ABSTRACT
Central to the Historic Urban Landscape approach (HUL) is the incorporation of community values into the management of the urban landscape. However, the relationship between community understandings and ‘expert’ notions of heritage value is a key debate in contemporary critical heritage studies and the idea of heritage as a cultural practice has only slowly incorporated into the technically oriented heritage mechanisms and the realities of local heritage conservation practices and outcomes. At the same time, a growing interest in the affective encounter between people and place in number of disciplines has foregrounded the way that new visual research methodologies (VRM) might be useful in making links between the visual and the sensory, highlighting more nuanced attachments to place. This chapter provides a critical analysis of a VRM project, part of the implementation of the HUL in the City of Ballarat, Australia, and reflects on the applicability of VRM for cultural heritage research. It shows how the subjective, emotional and ephemeral values of place can be better incorporated into strategic planning, guiding the decision-making process through the HUL, that sees cultural heritage as broader than the conventional ‘sites’ approach.
