Planning reform and heritage governance

Abstract

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 markedoriented 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 PLANNING PRACTICE & RESEARCH 2023, VOL. 38, NO. 3, 331–339 https://doi.org/10.1080/02697459.2023.2206215