Heritage protection can sometimes disrupt the remaking and reimaging of cities by prioritising and protecting alternatives based on non-market values of architectural and historical significance. In England, the "post-war listing" programme has positioned state heritage protection as an unlikely advocate and defender (sometimes of last resort) of the diminishing material and symbolic legacy of the architecture of the welfare state and its socialist values from the 1950s and 1960s. In this paper, we explore what might be at stake ideologically, materially, and symbolically in the protection of post-war architectural heritage in England. While post-war listing has creating scope for alternatives, its subaltern role (in and against the state) has been limited in various ways by state strategies of market-based regeneration that erode and marginalise social housing and welfarist rights to the city. Although heritage protection has been only a minor irritant in the politics of regeneration, the paper explores what might be at stake for the Left in engaging more explicitly with heritage building protection and the selectivity of heritage value.

There are three World Heritage Sites in Berlin – can you guess what they are? You might expect to discover that, first, Museum Island and, second, the Palaces of Potsdam and Berlin are included on the list. But you might be more surprised by the third site – Berlin Modernism Housing Estates, six housing estates constructed between 1910 and 1933, principally from the period of the Weimar Republic. They are claimed to testify to innovative housing policies in a period when the city of Berlin was particularly progressive socially, politically and culturally. Together they ‘contributed to improving housing and living conditions for people with low incomes through novel approaches to town planning, architecture and garden design’ also providing ‘exceptional examples of new urban and architectural typologies’, which ‘exercised considerable influence on the development of housing around the world’ (UNESCO, 2008).

The right of the public to have a direct say in planning matters and the inherently political nature of planning are now taken for granted. The formal machinery for objections and appeals, initially devised only for specified uses by a restricted range of interests, is now employed much more widely. Many informal mechanisms have been created by planning authorities and others to improve the capacity of, and opportunity for, local communities and interest groups to play a part or the lead in formulating and implementing planning policy. Even so, many questions remain about the effectiveness of public participation, whose interests are served by planning, and the relationship between professional and political decisions. The first part of this chapter explains the history of public participation in planning, the nature of 'interests' and the mechanisms that enable them to influence the planning process. The second part then considers the professionalisation of planning and the relationship between the profession, politicians and the public.

A distinct collective place imaginary has developed in recent decades for the Lower Ouseburn Valley, Newcastle upon Tyne, or 'Ouseburn', formed by the experience of 'rediscovery' of this post-industrial area, as well as its longer industrial past. This has crystallized in the idea of 'Ouseburnness', a placeness that is used to actively frame the area's character and future. In this paper, we examine this story in the context of a relational understanding of place and the translation of place imaginary into place governance, and vice versa, in the process raising questions of wider relevance to heritage management and urban planning.

In 1968 Newcastle City Council took the bold step of appointing Ralph Erskine, a remarkable appointment by the Conservative-controlled local authority, to be architect and planner for the rebirth of Byker. Erskine and the City Council shared a vision that all that was positive about Byker-specifically its strong social capital built from kith and kin networks-could be retained, while all that was poor-its worn out Victorian terraces and hard environment-could be transformed into a delightful place that supported its community.

Recent years have seen growing international interest in the practice of 'adaptive reuse' of heritage buildings, promoted as a financially more viable and environmentally sustainable way to achieve both regeneration and conservation. In parallel, adaptive reuse has emerged as an aim in national policy frameworks and EU governance. Much of the writing on adaptive reuse reflects its nature as a design practice and concentrates on the material form intervention may take. This paper has a different approach, considering the institutional factors that support adaptive reuse occurring, as part of a multi-faceted and complex conservation-planning assemblage, across fifteen European countries. Focusing on regulatory systems for heritage and planning, governance systems, human and financial resources and policies on civic engagement and participation, thematic analysis is used to generate a typology of approaches across the continent, grouping the countries considered into three clusters. The typology proposed is not fixed, but a way to conceptualise the similarities and differences in institutional and policy-contexts that facilitate or restrict adaptive reuse. It contributes to a more informed overview of the context for adaptive reuse and the possibilities of learning from different policy contexts.

Buildings have always been reused for both pragmatic and symbolic reasons. However, out of the turbulence of the mid-twentieth century, stimulated by reactions against modern 'clean-sweep' planning, a new field of policy and practice emerged in the 1970s to respond to the burgeoning conservation movement and growing environmental awareness, which came to be termed 'adaptive reuse'. The last decade in particular has seen a flourishing of interest in adaptive reuse both on the ground and in scholarship. Today, the practice is witnessed across the architectural spectrum, from starchitects to the most modest community-generated projects. Adaptive reuse is ideologically supported through heritage and carbon reduction campaigning, and is evident in policy and education. In this paper, we critically review the rise of adaptive reuse scholarship and the emergent epistemology it represents, with a focus on the past twenty years and more recent monographs in the field. What we discern in these texts is a recent shift in the debate toward a more theoretical approach to the subject. While the debate on adaptive reuse has been continuously developing since the 1970s, it did so mostly with a focus on mapping and depicting an architectural phenomenon, and identifying tools and strategies to instruct practitioners and designers. However, more recent works on adaptive reuse are increasingly seeking to go beyond a pragmatic and practice-focused approach, and to investigate adaptive reuse in a more conceptual way. In doing so, they might open up the debate to new disciplinary contributions beyond the domain of architecture and design. This paper aims to outline and contribute to this shift.

This paper examines the long history of planned water and landscape management in China, focusing on the Tai Lake Basin located in the southern part of the Yangtze River Delta. To position this polder landscape within the broad spectrum of water heritage in China, the paper examines the historical perceptions and symbolism of water and its decisive role in shaping Chinese outlooks on empire, urban settlements and landscapes. It then delineates the evolution of polder landscapes in the Tai Lake Basin, which has been recurrently transformed since the fifth century BCE through to their contemporary condition. Despite changing material forms, the polder landscapes in the region evidence continuous endeavour to manage water for both productive (food) and preventive (flood) purposes. The latter part of the paper considers to what extent these polder landscapes might now be considered as a 'continuing landscape' - an organically evolved cultural landscape reflecting the changing needs of society, economy, government as well as flood prevention. Today, with few features that are materially historical, their continued existence has been threatened by urbanization, land consolidation and agricultural modernization. The paper advocates historically informed landscape planning to safeguard these dynamic and adaptive agricultural landscapes.

The Byker Estate, Newcastle upon Tyne, is one of greatest achievements of its age in public housing anywhere in the world. The Council’s ownership was transferred to the Byker Community Trust (BCT) Housing Association in 2012, following a unanimous vote by residents. Subsequently BCT has embarked on an ambitious programme of physical renewal. However, the biggest challenge Byker faces is not the condition of its buildings or public spaces but the impact of deep-seated poverty and deprivation, exacerbated by austerity and welfare reform. This chapter focuses upon the efforts of the Byker Community Trust to develop the ‘Byker Approach’, which gives tenants a key voice and role in decision making, influence in service provision and standards and maximises access for local people into employment, training, health and educational opportunities. Central to this process is building trust, empowering both staff and residents and building closer working relationships.

This paper focuses upon the practice of conservation applied through the planning systems of three European countries, Ireland, the Netherlands and England, here termed conservation-planning. The values and validated practice of conservation-planning are considered in terms of the concept of Authorised Heritage Discourses (AHDs) that are internationally-shaped but nationally articulated in each country, and by a distinct conservation-planning social entity that may be described as an 'assemblage'. The post-2008 period has seen over-arching economic similarities in economic and political forces affecting conservation-planning practice in each country. In each case public-sector austerity measures have been accompanied by ideological re-positionings over the role of the state and a greater emphasis upon 'selling the historic city' has been accompanied by a declining public-sector capacity to manage change within the frame of traditionally established AHDs. The partial withdrawal of the state has in each case resulted in adjustments in the construction of the assemblage and thus in the 'ownership' of the AHDs with a greater involvement of the private sector in these processes. Despite similarities in conservation discourse, shaped by an international AHD, differences exist between the countries considered, which we can better understand by reference to the conservation-planning assemblage in each country.

The late 1960s witnessed sustained debate about the prevailing direction of policy towards the existing built environment. Against that background, an initiative launched in 1966 saw small teams of consultants commissioned to prepare analytic and advisory reports on Bath, Chester, Chichester and York. Their reports were belatedly published between February and May 1969. They were intended not just to provide specific information about four cathedral cities but also collectively to act as pilot studies able to indicate more generally the options available to policymakers. In this paper, we make use of oral testimony, archive sources and contemporary commentaries to identify the origins and purpose of this initiative, discuss the intrinsic visions offered for the different cities, and comment on the methodologies proposed for achieving conservation. The final section provides historiographic commentary on the significance of the Studies in Conservation half a century after their publication.

In this paper we examine the way conservation-planning has changed since the global economic crisis in Newcastle upon Tyne (UK), where austerity is still an all-consuming issue. Focusing upon a recent project around the Bigg Market, a historic public space, we map the new 'conservation-planning assemblage' where 'other-than-public' forms of management have taken hold. We identify impacts of austerity, deregulation and a smaller state ideology, and show how the agency of heritage assets and narratives in urban context is focussed on economic performance and competitiveness. Within the conservation-planning assemblage, roles and responsibilities have changed, and we reflect on the impact this has on conservation policy and practice.

Thomas Sharp was a key figure in mid-C20 British planning whose renown stems from two periods in his career. First, he came to attention as a polemical writer in the 1930s on planning issues, including as a virulent opponent of garden cities. His prose tempered over time and this phase perhaps culminated in Town Planning, first published in 1940 and reputed to have sold over 250,000 copies. Subsequently the plans he produced for historic towns in the 1940s, such as Oxford, were very well known and were influential in developing ideas of townscape. The Anatomy of the Village originated from a brief phase between these two periods when Sharp was seconded during the early war years to work for the Ministry of Town and Country Planning. Started as an official manual on village planning, it followed on from the Scott Report, for which Sharp had been one of the Secretaries. When the Ministry decided not to proceed with the publication, Sharp himself published it 1946. The Anatomy of the Village became one of Sharp’s best known works, with lucid prose and generous illustration by photograph and beautiful linedrawings of village plans. The aim of The Anatomy of the Village was to set out the main principles of village planning, especially in relation to physical design. Anatomy became a key text in thinking about villages in the post-war period; a period when there was great concern that settlements should develop in more sensitive ways than inter-war ribbon and suburban development patterns. The problems of poor quality development, unrelated to settlement form, was to continue to stimulate books such as Lionel Brett’s Landscape in Distress and campaigns from the Architectural Review. Reading the text today it still has much to offer: while some of its assumptions about the level of services a village might support clearly belong to another era, its beautiful and simple typological analyses of village form continue to be of relevance.

In what is traditionally known as ‘the West’, it feels like a very uncertain world at the moment and this has become manifest in the political processes of many European countries and the USA. Unce...