Communities, Heritage and Planning: Towards a Co-Evolutionary Heritage Approach

Community engagement is becoming a key part of heritage management processes. Community-heritage engagement, however, also means that heritage management processes become more dynamic and versatile, as participation and community engagement is often complex, multifaceted, open-ended and unpredictable. This paper introduces a third, more radical perspective on community-heritage engagement, which we coin ‘a co-evolutionary heritage approach’. We argue that a co-evolutionary heritage approach is alive to the adaptability, flexibility and complexity that comes with the diversity of heritage valuation by communities.