A personification-based approach to campus landscape heritage conservation

Historic campus landscapes are living parts of sustainable historic environments: they remain in use while adapting to changing educational needs. Yet conservation systems that focus primarily on material fabric seldom recognise these landscapes as heritage in their own right. Drawing on Dober’s (2000) concept of the “personification-based campus”, the study treats campus meaning as the product of prolonged people-place interaction and examines how intangible landscape values can be translated into differentiated conservation strategies. Because personification is a relational attribute embedded in long-term people-place interaction and cannot be read directly from drawings, a case study approach is adopted for its capacity to capture such dynamic characteristics through in-depth contextual analysis and process tracing. Dongwu University is examined as the principal case, with the University of Oregon providing a comparative reference. The resulting framework identifies three categories of heritage space: activity-supporting, memory-defining and cultural-continuity spaces. The findings show that personified values provide evidence distinct from assessments of physical authenticity and should therefore be considered alongside them in conservation decisions. The comparison also indicates that continued use is central to the social sustainability of historic environments. The proposed strategies offer a practical basis for managing change in historic university campuses.