ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter starts by briefly recapping some of the key features
of the evolution of conservation as an activity since the nineteenth century and
some of the issues that have gone unresolved in that process. I then discuss
my own positionality; my own values necessarily inform my analysis of the
challenges that I think face the conservation system and movement. The next
part of the chapter discusses sanctioned conservation values and the way they
have evolved with, for example, the growth of the idea of historic environment,
both as a valuable economic commodity and as a source of individual and
community identity. A multiplicity of values exists, and these are important for
framing how we conserve. What constitutes ‘good’ conservation practice is
discussed in the next section. While there are clear, authorised sets of principles
for managing monuments or sites – the conservative repair approach – no such
clarity exists for the management of places, with their multiplicity of buildings
(and people). A simple extension of conservative repair principles is both inade-
quate and impractical. Characterisation, the catch-all term used for a disparate
set of methodologies, has perhaps some potential at least in helping to describe
and understand place.
