People and Places: Social Landscape Characterisation for inclusive and sustainable heritage management

The historic environment—comprising a palimpsest of landscapes, buildings, and objects—carries meaning and is crucial in giving people a sense of place, identity and belonging. It represents a repository of ever-accumulating collective and individually held values—shared perceptions, experiences, life histories, beliefs, and traditions. These elements afford meaning-making, developing social values, and, subsequently, place attachment. Despite the Burra Charter and Faro Convention’s aspiration to include people in the assessment process, individual, subjective, or emotional connections to place are often overlooked within heritage decision-making. Most changes to landscapes happen as part of the planning process, which is not currently able to account for individual connections but is based on views expressed in the language of the Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD).

This research addressed the challenge to collect, analyse and meaningfully integrate individually held values into the assessment framework of heritage and landscape management. Artificial Intelligence methods, particularly Natural Language Processing and Topic Modelling, were successfully applied to survey, interview, and social media data to analyse the places and reasons behind the development of social values and place attachment. Categorisation, based on elements of Grounded Theory, and their visualisation have shown that individually held values form patterns of social values across wider landscapes. The people and place-centred method of Social Landscape Characterisation (SLC), resulting from this research, collects, analyses, and visualises these invisible or hidden value communities based on the same meaning (category value) or location (place value) as shared values across landscapes.

SLC provides a method for inclusive and transparent heritage and landscape management including people’s individually held values in existing assessment frameworks of planning and decision-making. People-centred, place-based heritage and landscape management can increase the quality and distinctiveness of landscapes for managing the historic environment in a socially sustainable way for present and future generations.