processes of distancing its
conservation from its traditional guardians.
The Declaration proposes that such specialisation 'should never be established as an activity
lying outside the values, aspirations and practices of communities... (nor should it) ignore the
very existence of the living heritage of cultural customs and traditions'.
Our practice of conservation has already done this; we have handed the tasks to the
professional class, and failed to find ways of bringing community concerns back into the
debate. Moreover, many places lose their connection with our daily lives by being allocated
new uses. While this may generate a new community of users who value the place for its
current use, they may be more inclined to seek changes. Loss of the traditional activity often
means that such places are allocated to meet the needs of visitors rather than the locals,
increasing the disconnection between community and place.
The Oaxaca Declaration also expresses concern about the limited range of places identified
as heritage, noting that many elements in the historic environment are not valued as 'heritage';
examples included path structures, subdivision patterns, infrastructure, paving surfaces,
fountains and street furniture. The same is true of our studies of historic places which still
tend to focus on standing structures. Many of the elements that make up the 'whole place'
remain unidentified, despite the fact that it is the whole rather than the parts that will have
social value.
Our attention is still also focused on architectural history, which while providing an
aesthetically pleasing view of the past, is essentially a very limited view. And few
govermnents have sought to identify the 'history of their citizens' most typical activities—
earning a living, bringing up a family, and carrying on local holidays'.
A Charter for the conservation of historic villages and rural areas, prepared by Sri Lanka
ICOMOS in 1988, also advocates the connectedness of people and place and the need to
recognise social units as well as architectural fabric in the understanding of heritage.
One notion closely related to the position advocated in the Declaration is that seeking a
continuity of use is often the best way of retaining heritage value. Our assessment of many
places also reflects this philosophy, with continuity of a use over a long period being a factor
contributing to its heritage value.
Action to continue and reinforce (even re-establish) the connection between local people and
a place is recognised as essential in the Oaxaca Declaration. It suggests that it is possible and
valuable to involve those who have migrated from a village in the subsequent decisions about
conserving its heritage values.
This is also important in Australia where, for Aboriginal people displaced from their country
and culture, learning about places that provide evidence of Aboriginal culture can help create
new and important links back to their past.
New Zealand ICOMOS are working in a similar direction, having prepared the Aotearoa
Charter, based on Australia's Burra Charter, but with a significant difference due to Maori
beliefs about allowing places imbued with the wairua (the spirit) of ancestors to be allowed to
decay. The Aotearoa Charter refers to cultural significance as meaning places 'possessing
historic, architectural, aesthetic, scientific, spiritual or social value' (Article 1) however these
aspects of significance are not further defined.
In seeking to understand social value we are looking at the essence of ourselves—our cultural
traditions (past), our cultural identity (present) and our cultural aspirations (future)—and how
we create and give meaning to our environment.