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Abstract
Economic thinking can provide great insight into heritage conservation. The cause of integrating heritage conservation into broader social agendas could be well served by engaging with economic discourse. Written from the perspective of the conservation field, this essay draws out distinctions between economic and conservation discourses, examines why and how economic arguments are made about conservation, and advocates serious engagement of cultural economics by the heritage conservation field. Strategic and epistemological barriers to the inclusion of economic discourse in conservation are surveyed, and several arguments for including economic discourse as a more integral part of conservation practice are weighed. The essay concludes that thoughtful, critical engagement with economics discourse will lead to a dynamic new research agenda and strengthen the conservation field’s hand in policy discussions and decisions.
Acknowledgements
This essay is based on a lecture given in December 2005 at the ‘Built Heritage—Value Adding Sector’ conference in Helsinki, organised by the National Board of Antiquities (Finland), the National Heritage Board (Sweden) and the Directorate for Cultural Heritage (Norway). I wish to thank the organisers and participants in this event, in particular Panu Lehtovuori, Maire Mattinen and Sinikka Joutsalmi. Erica Avrami, Michael Holleran and Greg Donofrio kindly commented on an earlier version, and anonymous reviewers offered a number of constructive comments for which I am grateful. Any errors of omission or commission are solely mine.
Notes
[1] This is particularly true in the USA. This article is based mostly on experience with the historic preservation field in the USA, but draws on the international literature in cultural economics, environmental economics, and heritage conservation. In US terminology, preservation refers to the heritage field in its broadest sense, while conservation refers narrowly to material work to arrest decay of buildings. In this article, the broader, international meaning of ‘conservation’ is used to stand for heritage conservation or conservation of built heritage, applying to buildings, districts, sites, towns, and landscapes.
[2] There is a growing literature on the economics of conservation, mirroring a growing interest in many quarters of the conservation field, its allied fields, and societies at large in the economic dimensions of conservation and heritage. The economic literature on conservation is substantial and diverse. Reviews of the literature can be found in Mason, Economics and Heritage Conservation; and idem, Economics and Historic Preservation. Many of the basic issues of heritage conservation economics have been established, based largely on work in the parallel field of environmental economics and benefiting from advances in cultural economics focused on the performing and visual arts. Not surprisingly, the existing literature is weighted towards advocacy studies—those with an underlying commitment to advocating the cause of heritage conservation. This is changing. As yet, there are few analyses with enough critically distant but sympathetic questioning of conservation’s role in society. This literature is embedded in a larger debate about valuing culture, which in turn relates to the cultural dynamics of globalisation and the dominance (in most societies) of market discourse and business thinking in relation to the public and private spheres of life. Ackerman and Heinzerling, Priceless; Harrison and Huntington, Culture Matters; Hutter and Throsby, Beyond Price; and Slater and Tonkiss, Market Society, provide different perspectives on this.
[3] The use of ‘beware’ is intended to convey ‘be aware of’ and also ‘be wary of’.
[4] Darvill in Cooper et al., Managing Archaeology; de la Torre, Assessing Values in Heritage Conservation; Walker and Marquis‐Kyle, The Illustrated Burra Charter; Mason, ‘Theoretical and Practical Arguments for Values‐centered Preservation’; Mathers et al., Heritage of Value, Archaeology of Renown (essays by Darvill and Clark, in particular); Pearson and Sullivan, Looking after Heritage Places.
[5] ‘Value’ is used here in the sense of ‘characteristic’ or ‘quality’; not as a synonym of ‘ethic’ or ‘principle’.
[6] Research value—the capacity of a place to yield future information—is another. The literature on a plural understanding of values as the basis of conservation began with the art historian Alois Riegl (see ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’), and discussion of one or another particular heritage values has long been part of conservation discourse. See the Venice Charter, for instance.
[7] This terminology is not to be confused with the Marxian framework of use and exchange value, central to the seminal works of Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital, and Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes. Though these authors share an interest in describing the different values ascribed to a particular place, they differentiate the two types of values by their social uses under capitalism: use values are consumed, exchange values are traded. In this paper, ‘use’ and ‘non‐use’ distinguish those values priceable in markets (use values) from those for which markets do not exist (non‐use values). Note that this usage differs from other works dealing with the centrality of ‘value’ and ‘valuation’ in heritage conservation, notably Darvill’s (in Cooper et al., Managing Archaeology; and in Mathers et al., Heritage of Value, Archaeology of Renown).
[8] Typologies of the value of heritage sites in economics are not monolithic. They break down the overall value of a place into different fractions, though according to a different set of distinctions from those of cultural values, and creating categories that ultimately will be expressed in terms of price. Economists’ main distinction, discussed below, is between use and non‐use values; distinctions within non‐use values are common, such as bequest and option values. See Frey, ‘The Evaluation of Cultural Heritage’; Mason, Economics and Heritage Conservation; and Throsby, Economics and Culture.
[9] By definition there is no market for a public good, although prices can be estimated by creating hypothetical markets. These economic concepts of public and private are yet more complex—cf. discussions about the mixed‐good or merit‐good nature of heritage conservation. See Mazzanti, ‘Cultural Heritage as Multi‐dimensional, Multi‐value and Multi‐attribute Economic Good’.
[10] Economist David Throsby explains the connection between the two sides of this epistemological cleavage around value by describing conservation as resulting in flows of both economic and cultural benefits. Throsby, Economics and Culture.
[11] Mason, ‘Fixing Historic Preservation’.
[12] A third domain would be interpretation, which is more purely in the realm of cultural values and not taken up here in order to limit the length of the paper.
[13] This characterisation is overly general—some conservation professionals indeed have been quite concerned with broad economic and political dynamics—but the exceptions prove the rule, and conservation discourse remains quite focused on matters of fabric and technical problem solving. Surveys of the history of conservation reveal our field’s original and abiding interest in historic fabric (Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument; Hosmer, Presence of the Past; idem, Preservation Comes of Age; Jokilehto, A History of Architectural Conservation); many of the field’s efforts to engage in broader social processes (such as political decisions and cultural crises) have been animated by proselytising the need for conservation rather than analysing its place in society.
[14] Consider the Burra Charter, for example, the laudable and progressive effort of Australia ICOMOS advocating conservation planning that takes account of a broader range of heritage values than traditionally admitted: economic values are still excluded, defined a priori as secondary to the values making up cultural significance.
[15] Listokin et al., ‘The Contributions of Historic Preservation to Housing and Economic Development’.
[16] McCarthy et al., Gifts of the Muse.
[17] This idea has been popularised by the recent bestsellers Freakanomics (Levitt and Dubner) and The Economic Naturalist (Frank).
[18] Applying cost–benefit analysis to conservation remains controversial, for the same reasons it has engendered so much debate in application to environmental issues: cultural values are resistant to pricing, and introduce methodological problems into CBA frameworks.
[19] See eftec [Economics for the Environment Consultancy Ltd], 2005, Valuation of the Historic Environment, available from www.eftec.co.uk [accessed 2 June 2008].
[20] Thanks to Michael Hutter for driving this point home to me.
[21] Mauss, The Gift; D. Kahneman, ‘Maps of Bounded Rationality: A Perspective on Intuitive Judgment and Choice’, Nobel Prize lecture, 8 December 2002.
[22] de la Torre, Assessing Values in Heritage Conservation.
[23] This risk can be managed, however. Some economic methodologies, outlined below, include provisions for measuring extra‐market values. And as Donovan Rypkema has demonstrated, preservation can be a profit‐making venture. Rypkema, The Economics of Historic Preservation.
[24] Throsby, Economics and Culture.
[25] Slater and Tonkiss, Market Society.
[26] Klamer and Zuidhof, ‘The Values of Cultural Heritage’.
[27] For an extended discussion of benefits transfer, see Navrud and Ready, Environmental Value Transfer.
[28] D. Kahneman, ‘Maps of Bounded Rationality: A Perspective on Intuitive Judgment and Choice’, Nobel Prize lecture, 8 December 2002.