Placemaking, Conservation and Heritage: The problem of 'difficult' and 'different' heritages and the impact on placemaking.

Particularly in response to rapidly changing circumstances and environments, conservation involves identifying and retaining an element of heritage, stability, and familiarity in both existing areas and informing the design of new areas. Yet this is a complex and contested process. It involves processes of valuation and selection: so whose heritage is being selected, prioritized, promoted, and retained, and whose is marginalized, redeveloped, and vanishes? And individuals and communities do change over time, so the views and values of those communities are also likely to change. Incomers do not necessarily share the same values as long-term residents. On a wider scale, what is generally accepted as worthy of conservation also changes with, for example, postwar modernism, brutalism, and postmodernism becoming accepted but difficulties with problematic heritage ‒ of war, destruction, slavery and exploitation, for example – being contentious and potentially splitting communities. What one generation values, particularly if it is (relatively) new, can be seen by others as disfiguring, and this is very evident in the contentious heritage identification and conservation of urban art and graffiti. We use a range of examples from the United Kingdom, Europe, and elsewhere to identify and critique the processes and products – the landscapes of heritage manipulation, the decision-making processes, the power of individuals and communities. All these are critical factors in the complex interrelationship between placemaking and conservation, new and old.