Community-based Heritage Management: a case study and agenda for research

Heritage sites regarded as important are safely managed by the state, voluntary or private sectors but the majority of sites, despite statutory protection, remain unrecognised and without a role in their host communities. New schemes such as the Local Heritage Initiative in the UK aim to encourage communities to recognise their heritage assets and in managing them effectively to contribute to their preservation. With reference to the case of Nether Poppleton near York (UK), the present study explores the factors and conditions for effective community management displayed in one locality by groups who are successfully conserving and managing a diverse set of local heritage sites. Interviews and joint tasks enabled an analysis of the complex range of factors and conditions that can lead to a successful community-based initiative. Future research will determine the extent to which these factors, if applied to other sites, might produce the same results. The importance of this agenda is underscored by the increasing reliance on community-based heritage management in the UK and elsewhere.     

Framing theory: towards a critical imagination in heritage studies

Heritage theory has developed piecemeal over the last 30?years, with little progress made in fully understanding the way the subject can or should be theorised. This paper identifies some of the main sources of theory in heritage, as well as the approaches and perspectives that have been formulated as a result. These are framed on the basis of their disciplinary origins and can be viewed as theories in, theories of and theories for heritage. As frames through which heritage can currently be examined they are still employed in relative isolation from each other and we suggest, therefore, a way by which they might be considered as complementary, rather than competing approaches in order to provide impetus for the development of a critical imagination in heritage studies.     

Conceptions of Space and Crime in the Punitive Neoliberal City

The entrenchment of neoliberalism in the United States has coincided with an unprecedented expansion of punishment practices that intensify social divisions rooted in class and race. We explore the political culture of this hyperpunitiveness through a discussion of two popularized explanations for urban crime: broken windows and situational crime prevention. These popular criminological theories help legitimate the deepening of social and spatial divisions. They also rest their precepts upon the foundation of a particular geographic imagination. We use this paper to reveal and critique the core assumptions about space upon which each of these theories critically relies. We suggest that each theory understands society–space interactions too simplistically to provide comprehensive insight into the dynamics of landscape construction and interpretation. We argue further that the logics and practices of broken windows and situational crime prevention possess significant elective affinities with social dynamics characteristic of neoliberalism. For these reasons, these popularized criminologies both reflect and reinforce the processes through which neoliberalism exacerbates social differences.