Planning reform and heritage governance

As retrofitting becomes a way to battle climate breakdown, and reusing and recycling the existing building stock becomes the norm (European Commission, 2021), understanding the role of the historic built environment in regeneration policy and practice is key. Spatial planning deals with a world full of context, and as spatial policies, plans and designs always require interaction with pre-existing conditions, one could argue that conceptually, all planning is heritage planning (Veldpaus et al., 2021). Whether you agree with that or not, it is clear that heritage is often and overtly mobilised as a catalyst in regeneration for economic development (Pendlebury & Porfyriou, 2017). Heritage policies are being integrated into planning policies to facilitate this. As heritage becomes seen as more useful in spatial development, the understandings and definitions of heritage, and its material and socio-political role in planning, change. Increasing policy integration between heritage and planning (Mérai et al., 2022; Nadin et al., 2021) means that it is likely that planning reforms impact how we deal with heritage. In the research we present in this special issue, we aimed for an assessment of the impact of fundamental reforms in urban planning and governance on the historic built environment. We address this in different European countries and examine practice in the decade post-2008, as the recovery of a global economic crisis instigated and exacerbated neoliberal and marked-oriented planning (Getimis, 2016).

In heritage studies, many authors have addressed the problematic nature of, and excluding ways in which, heritage and heritage narratives are selected, defined, and used within and beyond the built environment (e.g. Dicks, 2000; Pendlebury, 2009; Harrison, 2012; Meskell, 2015). We understand heritage as not just a ‘thing’, but a process of (re)enacting and mobilising some past(s) in the present – whether in material or immaterial forms. Thus, planning is critical in heritage making (or breaking). Heritage in this understanding is operational, it is being produced, and it produces. It has agency, and it is a tool. It is a means to an end, in spatial planning, and beyond. The state valorisation of heritage, for example, is intimately connected with the creation of the modern nation-state (Jokilehto, 1999; Pendlebury, 2009), giving heritage an instrumental purpose in getting people to bond to – or be excluded from – groups and places (Anderson, 1983; Hall, 1999). Over the past half century, heritage has become mobilised more explicitly as a means towards a wide variety of different ends. It is more and more used to create socio-spatial, political, cultural, and economic gains, and heritage is even put to work towards increasing quality of life and well-being agendas, and although we have to keep in mind that this may indeed work for some, it also works against the inclusion and recognition of others. This means that heritage is used for more things, and thus, it is useful for more things to become thought of as heritage. This is a broadening of the notion of heritage in terms of what can be formally designated and listed, as well as increasing acknowledgement of the idea that much of what we could consider heritage is not formally designated. In practice, however, heritage planning tends to concentrate on retaining and restoring particular – and often formally designated – elements and fragments in our built environment. Whilst this may sound benign, we need to consider who selects, decides, and narrates the history of place, and what is erased, forgotten, or celebrated and commemorated, and why. Heritage, and thus heritage planning, is loaded with politics, it is not inherently good, and we need to understand what it is and what it does for and to people, for and to the environment, and for and to the future. In other words, how can the historic environment play a role in working towards both environmental justice and social justice (Kisić, 2021; Veldpaus & Szemző, 2021)? It is in this context that we need to understand the relations between heritage and spatial planning.

Heritage planning – a governance lens

In the papers presented in this collection, we address the need to better understand how the relations between heritage and spatial planning are evolving under planning reforms and austerity policies, also considering a changing understanding of heritage, using a broader governance lens. Heritage governance, like urban governance, can be seen as an ‘arrangement of governing beyond-the-state’ (but often with the explicit inclusion of parts of the state apparatus) organised as networks of private (market), civil society (usually NGO) and state actors (Swyngedouw, 2005, p. 992; McCann, 2017). All actors and factors have their own, and changing, degree of influence in the conservation planning assemblage (Pendlebury, 2013).

The role of heritage in spatial planning has changed a lot over the past decades, and the impact of planning reform on how heritage is understood and used is significant. As described by Scott et al. (2018, this issue), the 1970s and 1980s saw dramatic changes to many western cities in the wake of deindustrialisation, suburban flight, and the subsequent turn to entrepreneurial governance, replacing traditional government structures with public-private partnerships, and development vehicles, and a focus on economic development, jobs, and investment, rather than welfare or wealth redistribution. Cities became a lens into the larger economic and political shifts of the emergent new global era, and the urge to push urban centres to become platforms for the current urban century grew significantly (Tiesdell, 1996; Sassen, 2011). Around the same time, the regulatory mechanisms underpinning conservation planning – such as conservation areas – started to become more established and widespread, and citizens also started to push back on the massive interventions and demolitions proposed to facilitate the development of city centres (Pendlebury, 2009). Heritage increasingly becomes used as a way to (re)produce identity and claim uniqueness and attractiveness, and in many cities, the historic urban core becomes valued and protected for its heritage and its contribution to place identity in the same process (Hayden, 1997; Graham et al., 2000). So, within the context of a wider neoliberal turn, and the move to entrepreneurial planning, the governance of heritage, and its (adaptive) reuse, becomes more and more important and accepted, integrated in wider urban governance, and its instrumentality in local investment and economic growth continues to increase (Harvey, 2001; Pendlebury, 2002).

As we see in the papers in this collection, the same pattern continues into the twenty-first century, and in particular, the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath stimulated further planning reforms as part of neoliberal policy responses and ‘austerity urbanism’ (Peck, 2012). The post-crisis recovery from the 2010s onwards sees heritage folded into wider urban governance, for better or worse. In this special issue, we show how it has led to the further acceleration of the instrumental use of built heritage and commodification of heritage values for urban growth. The lack of public funding and resources imposed by austerity regimes initially meant that investment in heritage went down, while vacancy and lack of maintenance went up (further). Built heritage was then mobilised as one of the tools for post-crash recovery. In favour of making the (re)use of heritage buildings and sites easier, arguments for integration of urban planning policies and heritage management became common. They came both from an international heritage perspective (e.g. UNESCO, 2011) pushing for heritage to become an integrated part of the urban fabric and thus planning and from the local real estate development in many cities, where new build projects came to a halt post-financial crash, while (temporary) reuse of the historic environment was still possible or at least more likely. The value of heritage in terms of place branding and tourism attraction also becomes ever more important, especially as a means to replace or diversify ways to bring people and thus money into cities (Ashworth et al., 2007; Pendlebury & Porfyriou, 2017; Scott et al., 2020).

The case studies as developed in the papers in this collection were part of two projects within European Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage (JPI CH), initiated and led by Delft University of Technology: SHUC and PICH (Planning & Heritage, 2018). In both projects, we concentrated attention on the influence of changes in urban governance on heritage, including its material and immaterial aspects, and the wider conservation planning assemblage. The papers use a governance lens to examine this complex structure of policies, processes, practices, and people driving decision-making around heritage and planning. This draws attention to the limitations of the formal organisation of government and to the formal planning and heritage protection mechanisms, especially as they became subject to both austerity measures and entrepreneurial urbanism (Scott et al., 2018) post-financial crash. These effects were equally evident in Norway where the financial crash was much less directly felt (Kittang & Bye, 2019). We also expected an increased emphasis on the redistribution of power, in the form of participation, local engagement and facilitating grassroots initiatives to stimulate more inclusive planning and heritage policies and practices and thus increase attention on diversity and pluralising narratives for heritage to become more inclusive (Ashworth et al., 2007; Kisić, 2021). This increase in ‘participation’ we saw, however, often referred to the involvement of a wider group of local actors and, in particular, the work done by local other-than-public actors, necessary due to the gaps left by austerity and the retreat of the state, rather than working on more inclusive or diverse heritage understandings.

The model of planning (Dühr et al., 2010; Mérai et al., 2022) seems a determining factor in the explanation of the tools that are used by government to plan and manage the built heritage, and it provides a crucial frame for policy making. So, the continental cases (Italy and Norway) exhibit imperative approaches. In these cases, there is still a tendency for government at various levels to take a more direct(ive) role in urban development, even if less than before, which is mirrored in the approach to the built heritage. The Irish and English cases show a stronger tendency towards the indicative as well as the economic models and for government to facilitate the actions of private and civil society actors, who subsequently (have to) play a more active role in heritage governance. However, the trends across all cases are very similar: a push for a small(er) state narrative, the use of new institutional arrangements for heritage-led regeneration, and the idea that we need more public engagement and participation.

By bringing a selection of empirical papers together in this special issue on planning reform and heritage governance, we explore how concepts of heritage and heritage management vary in their planning context under the influence of global forces. All case studies confirm the clear trends discussed above, towards mobilising built urban heritage as part of entrepreneurial competitive urban development strategies, despite the difference in dominant planning models.

The contribution on Trondheim, Norway, by Kittang and Bye (2019) explains how different discourses exist within the larger community of professionals involved with the management of built urban heritage at Kjopmannsgata, Trondheim (Figure 1). While these narratives still demonstrate a strong correspondence with traditional heritage approaches, a pragmatic approach to heritage seems to gain the upper hand. There is consensus on the importance of the built urban heritage for place identity and its instrumental role in the attractiveness of Trondheim as a whole. Norway’s case study demonstrates a policy outlook very much comparable to the other European case studies, seemingly following the ‘austerity urbanism’ trend in urban policy, even though the 2008 financial crisis affected Norway much less directly.

Figure 1. View on the waterside of the warehouses along Kjøpmannsgata (Trondheim, Norway).

The contribution by Wacogne and Fontanari (2022) demonstrates how a spatial planning tool (variante l piano regolatore generale, or restrictive variance) rather than a heritage conservation-tool (vincolo, or listing) was used by local government to pursue the combined aspirations of conservation and regeneration. This method has been important in a system where the actions of various policy sectors that have an impact on the heritage are weakly coordinated and full of complexities and contradictions. This innovative approach was followed because there was a perceived need for a different approach to deal with younger heritage in Italian conservation practice. A second issue raised by the Italian paper is that the ways in which heritage contributes to placing identity varies significantly between experts and local residents and other local stakeholders.

Scott et al. (2018) explain how planning in Ireland has been used to mobilise heritage to ‘reimagine the city’ in the service of competitive development strategies. They explain how in the cases of Waterford and Limerick, the process was accelerated by severe economic recession. The cases also demonstrate how the heritage discourses that surface in regeneration schemes are targeted towards an outside audience, rather than to citizens, which reflects a policy response from government under severe economic stress. This mode of so-called ‘entrepreneurial urbanism’ favours an agenda focused on enabling economic enterprise through the rise of public-private partnerships, often in parallel to, or as a replacement for, traditional local government structures, including the use of flagship projects for place-branding.

Both English cases Ouseburn (Pendlebury et al., 2023) (Figure 2) and Bigg Market (Veldpaus & Pendlebury, 2019) show, albeit in very different ways, what happens when austerity urbanism collides with area-based heritage led regeneration. Both cases have other-than-public actors developing a significant, if not leading, long-term role in area-based regeneration. They work across the whole spectrum, from obtaining funding to commissioning capital works, co-developing policy frameworks, negotiating heritage value, and managing public space. This leads to complicated entanglements of people, place, policy, and shifting roles, responsibilities, and relationalities. Heritage is very much seen as something to ‘use’ in place making and place branding and visitor experiences. With this come consequences in terms of displacement of uses and people, as well as the exclusion of many histories, especially those with more difficult or complicated narratives.

Figure 2. New housing development in Ouseburn (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK).

In concert, the contributions in the collection reveal two clear trends and hint towards a third. The trends each have longstanding histories in planning but become more significant under contemporary pressures for the reform of planning systems. They perhaps become particularly visible in the context of heritage – where the value that can be exploited and commodified often overlaps with the reason why it became seen as heritage in the first place.

First, the public sector is taking a step back. Rather than being involved with directly implementing change, it acts more and more as a facilitator, guiding and shaping the policies and activities in which other key actors, whether for-profit or not, take the lead in heritage (planning) projects. The financial crisis of 2008 was used to change priorities in favour of development, and ‘cutting red tape’, and a stronger policy orientation towards economic growth. Heritage remains important as long as it can demonstrate its ‘usefulness’ in this process. In the context of growth pressures, heritage is easily turned into a high-value commodity. We see in the papers, for example, the ‘touristification’, gentrification and privatisation of heritage. So as, heritage becomes more central in the planning process, it also has to follow the ‘logics’ of planning, which, in many cases, is growth. This means that heritage cannot be seen to block economic development (too much); it has to facilitate and stimulate it and perform its cultural worth and its economic potential. In relation to this, we see the erasure, exclusion, and evasion of heritage narratives and assets, which are less easy to commodify, not seen as ‘fitting’, or simply not seen. As such, the cases show how (built) heritage is positioned centrally on the austerity urbanism/entrepreneurial urbanism axis, by suffering from cuts to funding, resources, and capacity, whilst being usefully framed as a ‘catalyst’ for, and a contributor to, creating place uniqueness, place branding, tourism, and inward investment. In this context, we see how obvious, and well-known, consequences of the process of instrumentalising heritage and using it as a catalyst for urban regeneration, such as displacement or other forms of gentrification, are de-problematised and even celebrated as they are seen as a way to bring new money to a deprived heritage sector (Scott et al., 2018; De Cesari & Dimova, 2019; Veldpaus & Pendlebury, 2019; Pendlebury et al., 2023).

Second, we see a widening of competences needed to operate in the heritage and planning sectors across public, private and civil society actors. This arises from the normalisation of partnership working in the context of the necessitated shedding of responsibilities by the public sector. So, heritage planning practices change under pressure of austerity and lack of capacity, whether actual policy changes or not. New strategies and collaborations are explored, with sometimes interesting outcomes, but generally the squeeze of public resources and capacity leads to a fragmentation of knowledge, conflicting responsibilities, and the moving of responsibilities towards actors that escape clear democratic accountability. This can, amongst many issues, have ramifications for heritage too, as such partnerships are likely elevating the discourse that is most useful to the partner with most power in the process.

Finally, the cases reported here hint towards something that has become much clearer in the 2020s, the trend towards understanding the role of the historic environment in the context of climate breakdown. Heritage-led urban regeneration now appears in the greening agendas, through a focus on, e.g., circularity, recycling and reusing materials and buildings, as well as reducing carbon and nitrogen emissions (Veldpaus, 2022). However, also in this discourse, the link to the social and political meanings of the historic environment is often overlooked (Veldpaus et al., 2021). As heritage planning becomes a means to an end in those ‘greening’ agendas, it becomes even more important to consider how the historic environment can play a role in realising environmental and social justice.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank all project collaborators for their contributions to this collection of papers. It was and is a real pleasure to work with you all. I think I speak for all of the authors, in saying I would like to dedicate the Special Issue to Professor Enrico Fontanari, who sadly passed away in July 2020. Enrico was professor of Urban and Landscape Design and Planning in the Department of Architecture and Arts of the Iuav University of Venice, and above all a wonderful colleague and inspiring person.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JPI-JHEP Joint Research Project on Cultural Heritage ‘A Sustainable Future for the Historic Urban Core (SHUC)’, Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/L503733/1]; Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research; and Heritage Council. See also https://www.heritageresearch-hub.eu/project/shuc/ (Accessed 13 April 2023).This research was funded as part of the project ‘PICH’ (The impact of urban planning and governance reform on the historic-built environment and intangible cultural heritage) under the JPI Cultural Heritage, ‘Heritage Plus Joint Call’, through the Dutch National Research Organisation (NWO) and the Research Council of Norway [249602/E50]. See also: https://www.heritageresearch-hub.eu/project/pich/ (Accessed 13 April 2023).