ABSTRACT

Historical accounts of the development of place that emphasised overarching economic, social and political processes are also being contested. As value is typically placed on aspects of landscape that most directly inform favoured discourses, ways of valuing landscape are also changing. Less concrete, less certain and thus more conditional and contestable, this formulation of landscape liberates those contained and constrained by established ways of experiencing, studying and presenting place or landscape. Landscape, fashioned by interplay of place, perception and cognition, can be thoroughly personal and subjective. Landscape is also active, driven from within, being 'the way in which people – all people – understand and engage with the material world around them'. Heritage atrophies in the absence of public involvement and public support. Heritage involves continual creation and transformation. People can make heritage by adding new ideas to old ideas. Heritage is never merely something to be conserved or protected, but rather to be modified and enhanced.