This paper was presented to the New Zealand Historical Association conference in November 2021.
The heritage field in settler colonial cities is facing many challenges. While climate change, natural hazards and development pressures raise issues about what and how heritage can be conserved, previously unheard voices are questioning whose heritage should be valorised and why. Yet the professional practice of heritage identification and management remains in a state of inertia, reflecting a lack of clear understanding of the field’s own history and its implications for future heritage-making.
This paper explores how heritage theory and practice came into being in the urban contexts of settler colonial countries, and how these constructs are being interrogated and potentially disrupted in light of urban realities today. It examines how the concept of “values” came to underpin heritage-making processes internationally from the 1970s, and how this has been challenged through critical heritage discourse and the fragmentation of universality in significance and meaning. This paper highlights how heritage dissonance is so profoundly unsettling in settler colonial countries, where heritage-making is entwined with a homemaking agenda. This dissonance – the inevitable favouring of some peoples’ interests and values over others – is either suppressed or “constructively managed” when determining priorities and funding for urban heritage. However, I suggest that rather than “safeguarding” our heritage we need to look to acknowledge the disparate cultural viewpoints and situational realities that bear upon places. Relinquishment, sacrifice and loss may be part of learning from heritage-making history as we reimagine our heritage anew.
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