Competing discourses of built heritage: lay values in Irish conservation planning

Built heritage conservation has traditionally been shaped by professionals through an ‘authorised heritage discourse’, emphasising expert knowledge and skills, universal value, a hierarchy of significance, and protecting the authenticity of tangible assets. However, while the purpose of built heritage conservation is widely recognised to be broad, encompassing cultural, social and economic benefits, it takes place in the presence, and on behalf, of a wider public whose values and priorities may differ starkly from those of heritage power-players. Drawing on the perspectives of a range of built heritage actors in three small towns in Ireland, this paper contributes to these debates, exploring the competing values and priorities embedded within lay discourses of heritage. Based on critical discourse analysis of interviews with local actors, the paper identifies that collected memory and local place distinctiveness, contributing to a sense of local identity, are of central importance in how non-experts construct their understanding of built heritage. In the Irish context, this is particularly important in understanding social and cultural statutory categories of heritage interest. The paper concludes on the implications for policy and practice and, in particular, the need to more effectively take account of non-expert values and priorities in heritage and conservation decision-making.     

Benjamin Constant and the politics of reason

This paper makes a claim about Constant’s intellectual sources in order to throw additional light on the nature of his liberalism. It assesses Constant’s views against the background of a tradition of political rationalism. Constant both criticized and inherited that tradition. This paper shows how this process of critical re-appropriation occurred principally with two figures that had a particular significance for Constant: the very Francophile William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet. Constant resisted these authors’ desire to replace a consent-based decision-making model by a truth-based decision-making model, and condemned their tendency to enrol individual judgment at the service of a politics of truth. At the same time, Constant did not renounce completely to their dream of bringing certainty into politics. As this double-move shows, it is not clear to what extent Constant succeeded in distancing himself from this tradition of political rationalism in order to establish what I call a rationalist liberalism. This problematic intellectual lineage not only challenges received interpretations of Constant’s liberalism either in terms of ‘scepticism’ or ‘pluralism.’ It should also invite us to reconsider the widespread idea according to which the French liberal tradition had a common and exclusive source in Montesquieu.     

HLO1‐south: An Early Neolithic site in Wadi al‐Hilo (Sharjah,UAE)

Site HLO1 (Sharjah, UAE), situated in a particularly favourable geographical position, has provided an extraordinary range of anthropogenic radiocarbon dates, spanning before 8000 to Zero BCE. The Neolithic is represented by finds from the eighth to the fifth millennium BCE. Apart from the dated fireplaces, however, there are almost no typical artefacts of this period. Small stone structures appear to have been early Neolithic graves. A middle Neolithic grave consisted of a large rounded stone heap which was reused as a grave during the Late Bronze Age. The site is interpreted as a campsite of nomadic herders, used throughout the Neolithic period. After a break in the fourth millennium BCE, the site became a Bronze Age smelting site which continued to be settled until the Late Iron Age.     

A SIMPLIFICATION AND GENERALIZATION OF THE EXCLUSION THEOREM: A TECHNICAL NOTE

Several researchers have proven that for the integrated production-location problem on the Weberian triangle, intermediate points on the edge of the triangle can never be optimal locations. Authors of previous proofs of this result have used cumbersome trigonometric arguments. We present a much simpler algebraic proof of the result, and present it in terms of the more general n -input model, where the feasible location space is a convex polygon rather than a triangle. In addition, the result generalizes immediately to other cases, such as (1) multifacility production-location problems, (2) stochastic versions of one-facility and multifacility production-location problems, and (3) comparable pure location problems (e.g., the Weber problem).