ABSTRACT
Heritage planning develops policies and management strategies to guide proposed changes to historic places. The proposals may concern individual places or collective groups of places.
The first step in this process is to gain a thorough understanding of the historic place, an activity that forms the foundation of heritage planning.1 This investigation reveals not only so-called ‘objective’ and technical data (both socio-historical and physical), but also the stories and the values that are associated with the place. The data and the values together enable us to understand the meaning of the place and to make an assessment of its cultural heritage significance. This in turn provides the basis for making informed decisions as to the management of change to the historic place, a process that is addressed in Chapter 5.
