Practice barriers towards intangible heritage within the UK built heritage sector

ABSTRACT

For historic buildings to endure as testimony to society, physical residue of the past must always be altered to some degree. Consequently, the overarching characteristics of built heritage practice maintains a sincere focus on material authenticity and decay prevention to encourage safeguarding of built heritage assets. However, in order to accommodate increasingly influential critical heritage perspectives within the built heritage paradigm, a more intangible, people-focused and participatory point of departure is required for determining how a building should be altered. Utilising a transdisciplinary approach, this research focuses on understanding the perceived barriers at play which limit practitioners from integrating intangible heritage within their role. Analysis of sixteen interviews with UK-based practitioners is structured into five thematic barriers: 1) role complexity; 2) non-physical qualities; 3) unclear domain relationship; 4) uncertain definition; 5) participatory problems. To overcome these barriers, three high-level strategies are proposed: 1) advancing intangible heritage in conservation concepts and methods; 2) supporting practitioner dissemination of intangible heritage; and 3) practitioner participation in intangible practices. By assembling these strategies into an overarching model, attention is placed on conceptual and methodological shifts as impetus for empowering practitioners to both disseminate and participate in intangible heritage practices related to physical heritage sites.

KEYWORDS:

• Building conservation
• intangible heritage
• built heritage
• heritage practice
• heritage management

Acknowledgments

Thanks must firstly go to the built heritage professionals who gave up their own time to engage with this research project. Also, I would like to thank members of the Institute of Historic Building Conservation (IHBC) North West Branch for insightful comments received on an earlier presentation of this paper. I am also extremely grateful to the journal editor and reviewers for their experienced feedback and critique which uplifted the overall scope and quality of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the AHRC North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership under grant number D92204B;Arts and Humanities Research Council [D92204B];

Notes on contributors

Johnathan Djabarouti

Johnathan Djabarouti is a registered architect (RIBA) and accredited conservation professional (IHBC). He is currently undertaking an AHRC funded PhD in Architectural Heritage at the Manchester School of Architecture, where he also teaches as an Associate Lecturer in Architecture. His broad research interests include the conservation of built heritage, critical heritage theory and intangible heritage – with a specific research focus on the more-than-physical qualities of historic and listed buildings.