Looking into the ‘black box’ of heritage protection: analysis of conservation area disputes in London through the eyes of planning inspectors

The paper analyses conflicts associated with policies to protect the built heritage. Such conflicts relate to a host of tensions between private and public concerns and specifically between pro-development and pro-conservation approaches. To examine these cleavages, the paper operationalises private and public concerns over heritage by asking if there is a recognisable set of justifications that policy-makers use for supporting a pro-conservation or alternatively a pro-development approach? To do this, the paper looks at appeals decided by Her Majesty’s Planning Inspectors in London. The findings show that although they are not dichotomous, public and private interests in heritage development can be factually recognised in the setting of appeals. Moreover, the paper finds that Planning Inspectors often channel conflicts through the prism of certain public interests, namely, protecting architectural and physical attributes of the building and its surroundings. Although inspectors are instructed to actively weigh in other (potentially overriding) considerations in heritage appeals, such as socio-economic and proprietary issues, these considerations do not appear to have the same standing within the decision-making process.     

OPENING UP THE "BLACK BOX" IN EVALUATING NEIGHBORHOOD PROBLEMS: THE IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS IN ISRAEL'S PROJECT RENEWAL

How successful is a particular neighborhood program? This question poses a special challenge for evaluation research. This paper demonstrates how implementation analysis can be utilized to reinforce the evaluation endeavor. Israel's Project Renewal is the laboratory. As a large-scale national program that encompasses most towns in Israel, it provides what few programs can: the possibility of studying a large enough sample of neighborhoods to cover diversity, yet in the context of a small, unitary-system country that provides the canopy of shared national policy, institutional structure and administrative norms.     

Architecture is not everything: a multi-faceted conceptual framework for evaluating heritage protection policies and disputes

ABSTRACT

This paper is grounded in a rancorous debate in built-heritage studies concerning heritage policies and the disputes associated with them. Despite the seeming dominance of architectural considerations in decision-making about heritage protection, factual evidence from previous studies shows that not one, but five factors are involved, in differing doses, in the decisions made by planning bodies: architecture and design, city-planning, social considerations, economics, and property-related considerations. This paper categorizes each of these elements and frames them in a new conceptual framework. . The framework analyses the five factors from the perspectives of two prisms: support or opposition to heritage protection policies. Through a prominent case-example of Tel Aviv’s conservation plan, we then demonstrate that the new conceptual framework can be utilized to better understand the multifaceted debates – overt or covert – surrounding heritage protection. The case study and the conceptual framework suggest that although urban form and design issues are quite dominant, other non-physical considerations shape the dynamics of conflicts, practices, and policies surrounding heritage protection.