Exploring Emotion

The evidence informing this Element is drawn from a four-year research project which used emoji workshops, place-based oral histories, and extant material such as planning documents, heritage policies, press releases, and a series of reports designed to prevent the loss of historic urban places to explore why historic places matter emotionally. This data covered urban areas in England and Scotland since 1975 and was collected with a clear focus on accessing the emotional dimensions of historic urban places.Footnote ¹

Emotion was built into the research design in three main ways. First, by focusing on urban change. Second, the sources and methods for data collection were chosen to prioritise emotions. Third, emotion was coded in the data analysis.

Emotion, Place, and Heritage

Understanding emotion requires shifting our thinking from seeing heritage as the historic environment to instead seeing heritage as historic places. This is not just a semantic shift. Instead, it builds from a substantial body of place-based work from across a range of disciplines that states that people and place are connected through meaning and emotion (Tuan, Reference Tuan1977; Altman and Low, Reference Altman and Low1992; Relph, Reference Relph2008; Manzo and Devine-Wright, Reference Manzo and Devine-Wright2021). Yi Fu Tuan, one of the earliest exponents of this view, believed that ‘the emotion felt among human beings finds expression and anchorage in things and places’ (Tuan, Reference Tuan, Gale and Olsson1979: 417). The term ‘place’ is therefore deliberately used in this Element to emphasise the connection between the physical and the emotional. There are innumerable definitions of place, with debates found across a number of different disciplines concerning what place is, how it differs from space, and placelessness/non-place (Cresswell, Reference Cresswell2014). Ultimately, these definitions can be summarised as having three main elements: (1) geographic location, (2) material form, and (3) centre of meaning and value (Gieryn, Reference Gieryn2000: 464–5). These three elements are mutually reinforcing and cannot be separated: one is not more important than the other but rather they work together, and they involve tangible forms (e.g. buildings and streets) and intangible elements (e.g. memories, symbols, rhythms, routines, and rituals). The first and second points of Gieryn’s definition are well understood within heritage theory and practice. Listed buildings and conservation areas are geographic locations with material form and these aspects of the definition are therefore enshrined in the laws, policies, and practices of heritage designation and management. The third point (meaning and value) is much more complex. While values are the underpinning framework of cultural significance, it is less clear how meaning is constructed and considered within decision-making. As such, it is this latter aspect that the Element is concerned with. This is achieved by focusing on how emotion can help us understand why historic places hold meaning and therefore matter to people.

For the purposes of this Element, meaning and therefore our emotional relationships are derived through a person’s interaction with, and lived and felt experiences of, historic urban places, which include designated and non-designated places. In this understanding, historic places do not have intrinsic meaning but rather meanings are constructed through individual and collective experience and therefore are historically and culturally contingent. Meaning is therefore plural and contested, not singular and agreed, it is fluid and changes over time and between space, and it differs between people. Crucially, in this understanding, meaning cannot occur without an emotional relationship between people and place.

In developing this view, this Element engages with key themes in critical heritage studies. In particular, it is situated within an increasing body of academic work that explores the emotional dimensions of heritage sites, including rural and urban areas and museum/visitor attractions (Byrne and Nugent, Reference Byrne and Nugent.2004; Harrison, Reference Harrison2004; Graham et al., Reference Graham, Mason and Newman2009; Gregory, Reference Gregory2015; Tolia-Kelly, Waterton, and Watson, Reference Tolia-Kelly, Waterton and Watson2017; Smith, Reference 81Smith2020; Wells, Reference Wells, Kopec and Bliss (eds.)2020; Wang, Reference Wang2023). This work has started to develop an understanding of emotion and moved us from a point whereby emotion was previously believed to be the ‘elephant in the room of heritage and museum studies’ (Smith and Campbell, Reference Smith, Campbell, Logan, Craith and Kockel2015: 443) to something that is actively engaged with in theory and practice. Within this emerging work there is a desire to develop empirical evidence through using innovative methods that directly focus on emotion in both data collection and analysis (Madgin and Lesh, Reference Madgin and Lesh2021). Emerging work in the field of heritage and emotion is also opening up powerful new lines of enquiry based on different theoretical positions. For example, Smith, Campbell, and Wetherall’s (Reference Smith, Wetherell and Campbell2018) use of ‘affective practices’ sits alongside the more-than-representational approaches taken by Tolia-Kelly, Waterton, and Watson (Reference Tolia-Kelly, Waterton and Watson2017). This Element positions itself within this tradition and trajectory of scholarship by using original empirical evidence to critically analyse how we can understand emotion. To achieve this, it draws on insights and literatures both from within and outwith critical heritage studies, and particularly from environmental psychology and humanistic geography, to develop a framework that concentrates on three key components of emotion: responses, attachments, and communities.

In line with more recent attempts within critical heritage studies to align theories and practices, the Element is also located within the development of people-centred approaches to both heritage and planning. In a heritage context, this approach has evolved from more traditional theories of heritage conservation, which ascribed value based on the primacy of an expert view of physical fabric. This traditional approach, while retaining its primacy, is continually being refined through the introduction since the 1960s of concepts including ‘sense/spirit of place’, ‘genius loci’, ‘townscape’, and ‘character’. Each of these concepts reflected a desire to try to isolate and understand the meaning of place by both including and going beyond built fabric (Jivén and Larkham, Reference Jivén and Larkham2003; Schofield and Szymanski, Reference Schofield and Szymanski2010; Bandarin and van Oers, Reference Bandarin and Oers2012).

Into the twenty-first century, policies and practices further developed the linguistic canon by using words that more explicitly linked people and place. Historic Environment Scotland, ‘the lead public body set up to investigate, care for and promote Scotland’s historic environment’Footnote ⁴, outlined their more people-centred approach in their revised definition of the Scottish historic environment as ‘the physical evidence for human activity that connects people with place, linked with the associations we can see, feel and understand’ (Scottish Government, 2014: 2). This linguistic shift was also supported by initiatives such as What’s Your Heritage? (2017) and a change to include Social and Historical Interest in the revised guidance for selection and designation (2019) – each of which were designed to centre people more formally within an evolving heritage system. This is paralleled in England, as demonstrated by a raft of more people-centred measures inaugurated by Historic England, ‘the public body that helps people care for, enjoy and celebrate England’s spectacular historic environment’Footnote ⁵, through their introduction of communal and social value in their six Conservation Principles, which are intended to guide change according to best practice. For example, the Principle for Communal/Social Value recognises some places ‘may have fulfilled a community function that has generated a deeper attachment’ (Historic England, 2008: 32). However, while spaces have opened up for more people to become involved in heritage decisions, social value – the principle most dedicated to people–place relations – still remains marginalised (Jones, Reference Jones2017) and understandings of emotion remain under-developed.

In a planning context, spaces for people to participate increasingly opened up, as exemplified by People and Planning, the report of the Committee on Public Participation in Planning, commonly known as the Skeffington Report (1968). This approach developed in the twenty-first century through a range of initiatives including the Community Empowerment Act in Scotland (2015), Assets of Community Value (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2011), and the introduction of Neighbourhood Plans brought in under the Localism Act (2011)Footnote ⁶, which have each been used to support a more people-centred approach to planning. This was paralleled by the definition of the historic environment in the National Planning Policy Framework in England as ‘all aspects of the environment resulting from the interaction between people and places through time, including all surviving physical remains of past human activity, whether visible, buried or submerged, and landscaped and planted or managed flora’ (Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, 2023: 68). The extent to which planning has truly evolved into being ‘people-centred’ though remains contested (Inch et al., Reference Inch, Sartorio, Bishop, Beebeejaun, McClymont, Frediani, Cociña and Quick2019).

These moves at a national level do not sit within a vacuum, and arguably much of this discourse has been shaped by international practices. For example, the place-based approach of the Australian Burra Charter (1979), particularly through its revised versions (1999 and 2013), was seen as a necessary way to broaden the definition of cultural significance by seemingly bringing in a more people-centred view of heritage, although how far this went is debatable (Waterton et al., Reference Waterton, Smith and Campbell2006). This approach was further extended through other key declarations and conventions, most notably the Nara Document on Authenticity (ICOMOS, 1994) and the Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (Faro Convention; Council of Europe, 2005).

Together, this produces a substantial heritage and planning lexicon that hints at people–place relations as ‘association’, ‘attachment’, ‘interaction’, and ‘connection’ sit alongside other terms such as ‘sense/spirit of place’, ‘genius loci’, ‘townscape’, ‘character’, ‘social value’, ‘communal value’, and ‘social historical interest’. It is thus undeniable that both the heritage and planning sector are aware of the relationship between people and place but arguably there is still very little understanding of what this relationship is comprised of, far less the emotional aspects of these relationships, or put differently, why historic places matter emotionally. This translates into a recognition within heritage organisations that things need to be done differently. For example, Historic Environment Scotland (2017) stated, ‘We think that people are increasingly interested in different aspects of our history that our listing and designation policies have not traditionally recognised’ (7). This Element provides a significant entry point into these issues by providing a conceptual framework that enables us to understand why historic urban places matter emotionally and how emotion, in the form of responses, attachments, and communities affects decision-making in the urban environment.

Emotion within Place-Based Decision-Making

Emotion has been largely neglected within decision-making in both the traditional and people-centred approaches to heritage and planning. This is largely a product of history, given that there remains an entrenched mistrust of the role of emotion within decision making in the Western world. Historically, a desire for rationality and an unwavering belief in objectivity resulted in a mindset that neglected or even outright rejected emotion within decision-making. This Element refutes this position to instead see ‘emotion’ as a valid category of information. As such, the underpinning assumption in the Element is that emotional responses, attachments, and communities, are valid forms of evidence that help us to better understand people’s relationships with historic urban places and therefore, in the words of Historic England, enables us to develop ‘a better understanding of how heritage is meaningful to people in their everyday surroundings and why they engage with or feel excluded from their heritage’Footnote ⁷.

A mistrust of emotion is a fundamental part of the Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD), which remains central to heritage decision-making (Smith, Reference Smith2006). Smith argues that ‘emotional or subjective activity’ is not acknowledged within the AHD as it instead favoured ‘facts’, ‘remembrance’, or ‘commemoration’ (58). This is evident as early as the origins of the formal conservation movement, as seen in the parliamentary debates for the original Ancient Monuments Act, eventually passed in 1882. Here, one protagonist rejected emotion as ‘he trusted that the House would look at the subject from a business, and not from a sentimental point of view’ (HC Deb, 14 April 1875: cc905). Here, emotion is seen as unhelpful within the confines of an emerging process-driven system based on objective rules and regulations. This is supported in the allied practice of town and country planning, where there are strong parallels with the AHD. Hoch (Reference Hoch2006), for example, noted that planners/analysts rarely recognise emotions and indeed ‘learn to treat emotions as a source of bias and distortion’ (367). Baum (Reference Baum2015) built on this by finding that planners ‘largely resist recognising emotion’ because ‘Western culture downplays the role of emotion in human behaviour’ (498). While this view has remained dominant, it is possible to complicate the narrative by focusing on where we can identify emotion within place-based decision-making.

One way of accessing this information is to see how heritage and emotion have been drawn together through rhetoric. For example, despite the desire to reject sentimentalism in the debates around the Ancient Monuments Act, emotion words were evident as expressed by the proposer of the bill, Sir John Lubbock.

This was not an isolated incident but rather connected to other more romantic views developed in the nineteenth century, primarily by John Ruskin’s evocation of the emotional power of architecture both for the producer and the receiver. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we see emotion words being used by national heritage organisations, which believe that we can ‘celebrate the buildings we love’Footnote ⁸ or that ‘parts of our history … can be painful or shameful by today’s standards’Footnote ⁹. Furthermore, we can also see the word ‘emotion’ being used explicitly within policy/practice documents. For example, Historic England’s (2008) Conservation Principles uses the phrases ‘emotional links’ (8) and ‘emotional impact’ (10), the draft consultation document to revise the Principles uses ‘emotional evidence’ (Historic England, 2017: 56) whereas ‘emotional associations’ is used in Scottish Historic Environment Policy (Historic Scotland, 2009: 45). On an international stage, the Québec Declaration on the Preservation of the Spirit of Place (ICOMOS, 2008) uses the word ‘emotion’ in its definition of ‘Spirit of Place’. In this context, it is clear that a heritage–emotion lexicon exists within professional practice. This lexicon either explicitly uses ‘emotion(al)’ as a term; evokes emotions through emotion words; or implicitly refers to it through terms such as ‘attachment’. However, there remains little sense as to what is meant by emotional associations, links, or evidence or indeed the extent to which emotion affects place-based decision-making. This ongoing tension is perhaps best summarised by Placido Domingo, Chair of Europa Nostra, a pan ‘European voice of civil society committed to safeguarding and promoting cultural and natural heritage’Footnote ¹⁰, who stated:

The extent to which this lexicon of emotion drives or informs place-based decision-making is therefore under-researched. Two notable exceptions to this suggest that heritage practitioners in the United States and United Kingdom do ‘gauge significance by calling on emotional forms of attunement’ but that it is ‘rendered invisible in the official processes’ (Hoskins in Crossick and Kaszynska, Reference Crossick and Kaszynska2016: 21). The most explicit use of emotion within heritage practice to date is found with the National Trust’s (England and Wales) use of the concept of ‘topophilia’, defined as the ‘love of place’ as they ‘set out to explore and understand this visceral but intangible feeling more deeply’ (National Trust, 2017: 3). Thus, through a series of quantitative and qualitative studies, the National Trust (2019) explored the ‘depths of people’s neurophysiological connection with place’ (11). Their work demonstrated the ‘strong emotional connection between people and places’ (National Trust, 2017: 5) and further suggested that ‘there is a link between having a deep-rooted emotional connection to a place and having a better sense of wellbeing’ (National Trust, 2019: 8). In this evolving context, it is evident that emotional relationships exist between people and historic places but emotion, as a category of information, within decision-making remains under-developed and therefore under-utilised.

Introducing the Conceptual Framework

While work on emotion is growing within critical heritage studies and is gaining increased attention with heritage practice, two key issues remain. First, we do not fully understand why historic urban places matter emotionally. Second, the role of emotion within place-based decision-making remains under-researched. To achieve better understanding of both issues, the Element sets out a conceptual framework based on three interconnecting components: responses, attachments, and communities (Table 1).

The conceptual framework recognises that each of these three components – responses, attachments, and communities – are important in and of themselves and indeed could comprise a book on their own. As will be further developed in the introductions to the forthcoming sections, they each have significant intellectual lineages with work conducted across the arts, humanities, social, and natural sciences. However, the contention in this Element is that they are stronger when placed alongside one another. For example, while responses are the most visible aspect of our emotional relationships, and are often revealed through words and emojis, they do not, by themselves, reveal the profound attachments that we develop to historic urban places. Attachments are often hidden and sometimes only revealed during times of change and as such can be less visible than responses. However, it is possible to access and understand attachments through active listening, close reading, and thematic analysis of qualitative material. Drawing on work from within the place attachment field, which focuses on people–place relations and particularly the way that people form emotional bonds with place (Altman and Low, Reference Altman and Low1992), this Element posits that emotional attachments help us to better understand the profound nature of our emotional relationships with place. Alongside this, it is crucial to explore who is responding emotionally and forming emotional attachments. Here the book adapts historian Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of emotional communities to focus on two distinct types of communities: place and practice. In essence, the framework does not seek to reduce emotion to individual responses located in emotion words and emojis but rather recognises that people form intense psycho-emotional attachments to historic places at both an individual and collective level. Together, this information provides a robust, rich, and layered understanding of why, how, and for whom historic places matter emotionally. The framework also examines the notion that emotion cannot be trusted and/or that it distorts place-based decision-making. By systematically working through how people respond and form attachments to historic urban places, we find that emotion is a valid form of information that can support place-based decision-making.

The Element develops the conceptual framework through its structure. Each section examines one aspect of the framework: responses (Section 2), attachments (Section 3), and communities (Section 4). The Element then ties the three components back together (Section 5) by exploring the ways in which, and extent to which, emotion, in the form of response, attachments, and communities, is recognised within place-based decision-making. The Element concludes by considering what the findings could mean for present and future theories and practices in the heritage sector.

Isolating Emotions: Pride

‘Pride’ and in particular pride in place has been the focus of sustained attention from the UK Government (2019–24) as part of its desire to ‘level up’ the UK economy (Marsh et al., Reference Marsh, Howcroft and Owen2023). Despite this research being conducted before the Levelling Up White Paper (UK Government, 2021) was published, it was evident that pride was a recurring emotion word used both by built environment professionals and local residents. There were a range of reasons why pride was expressed. For example, when asked how Paisley Abbey (Figure 2), a twelfth-century church, made them feel, local residents focused on pride:

Figure 2 Paisley Abbey.

Source: Canmore, Historic Environment Scotland: DP 250520 © Historic Environment Scotland. All Rights’ Reserved

The emphasis on the aesthetic, architectural, and historic value of the abbey was matched by other examples, namely SAVE writing about Temple Mill in Leeds, which was described as ‘a blatant expression of the pride of John Marshall, the town’s industrial superstar’ (Binney, Reference Binney1979: 51). Allied to this was also the loss of and lack pride that troubled SAVE as the physical structures from the industrial revolution were demolished

This loss of pride which paralleled the loss of the built environment was not however solely attributed to the architectural and historic interest. Rather, SAVE recognised the human dimension of loss: ‘The dislocation and sense of loss can break down the pride and respect that ordinary citizens may have in their hometown. What they had identified as being their world ceases to be part of them’ (Binney, Reference Binney1979: 25). In these examples, pride is related to how it is used within daily life patterns as people move through places and well as the way a building looks.

Pride was also evoked in the context of working with historic urban places. In particular, pride was influenced by the intellectual, practical, and logistical challenge of working with historic places. Pride could occur at any time within the urban development process from the initial chance to work with a prominent listed building because of its historical reputation, perhaps as an example the world’s first ‘something’, or because it is an iconic local landmark that is seen to give the town a special meaning or character, and right through to the end of the process. Built environment professional Phil spoke eloquently about pride in the course of his work. First of all, pride came from knowing that ‘what you’re dealing with is special’ and second, pride was evident in an awareness of the degree of difficulty of working with historic buildings

Third, the challenge of delivering a restored historic urban building ensured that Phil felt an ‘immense sense of pride and satisfaction’ on finishing the job, because ‘sometimes the more challenging something is, the more sweet the success is’. This was developed further, with Phil stating, ‘You can feel that you’ve done a good job and that you have been involved in creating something special and also created a lasting legacy, or you’ve continued what already is a legacy, you know?’ Finally, pride was not only something that was only associated with the history of the building or in the process of change but also was seen as an emotional response that drove the nature of future change. For example, a link was made by both built environment professionals and local residents as to the relationship between pride and a desire to care for historic urban places in the future. For example, Phil went on to state:

Isolating emotions in this way helps us to understand what pride means to people in particular temporal and spatial contexts and to see any continuities and changes across time and space. From this analysis, we can see that there appears to be a relationship between historic places and pride that is shaped by the domains of architecture, history, aesthetics, challenge, and legacy and comes from being in, looking at, and working with historic places.

Blending Emotions: Conventionally Positive Responses

The word ‘proud’ or ‘pride’ was often expressed alongside a number of other emotion words. For example, local residents invoked their own emotion words when creating their own ‘do it yourself’ heritage plaques in the emoji workshops. In one example, Penny nominated ‘Campbeltown Town Hall … surprise, surprise, purchased on behalf of the community by South Kintyre Development Trust, 2014’ and used the ‘happy, smiley face with the rosy cheeks’ emoji. This historic place made Penny feel ‘chuffed’, ‘pride’, and ‘happy’. Penny went on to say, ‘We do feel very precious about it I think is the word! I feel really precious about it, and the town, but particularly with the town hall.’ Feeling a sense of happiness and pride was strongly related to the community ownership of the town hall and because the building was back in everyday use.

A combination of emotional responses, including pride, love, happy, and chuffed can inform particular kinds of actions within the urban environment, namely the kinds of place protective behaviour demonstrated by the South Kintyre Development Trust, a community anchor organisation led by a board of volunteers who all lived in South KintyreFootnote ¹¹. This link between emotional responses to a place and place protective behaviour, such as community ownership, can be set within a longer trajectory of the work of local and national civic amenity societies, where pride and enthusiasm has been a motivating factor both in campaigns to retain historic buildings and in the formation of societies (Craggs et al., Reference Craggs, Geoghegan and Neate2016). In this way emotions are used productively to secure certain kinds of outcomes as places undergo change.

A further example of the blending of emotion words came in Campbeltown where residents, when asked how a photograph of the Picture House made them feel, responded overwhelmingly with happy or very happy, and in their explanations went on to say that pride was a contributing factor

<Laughter> …

<Laughter>

Emotions, therefore, do not often happen in isolation and so it was often difficult to separate out pride from happiness. Within this, it is clear to see that a range of factors informed the residents’ emotional responses. Like with Paisley Abbey, the historical nature of the cinema was referenced, both in terms of the fact it’s the ‘oldest’ and because of the happy memories that the participants recalled from using the cinema. The architectural style of the building was referenced with residents saying it was ‘attractive’ and ‘beautiful’. Here we can see that the traditional and statutory categories for heritage designation – architectural and historic interest – are determining factors in producing positive emotional responses. However, these responses were also provoked by the cumulative lived and felt experiences of the residents in Paisley and Campbeltown. In these ways, the range of emotional responses were provoked by the recalled places of the past and the felt experiences of the present.

The complex and blended nature of emotional responses is perhaps best reflected by the concept of ‘wow’, which has not traditionally been considered as a ‘basic’ emotion but rather an emotional experience that is comprised of a range of interlinked emotional responses (Desmet et al., Reference Desmet, Porcelijn and Van Dijk2007). ‘Wow’ was evoked in a number of different ways and, as with pride and happiness, Lorraine, a built environment professional, demonstrated how the embodied experience of being in, walking around, and moving through the former Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh was important

‘Wow’ was strongly related to the ways in which this made people feel and how they looked. This is exemplified by built environment professionals Phil and Howard, who, when asked what was special about historic urban places answered:

Desmet and colleagues (Reference Desmet, Porcelijn and Van Dijk2007) found that surprise, desire, and fascination could be incorporated into the composite emotional experience that could be defined as ‘wow’. The specific emotional responses to historic urban places broadened this out to also include aesthetic appreciation, interest, awe, enjoyment, and pleasure. Of most relevance here is how Desmet and colleagues’ concept of ‘wow’ can help us to go beyond isolating particular emotional responses, such as pride, and to think about how a range of emotional responses can co-exist. In these ways, this evidence moves us towards understanding the interactions between a number of different emotional responses, which together form a rich composite emotional experience that reflects how people feel in and about historic urban places.

Blending Emotions: Conventionally Negative Responses

Any discussion of composite emotional experiences needs to consider the ways in which more conventionally negative emotions also co-exist. This was most evident in the ways in which fear provoked other kinds of emotions, including pain, but also left a temporal legacy for people and place.

The emotional response of fear was multifaceted and related to three main areas. First, there was a recurring acknowledgment from built environment professionals that there was a complex emotional register emanating from the process of urban change. This was encapsulated by Derek’s belief as follows:

This generalised fear of change expressed here can be explored in the context of emotional hangovers. In the context of industrial cities, this related to the ‘shudders and pangs of guilt’ caused by the polluted, insanitary conditions associated with the industrial revolution

This fear was very real and was evident in the swathes of planning, welfare, and housing policies that were implemented from the inter-war years in the UK. In essence, a fear of not changing was more pervasive than the fear of change in the minds of local councillors and planners (Madgin, Reference Madgin, Barclay and Riddle2021d) whereas the fear of losing familiar environments, existing routines, and embedded social networks was felt deeply within urban communities, as recognised by SAVE:

This large-scale demolition of the existing environment left a deep emotional legacy that went beyond momentary fear and pain. Built environment professionals Christopher and Aaron reflected on this in the context of new development: ‘In the sixties and seventies, we put up very high buildings, and so people were right to be worried because they could see … that there was no … the new buildings didn’t have a relationship to what the place was (Christopher).’ This type of ‘regrettable … post-war thinking’ that resulted in ‘cheerless, uniform, uninviting’ and remained ‘unpeopled and unloved’ (Wood et al., Reference Wood, Freeman and Binney1983: 3) left an emotional scar in place and over time that affected future phases of urban change.

Common to these blended responses was thus a complex temporal as well as spatial register. Often the perception of the future was reflected through the memories of what had happened in the past. As such, these emotions were provoked by present-day worries and imagined concerns based on recalled memories. These more conventionally negative responses were therefore not static and provoked solely by present-day circumstances but were infused by a complex set of temporally and spatially derived factors.

Mixing Emotions

Local residents and built environment professionals did not just express conventionally positive or negative emotional response in isolation. Instead, both types of responses were evident. This was most evident in the use of the term ‘sublime’ as well as within discussion of the use of scaffolding within heritage-led regeneration initiatives. SAVE adopted the concept of the ‘sublime’ when discussing vast industrial complexes such as the Yorkshire Mills that ‘still impress, by their size and even grandeur. Few people would call them beautiful, fewer still picturesque. They are instead what the 18^th century called sublime’ (Binney, Reference Binney1979: 4). Contained within this was a belief that mills contained Burke’s qualities of ‘Obscurity, Power, Privations, Vastness, Infinity, Succession and Uniformity, all qualities which combine to induce a sense of awe, or ultimately of terror, in the onlooker’ (Binney, Reference Binney1979: 4). Here, it is clear that there are a set of mixed reactions to the visual dominance of industrial buildings. On the one hand, they are a source of pride and awe but also invoke fear, guilt, and/or terror.

In Campbeltown, buildings that once made people feel happy, they enjoyed using, and had fond memories of became suffused with conventionally negative emotional responses: ‘I have friends coming … and then before they came I was going, “Ah … it’s … building that is boarded up and I thought oh, … where am I gonna take them?” I felt embarrassed’ (Sally). This conventionally negative response was in spite of the fact that residents recognised that putting up scaffolding was a necessary, if unpleasant, aspect of development. As Isla recalled, ‘It was good because it was progression, there was stuff happening, but everything was so ugly and depressing.’ In addition, the scaffolding still provoked conventionally negative emotional responses even when mitigating steps were taken by the developers. Here, Gordon remarked on how being in and moving through the historic urban place generated a negative emotional response

This point was replicated in Selkirk (Figure 3) as the impact of the scaffolding on the clock tower was felt in residents’ everyday lives, as recalled by Logan: ‘Well I’m happy it’s been refurbished, because for a long time it was covered in scaffolding, and number of times you walk along the town and look up to see what time it is and the clock wasnae there!’

Figure 3 Selkirk clock tower.

Source: Canmore, Historic Environment Scotland: SC 336438 © Crown Copyright: HES. All Rights’ Reserved

Here, it is apparent that everyday lived and felt experiences of historic urban places produce a mix of conventionally positive and negative responses. The exact nature of this mix is heavily dependent on the ways in which our everyday experiences are disrupted by the process of urban change. As such, isolating emotions can only lead us so far. We may be able to interrogate pride or fear, but we cannot divorce them from the range of other emotional responses that are inextricably bound up within the emotional register of historic urban places: an emotional hangover from the 1960s does not just produce fear but also anxiety, worry, regret, pain, and suspicion with short and long-term consequences for people and place. Isolating and combining emotional responses and seeing them as part of composite emotional experiences based on place and time is therefore crucial to developing an understanding of why historic places matter emotionally to people.

Conclusion

We know that historic urban places matter emotionally because they have the capacity to provoke different kinds of emotional responses. In this section alone, twenty-one responses were expressed and were mixed between conventionally positive and negative (see Figure 4).

Figure 4 Emotion words used in this section.

Source: mentimeter.com. All Rights’ Reserved

The plural, rich, and complex emotional register outlined in this section arose from a number of recurring themes. First, it is undeniable that the architectural and historic characteristics of the places are influential in the expression of emotional responses. This ranged from the conventionally positive words associated with the beauty of Paisley Abbey and also the ‘oldest purpose-built cinema’ in Campbeltown to the conventionally negative words associated with the ‘regrettable’ post-Second World War replacement buildings. Architectural and historic interest were therefore key in the expression of emotion words.

Second, the everyday lived and felt experiences of the historic urban place were crucial in the formation of a person’s emotional responses. From the impact of scaffolding to the use of the Picture House, the ways in which people lived their daily lives in place conditioned their use of emotion words. Not being able to see the clock on the clock tower and/or not being able to show friends and visitors around the parts of the town that matter to you co-existed alongside cumulative visits to the Picture House or driving past the abbey in stimulating conventionally positive emotions.

Third, working with historic urban places was also a powerful generator of emotional responses. These could be seen throughout the urban development process including working with special places, securing consents, and the enjoyment of finishing the job. Working directly with historic urban places provoked a range of emotional responses including pleasure and pride in built environment professionals but also an awareness that their work had to be cognisant of emotional responses held by others.

Examining emotional responses to historic urban places tells us a lot about the ways people express their own feelings about places and the ways in which architectural and historic interest and people’s lived, felt, and worked experiences frame emotional registers. A close reading of emotional responses also reminds us that emotions do not happen in isolation, that we can rarely, if ever, separate pride or fear for example from other types of emotions, positive or negative. However, emotional responses cannot, on their own, tell us whether our emotional relationships are volatile, fleeting, ‘in the moment’ feelings or the product of a deeper, more profound connection to historic urban places. Indeed, we need to ‘distinguish between the primary experience of place which triggers an immediate, emotional and unreflective response, and the more reflective processes which, over time, lead to attachment’ (Johnston, Reference Johnston1992: 12). Attachment is the subject of the next section and the second component of why historic places matter emotionally.

Forming Attachments

The need to form attachments to place can be considered through the lens of ontological security, defined as ‘the confidence that most human beings have in the continuity of their self‐identity and the constancy of the surrounding social and material environments of action’ (Giddens, Reference Giddens1990: 2). This theme was developed in a heritage context by Jane Grenville (Reference Grenville2007; Reference Grenville2015), who explored how our ontological security is affected through external shocks such as war or financial crises. This section takes up this theme by examining the ways in which historic urban places can support ontological security through their permanence. For example, built environment professionals demonstrated an acute awareness of the ways in which particular kinds of buildings can provide

Mark and Callum considered permanence through the lens of security: ‘I think we all need to feel secure in our lives and the built environment is part of that feeling of security. You need to know that when you leave your house it is going to look like it did yesterday’ (Mark). Callum went deeper to discuss the materiality of historic place and how buildings, new and old, were designed to provide that subliminal sense of security and permanence: ‘And I think there’s evidence that some of the oldest medieval cathedrals put too much structure in for the psychological sense that it’s not gonna fall down on my head.’ Allied to this was a belief that familiarity was important to why historic urban places matter:

Pubs, alongside churches, have long been a locus of attachment as demonstrated by the number of campaigns to prevent their loss. For example, SAVE teamed up with The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) in 1983, as they realised that pubs were under threat from urban redevelopment and that ‘the surviving pubs of redeveloped city centres and inner-city areas remain as anchors in a shattered environment’ (Binney and Milne, Reference Binney and Milne1983: 30). In addition to this, their joint publication recognised that ‘the buildings themselves often give a sense of security in our changing times’ (Reference Binney and Milne1983: 31). This sense of permanence and familiarity was paralleled by a focus on comfort and calm. Built environment professional Brian, for example, discussed this with reference to street lighting by eloquently considering why comfort and familiarity and history could go together:

This was complemented by the belief from Callum, a built environment professional, that historic urban places could calm our senses:

In terms of local residents, Paisley Abbey was felt to be a restorative place and as such part of their daily rhythms and routines. Annabel remembered coming ‘out of the town centre, busy, people, traffic, and then you come to this small oasis of calm, and it has that about it’. Annabel went further to state that ‘it’s a kind of lowering the blood pressure kind of place’. Remembering how familiar places made you feel is of importance here and shows how memory and feeling can translate into a deeper emotional relationship. This was demonstrated in Campbeltown as Isla believed that ‘the people have got ownership of the Picture House because they have memories about it, and they grew up and they went to it’. This familiarity generated by particular types of felt experiences, in this case the calm felt by being in and around the Abbey and also by sedimenting memories in place through repeated use, saw people develop a sense of felt ownership of place that signals something deeper than just enjoyment of place and closer to an attachment to place.

These psycho-emotional states of comfort, safety, security, and ownership provoked by our layered lived and felt experiences in place are the reason historic urban places can stimulate attachments. They demonstrate our relationship to something deeper and more enduring. Historic buildings collect layers upon layers of stories, experiences, and memories which over time produce, in Callum’s words a ‘sense of belonging’ and an ‘affiliation’. Callum went on to say, ‘They, by definition, have authenticity ‘cause they exist over time and there’s a familiarity with that that makes us feel an affiliation, whether it be civic or communion, pub or schools or just stories, so it’s thick with that.’ Whether the terms used are ownership (Isla) or belonging (Callum), it is clear that the constancy of the material environment and its capacity to generate everyday experiences is crucial in the formation of emotional attachments.

Within this context, we can identify a number of different aspects of historic urban places that people form attachments to. These are summarised in the animation in Video 1 and are comprised of a number of interlocking parts. Crucially, these variables both include and go beyond the architectural and historic value of built heritage to also recognise intangible aspects of historic urban places. Some of these parts would be recognised within the traditional approach to heritage conservation that validates built fabric whereas others are more akin to the people-centred approach as they reveal how everyday experiences in place affect the formation of attachment. What is crucial within this is that ongoing heritage management initiatives, be they designation, listed building consent, and/or changes to the setting of historic places need to be cognisant of the emotional value of these places beyond their tangible existence. They are not just static memorials to a valued past but rather they are part of the fluid continuum of everyday lives, shaping stories, memories, and future meanings and it is because of both that people can form emotional attachments that in turn help to nourish their sense of self and a sense of place.

Disrupting Attachments

Given the powerful psycho-emotional states provoked by historic urban places, it is unsurprising that changes to the familiar environment can disrupt attachments between people and place and cause the obverse: ontological insecurity. Loss of the familiar environment can produce both grief and dislocation which in turn can disrupt or even sever existing attachments as well as prevent the creation of new attachments between people and place.

This sense of loss, pain, and dislocation is particularly acute in times of rapid urban change such as with urban renewal initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, Fried showed how the loss of the familiar environment induced a process of grief not dissimilar to losing a loved one (Reference Fried2000) whereas Lynch (Reference Lynch1960: 42) found an almost ‘pathological attachment’ to the remaining built environment during the urban renewal initiatives in North America and Fullilove (Reference Fullilove2016) identified the ‘root shock’ caused by forced displacement. Although not theorised as ontological insecurity, it is clear that within SAVE’s early publications there was a deep awareness of the link between conservation and psycho-emotional states. For example, SAVE identified the ‘stability signified by unchanging buildings’, which they saw as ‘psychologically valuable, particularly in a violent and rapidly changing world’ (SAVE Britain’s Heritage, 1975: 1289). It followed through with their understandings of the psychological impacts of urban change by again drawing attention to the psycho-emotional elements of conservation

Here, SAVE acknowledged the complex emotional register bound up within the stability of a familiar environment as physical destruction was married with psychological dislocation as a person’s everyday rhythms and routines were disrupted and the familiar became unfamiliar. In these ways, changes to the external environment ensured that ‘the continued existence of familiar surroundings may satisfy a psychological need, which even if irrational, is very real’ as ‘nothing gives more tangible assurance of stability than bricks and mortar’ (Cantell in Hubbard, Reference Hubbard1993: 363).

A sense of dislocation was evident in the ways in which local residents viewed some of the conservation work on their town’s historic buildings. For example, in Selkirk, the work to conserve the clock tower was met with a discussion about the effects of weathering on the look and feel of the town. Logan believed that the new stone ‘sticks out like a sore thumb’ but that within five years ‘it’ll be back to what it should be’. Logan went further to recall

Sharon on the other hand ‘didn’t mind the patchiness’ as ‘the fact that it is an old thing that is new and … really looked after, is a really positive thing, rather than just looking a bit faded and needing a bit of a face wash. I think that’s really positive, in fact. Yes, look, back to how it started!’ Here the temporal aspect of familiarity gained importance as the residents discussed the process of weathering to ensure that the building could continue to match their lived and felt experiences of their town. This exchange also highlights a key aspect of the intensity of attachments and the extent to which people felt uncomfortable or dissatisfied with change as opposed to the type of change that would fundamentally rupture their attachment to place as seen with the urban renewal initiatives of the mid to late twentieth century. The example of weathering did not come with a consensus nor strong emotional responses but rather a sense of in-the-moment dislocation and discomfort that would recede over time.

The spectrum from feeling dissatisfied with or detached from place was evident through the visceral reactions to new and replacement buildings. This was clearly expressed throughout SAVE Britain’s Heritage’s reports in the 1980s, as post-war redevelopment was decried across England. In Manchester, there was an awareness of ‘considerable public disenchantment with the products of this period, a dislike for the oppressive architecture it produced, and a nostalgic interest in what was destroyed’ (Powell, Reference Powell1982b: np). This set of complex emotional responses fed into a general belief that the people of Manchester ‘are dissatisfied with blank, bland and monotonous modern buildings’ (Powell, Reference Powell1982b: np). Gateshead was deemed to be a ‘pleasureless, utilitarian place’ and it was felt to be ‘doubtful if future generations will find pleasure in the creations of post-war architects and planners there’ (Powell, Reference Powell1982c: np), whereas ‘Wilfred Burn’s 1967 prospectus for the rebuilding of Newcastle is a vision of horror’ (Powell, Reference Powell1982a: np). In Leeds, the emotional response was cooler than in Newcastle as ‘the architectural form of the new development was profoundly disappointing’, whereas other developments were seen to be ‘uninspiring’ (Powell, Reference Powell1986: np). Here we can see the use of words such as ‘disenchantment’, ‘dislike’, ‘dissatisfied’, and ‘disappointing’, which suggests a lack of attachment to the new environment. However, it is important to note that attitudes and attachments can change over time as SAVE recognised that their ‘own views on some of the buildings it originally campaigned against – such as the Gateshead car park – have been reversed’ (Wilkinson, Reference Wilkinson2006: 109). Changes to the existing urban environment have the capacity to disrupt attachments between people and place. At times these can be temporary, as shown with the clock tower, whereas others can have a longer-lasting effect on both the place and on a person. This does not just arise from the demolition of existing buildings but also from the extent to which people can create new attachments with replacement buildings.

Intensity of Attachment to Place

Attachments to place can vary in their intensity and fluctuate both between people and over time. Sometimes there are strong attachments to place which are often demonstrated by a desire to exhibit place protective behaviour. One example of this is seen with SAVE Britain’s Heritage work to both prevent the loss of historic buildings and put forward alternative schemes. Further examples can be seen with the use of community asset transfers, right to buy, and the use of community shares and participatory budgeting. At a local level, the decision by the Campbeltown-based South Kintyre Development Trust ‘to acquire the building on behalf of the local community and to seek the necessary funding to redevelop the building and bring it back into full public use’Footnote ¹² demonstrated the importance of this historic building to the people of Campbeltown:

Action to prevent the loss and/or secure the future of a historic building could be seen solely in pragmatic terms yet a large body of evidence from environmental psychology suggests that this form of place protective behaviour is motivated by an attachment to place as shown by the local residents’ strength of feelings towards their ‘precious’ Town Hall to which they felt a ‘commitment’ (Penny).

However, not all people develop attachments to all historic urban places. In Scottish towns, the emoji workshops saw residents vote ‘neutral’ when asked how particular historic urban places made them feel. Neutral was largely equivocated with indifference with residents in Campbeltown, Rothesay, and Paisley each stating they ‘didn’t care’ about certain places which included museums, residential, and retail buildings. For example, in Paisley, the Secret Collection – a collection of museum items that were previously in storage drew a neutral response

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Staying in Paisley, reasons for neutral responses could be summed up by a dialogue between the participants

These neutral responses demonstrate that there can be either weak attachments to places or an absence of attachment. The origins of the place attachment field prioritised positive attachments to place and as such there remains a gap in the depth of understanding concerning weaker attachments and how people go through a process of detachment. Some of these aspects are explored through what Manzo (Reference Manzo, Manzo and Devine-Wright2014) has termed the ‘shadow side’ of place attachment, which sees home as both a safe and unsafe haven and through territorial conflicts (de Bakker, Reference de Bakker2022). However, in the case of the emoji workshops in Campbeltown, Kirriemuir, Paisley, Rothesay, and Selkirk, the reasons related to the fact that residents felt no connection with the stories behind the buildings or the buildings had not formed part of their everyday experiences, or it didn’t appear to fit with their narrative of place. Other reasons included having no memory of the place and/or feeling that they could not create future memories with the place due to the expense of visiting or the fact that the new use was not considered to be in line with the needs of existing residents.

Differing intensities of attachment to the same places were evident during the initial stages of the transition from deindustrial to post-industrial in the late twentieth century and were revealed through the conflicting positions adopted by different people. These positions were broadly based on the strong attachments of those for whom the towns were their home, their former workplace, and the site of numerous inter-generational stories, and the weaker attachments expressed by those charged with trying to secure a post-industrial future for the place. SAVE’s reports outlined this tension:

In this example, we can see how competing priorities impinged on the heritage of Yorkshire towns which affected both the architectural and historic value of industrial heritage and attachments between people and their place. SAVE further demonstrated their awareness of these relationships between people and place through a comparative exploration of how people felt about and remembered their places in both Yorkshire and in the United States of America

These memories were not just held internally or expressed through oral histories but also gradually translated into action to conserve the place’s industrial heritage. This shift was seen in Halifax:

At the heart of these statements is a gradual realisation of why place matters and a desire to maintain a connection to what the place once was as it transitioned into an unknown future. However, these strong attachments to place were not often recognised by those for whom there was a stronger attachment to what the place could become and a desire to resolve a more pressing set of socio-economic priorities

Heritage in this interpretation was seen by some as an irrelevance and a hindrance to plans to secure a prosperous future for the town. In both examples, a complex process of detachment and attachment plays out through different temporal horizons. For some, nurturing existing attachments is pre-eminent, for others a process of detachment happens as people become physically displaced and psychologically dislocated and people seek to form new attachments, whereas for others there is an attachment to an imagined future place. In each of these scenarios the feelings can be equally intense but can compete with one another. For example, an imagined and hoped-for attachment to a newly regenerated place can obscure powerful existing attachments to place yet these temporal horizons do not have to be in competition with one another. As SAVE recognised, ‘for new buildings to be successful they must become part of a stable environment, with the city preserving its identity and sense of durability and permanence amid the changes’ (Binney, Reference Binney1979: 24). Through this lens, existing attachments could be nurtured, new ones built, and imagined futures realised. However, to achieve this ‘planning must treat the existing environment with respect and care, and even with love, rather than inflicting conventional formulae on to unique situations’ (Binney, Reference Binney1979: 25). Within this context, it is difficult to see how a ‘one size fits all’ approach could be taken as the intensity of attachments will vary in each time and each place and between people. Of crucial importance here is ensuring that both existing and future attachments to place are validated within the process of urban change.

Conclusion

This section has demonstrated that historic urban places matter emotionally because they have the capacity to stimulate and disrupt emotional attachments between people and place. The emotional attachments outlined in this section arose from two key themes. Firstly, attachments are existentially connected to a psycho-emotional state of ontological (in)security and secondly, they are derived from our everyday lived and felt experiences of familiar urban places. The type, nature, extent, and pace of urban change fundamentally shapes the ways in which people form attachments, the extent to which these attachments are disrupted, and the intensity of peoples’ attachment to historic urban places.

The temporal dimension of historic place attachment assumes a key role within this analysis. The permanence and stability of a familiar environment ensures that there is potential for more people to develop rhythms, routines, stories, memories, and meanings that translate into emotional responses and emotional attachments. Furthermore, emotional attachments to historic urban places are formed, disrupted, and vary in their intensities because the past, present and future co-exist in both the psycho-emotional and everyday emotional register. In this interpretation, the past does not de facto assume precedence in the formation and maintenance of emotional attachments. Rather, it is a fusion of the recalled, felt, and imagined experiences of historic urban places – of what they were, are, and could become – that informs attachment. Crucial within this is therefore the recognition that emotional attachments are fluid and are not fixed in time, in person, or in place – attachments can form, strengthen, evolve, and weaken and can differ between people in the same place. As such, as this section has highlighted, emotional attachments are not universal, and people can have strong or weak attachments and/or become detached from historic urban places. The examples in this section build from emotional responses to demonstrate the complex processes through which emotional attachments are formed and disrupted and the varying intensities of these attachments to historic urban places. The extent to which these are individually formed or communally shared is the subject of the next section, as we move to consider the third aspect of the conceptual framework: emotional communities.

Place-Based Emotional Communities

As Sections 2 and 3 showed, a person’s emotional relationship with historic places develops from their lived and felt experiences. These place-based experiences ingrain meanings and memories resulting from our everyday rhythms and routines. Being in place, thinking about place, and using place are each key components of how and why we respond emotionally and form attachments. Each of these experiences can be intensely individual but they cannot be divorced from their shared social context, as such historic places have the capacity to produce emotional communities who can value and share a similar emotional register.

In Campbeltown, the emoji workshop revealed that residents either felt very happy and happy when asked how the Picture House made them feel (Figure 5). The reasons for this shared response were at once individual and communal

Figure 5 Campbeltown Picture House.

Source: Canmore, Historic Environment Scotland: DP 142574 © Crown Copyright: HES. All Rights’ Reserved

Here, Sally reflects the interplay of individual and collective experiences. In essence Sally tells us how our individual experiences can be mediated through collective experiences in public and shared spaces. Together these experiences are both deeply personal and widely shared. The result is a cumulative layering of individual and collective memories resulting from shared experiences in public spaces which gives rise, in this case, to a set of conventionally positive emotions. However, place-based emotional communities do not just share positive emotional responses. This was most evident within a wider discussion of Campbeltown, as both pride and shame co-existed and manifested in individual place-protective behaviour through a sense of feeling defensive about their town

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At the root of this exchange that evoked conventionally negative responses, however, was a deep sense of attachment to Campbeltown as demonstrated by the residents subsequent actions on social media. Here, residents discussed how they responded passionately to any negative comments made about the town in a very public defence of place. In so doing, place-based emotional communities contested the different images of the town through a virtual medium that in turn served to reinforce and strengthen attachments to physical places. These feelings also moved from the individual to the collective in terms of contesting comments made on social media. This example also illustrates that there is not just one place-based emotional community, and there can also be conflict between place-based emotional communities. However, identifying which communities exist, what their shared values and emotions are, and how they may be in conflict with one another, provides a better sense of the kinds of emotional responses and attachments that exist in place.

Emotional communities, in Rosenwein’s definition, share and value similar emotions. However, this is often mediated and realised through collective discussion. For example, the process of sharing how people felt about historic places within an emoji workshop in Rothesay saw instinctive individual responses change as each participant listened to and reflected on the collective discussion. Heather, for example, changed from very happy to neutral based on shifting from her memories of what Rothesay Pavilion (Figure 6) enabled the community to do including attending concerts, playing five-a-side, debating issues within the Community Council, and going to dances to a focus on what the re-opened Pavilion might prevent, hinder, or exclude the existing community from doing. This point was discussed further as the group then turned to consider examples where the retrofit of other buildings across the UK was perceived to have ‘separated the community from the building’ (Cameron). As the discussion continued, Heather again shifted – ‘Yeah, it’s starting to make me angry actually’ – and other participants also started to both change and blend their immediate responses in the light of the group discussion:

Figure 6 Rothesay Pavilion.

Source: Canmore, Historic Environment Scotland: SC 977802 © Crown Copyright: HES. All Rights’ Reserved

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These kinds of emotional responses are common among place-based emotional communities when their use of ‘their’ places comes under threat (Madgin et al., Reference Madgin, Webb, Ruiz and Snelson2018). Responses were heightened through collective discussion, whether in person or through social media, as increased knowledge of other people’s perceptions and lived and felt experiences shape and inform people’s ongoing emotional relationships with place. However, solely focusing on the expression of emotional responses does not fully reveal the reasons why people coalesce into emotional communities. Here, it is crucial to go deeper to ascertain what people are attached to and how this is shaping their responses. For example, in Rothesay there was an attachment to the activities that the Pavilion enabled, whereas in Kirriemuir, a strong attachment to the materiality of the ‘wee red toun’ was in evidence

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In Kirriemuir (Figure 7), it is clear that these residents both value and have a shared attachment to the materiality of place. Any attempt to change or deviate from the use of red sandstone would make people angry, likely because their attachment to place would be disrupted. Anger, in this instance, masquerades as a negative emotion, but through the lens of attachment we can see that the response needs to be contextualised and actually reflects a positive set of feelings towards place. Without such a positive attachment to place it is doubtful if anger could be expressed. Looking beyond the response and towards the attachment therefore gives a deeper understanding of why people coalesce into emotional communities.

Figure 7 Kirriemuir 31 High Street, Town House.

Source: Canmore, Historic Environment Scotland: SC 2625533 © Crown Copyright: HES. All Rights’ Reserved

Together, the Picture House, Campbeltown, the Rothesay Pavilion, and the ‘wee red toun’ demonstrate how individual and collective lived and felt experiences of public spaces can produce rich emotional responses that cannot just be taken at face value as they are often underpinned by deeply held attachments. Running alongside this is the architectural and historic value of the buildings and their materiality. In each example, the way the Picture House, Campbeltown, the Rothesay Pavilion and Kirriemuir looked in terms of their architecture, materiality, and/or present-day condition were referenced by residents as to why these places mattered emotionally to them. This valorisation of the built fabric could not, however, be divorced from their daily rhythms and routines and their ingrained memories resulting from their lived and felt experiences of place. Place-based emotional communities are therefore relational and informed by the relationships between social experiences and the physical look and feel of historic places.

Practice-Based Emotional Communities

The Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD) developed by Laurajane Smith (Reference 81Smith2020) highlights the ‘emotional neutrality’ (53) of heritage decision-making. This is supported by work within the wider built environment sector, which suggests that ‘planners typically conceptualise themselves as professionals not emotionally engaged with their work’ (Ferriera, Reference Ferreira2013: 703). Evidence to support the AHD/rational planning system was particularly apparent as some built environment professionals shared a view that emotion is synonymous with subjectivity. In this view, emotion was seen as the antonym of rational and objective decision-making and therefore should be rejected within professionalised decision-making including designation and managing change. In the context of heritage designation, built environment professional Howard supported Smith’s work on the AHD as he discussed the need for criteria and therefore how the process is ‘not particularly emotional’. Howard also supported Hoch’s findings with regards to the planning system:

A further built environment professional, Joe, supported Howard’s views, stating, ‘I’m not a great fan of emotional reactions, either one way or the other. There’s no emotion involved to what I’m saying. I’m saying this is going to have to be removed because … I’m not emotionally involved in that decision. It’s a practical thing.’ Joe went further to talk through how his ‘love’ of historic buildings had to be factored out within his own professional decision-making processes

Across these examples we can see that certain words signal practices that align with the lexicon attached to AHD/rational planning system: ‘dispassionate’, ‘concrete’, ‘scientific’, ‘practical’, and ‘objective’. When asked separately if emotion was considered within decision-making built environment professionals, Howard and Martin, both gave similar answers by stating that we are ‘absolutely objective’ (Howard) and ‘completely objective’ (Martin). However, over the course of the answer, Martin shifted to consider the boundaries between personal and professional but rested with a belief that emotion, both as a way of decision-making and category of information, was at best a tiny aspect of decision-making

To go from this position to suggest that heritage and wider built environment professionals could coalesce into a community that values emotion therefore feels quite a leap. However, there are two caveats here. First, while it is clear that some built environment professionals favour objectivity and apply a detached and rational approach to considering heritage designation and planning applications, this does not rule out the existence of emotion. Here, we can explore the extent to which ‘neutrality and rationality, or affecting a “cool logic”, are all states of emotional being’ (Smith, Reference 81Smith2020: 49). Smith, in the context of emotions within museums/heritage sites, develops the discussion to state that ‘the flat emotions of professional practice, where an “objective emotional neutrality” may be striven for, are nonetheless as much as an affective practice as public memorialising and commemorating the grief and distress of historical atrocities’ (61). If we apply this logic in the context of Rosenwein’s definition then a practice-based emotional community is evident in the ways in which built environment professionals collectively value a flatter emotional register within their decision-making processes.

Second, it is also apparent that some built environment professionals did demonstrate shared emotional responses and attachments to historic urban places. This was most evident at a personal level, where a number of built environment professionals expressed positive emotional responses to historic urban places. For example, Martin, like Joe, talked of his ‘love’ of history and the historic environment:

This was supported by the fact that Roy felt

This interest in the past, in imagining what it felt like to live in or use the buildings in the past, was further developed both by Martin, who recalled visiting historic sites, and Lesley who reflected on walking through a mix of old and new buildings:

‘Love’, ‘passion’, ‘fascination’, ‘amazement’, ‘interest’, and ‘imagination’ are each words that reoccurred in the shared emotional register of built environment professionals when considering their own emotional relationships with historic urban places. In addition, built environment professionals also expressed their attachments to historic urban places as well. For example, Roy reflected on his own family history in which buildings in his childhood city had repeatedly been demolished to state that ‘buildings matter to me because of the importance that they have in tying today’s community back into history’. Here Roy’s familial lived experience gave him a deeply felt awareness of the importance of historic buildings. This sense of attachment to historic place was also demonstrated by a number of built environment professionals, exemplified by Mark who reflected many of the themes outlined in Section 3 by talking about an awareness of the need for identity, safety, and security and how the historic environment can act as an anchor

Among built environment professionals there is therefore evidence of a group of people that ‘adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value–or devalue–the same or related emotions’ (Rosenwein, Reference Rosenwein2006: 2) whether that is in embracing a ‘cool logic’ or by demonstrating a positive emotional relationship with the past. The extent to which this is replicated within professional organisations is less clear. Using the example of SAVE in their early years, between 1975 and 1991, it is evident that there is an awareness of the emotional relationships held by place-based communities in much of their work. SAVE outlined, ‘The root of our belief is that people do care about the places where they live, work and shop, that they are concerned about the devastation meted out to historic towns since the Second World War’ (Binney and Watson Smyth, Reference Binney and Watson-Smyth1991: 22). This rhetoric was matched by the reality that SAVE often collaborated with place-based organisations as part of their campaign work. Indeed, as with pairing with the Derby Civic Society (Figure 8), much of SAVE’s work took ‘the form of Mayday calls from local people concerned about the imminent loss of a local landmark’ (11) and through this delicate balance of national amenity society and local issue were able to demonstrate an awareness of the psycho-emotional consequences of urban change.

Figure 8 Cutting the Heart out of Derby: Report by SAVE Britain’s Heritage.

Source: Copyright SAVE Britain’s Heritage. Image drawn by Robin Ollington. All Rights’ Reserved

For example, in Manchester, SAVE recognised that the demolition of the Lancaster Arcade was: ‘(as the Victorian Society commented), “a subject highly emotive to many Mancunians”’ (Powell, Reference Powell1982b: np). SAVE went further to match emotion to action by suggesting, ‘The old heart of Manchester needs new life and new prosperity. Its people are dissatisfied with blank, bland and monotonous modern buildings. Manchester cannot afford to consign the Cathedral Conservation Area to the bulldozer’ (Powell, Reference Powell1982b: np). In this example, there was therefore an awareness both of the fact that there was an emotional relationship between Mancunians and Manchester and that retaining historic buildings was an essential part of preserving this relationship. Contained within this is the capability within the organisation to ascertain the emotional register of place-based communities. This was not just restricted to Manchester. SAVE’s original manifesto spoke of the ‘pain’ of loss in general (SAVE Britain’s Heritage, 1975: 1289), and a report into Liverpool recognised that ‘more than perhaps any other major British city, it inspires affection amongst its natives and a deep fascination amongst outsiders’ (Powell, Reference Powell1982a: np). In Leeds, SAVE felt, ‘The clearances were motivated by idealistic intentions, but the results were not entirely happy. Ancient communities were ruthlessly scattered and the new housing estates were even bleaker that those of the 1930s’ (Powell, Reference Powell1986, np). However, in Newcastle, ‘The town centre has been largely wrecked and it is doubtful if future generations will find pleasure in the creations of post-war architects and planners there’ (Powell, Reference Powell1982c: np).

The work of an organisation to prevent the loss of historic places is a highly emotive practice and SAVE crucially took the form of finding ‘sympathetic developers and investors in the commercial sector’ and supporting numerous alternative schemes to come forward (Binney, Reference Binney2016: 3–6). Marcus Binney (Reference Binney2016), now Executive President of SAVE, recalled, ‘Above all, over these forty years, ours has been a message of hope: that great buildings can live again, giving satisfaction, delight and inspiration to all who see and use them’ (13). This message of hope was transformed into sustained action by SAVE by bringing together and working with other built environment professionals and place-based communities to recognise the past, present, and future values of historic places. In so doing, SAVE repeatedly demonstrated an acute awareness of the role of emotion within the process of conservation and could therefore be said to ‘adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value–or devalue–a shared set’ (Rosenwein, Reference Rosenwein2006:2) of emotional responses and attachments to historic urban places

Conclusion

This section has demonstrated that historic urban places matter emotionally because communities develop shared emotional registers. Both place- and practice-based emotional communities coalesce around a shared set of emotional responses and demonstrate collective attachments to historic urban places. This is evident both by the words used by local residents and built environment professionals and their actions including investing in and working with historic urban places, campaigning for historic urban places, and commenting on social media feeds. We can also identify examples within both place- and practice-based emotional communities where these responses and attachments and the very notion of emotion are contested. Emotional communities, like any community, are not homogenous and are conditioned by a range of different factors including positionality, power, and professionalised contexts. However, at root we can identify that emotional communities exist and at times they overlap and at times they are in tension. The next section turns to consider the ways in and extent to which the heritage and planning system can productively recognise and work with the responses and attachments of emotional communities.

From Words to Action

As seen in Section 1, there has been considerable evolution in the rhetoric that surrounds both the heritage and planning systems in the UK. This rhetorical shift is reflective of a more fundamental challenge to the traditional view of the inherent value of heritage as being rooted in physical fabric only to be uncovered by professional experts (the Authorised Heritage Discourse) by a more people-centred approach that instead pluralises both what can be seen as heritage and who can ascribe value. Much of the impetus for this move is expressed through international heritage charters, which outline evolving approaches to determining cultural significance and managing change in the historic environment, such as the revised Burra Charter (1999), the Faro Convention (2005), the Quebec Declaration (2008), and most recently the People-Centred Resolution from the International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), which resolved to:

The extent to which this rhetorical shift is matched by changes to policies and practices is more limited. However, built environment professionals did reflect on three areas where policy and practice had developed in the twenty-first century in ways that could, in theory, recognise emotion. The first one was in England, through the introduction of communal values within Historic England’s Conservation Principles, which are intended to help guide and manage change in the historic environment. Both the original principles (2008) and the Consultation Document on the Conservation Principles (2017) contain explicit references to emotion. In terms of how this could move beyond rhetoric, built environment professional Mark discussed the following:

A second way in which people’s attachments to place could be recognised was expressed by built environment professional Roy who stated, ‘The public sector equality duty is an area where judges have to grapple with the question of whether a decision was taken having regard to the due interests of communities.’ While Roy went on to recognise that it is the

Here, emotion and feeling were recognised within existing legal processes, even if as Roy further stated this was ‘mostly about the need to comply with the right to be heard’.

A third way in which the changing regulatory environment has opened up the potential for attachment to be recognised within the system comes through community ownership in both England and Scotland. Here, Roy talked of the link between assets of community value (ACV) and how people’s attachments to place reveal their sense of felt ownership:

As recognised in Section 3, pubs have the capacity to be an anchor in a changing urban world, which in turn can motivate the type of place protective behaviour mentioned by Roy. In Scotland, this was paralleled by the case of Campbeltown Town Hall and the Picture House, which are both owned on behalf of the local community and, like pubs, shows that there is an outlet for people’s attachment to place to be recognised in law.

Running alongside these policy/practice developments are also a raft of financial mechanisms that now enable attachments to place recognised through direct action. For example, the use of community shares, participatory budgeting, and grant schemes from organisations like the National Lottery Heritage Fund each offer a way in which communities felt ownership can transfer into legal ownership (Madgin in Kintrea and Madgin, Reference Madgin, Kintrea and Madgin2019). However, there must be a note of caution within these financial mechanisms, as they each put the onus on emotional communities being able to buy, redevelop, and maintain historic places. The extent to which attachments to place can be nurtured is therefore conditioned by economic and logistical factors. Systems that enable the everyday experiences of place to transition from felt ownership into actual ownership may be nascent, but the lens of emotion helps to develop a fuller understanding of how and why these mechanisms are taken up by place-based communities.

Locating Emotion

The rest of this section moves away from the macro policy level to instead focus on a place-based analysis. Within this, it is possible to identify six broad areas from the research in which emotion, in the form of responses, attachments, and communities, was recognised within decisions about individual sites (Figure 9).

Figure 9 Where emotion is located within urban development.

Source: We Are Cognitive (Madgin, Reference Madgin2021c). All Rights’ Reserved. The above infographic can be split into two key themes: working with existing emotional relationships and negotiating new emotional relationships and forms the basis of the following sections

Existing Emotional Relationships

Debating change within historic urban places is arguably the most emotive aspect of heritage and planning. This can take place within both written and verbal settings, and it can also take place within planning offices, courtrooms, place-based campaigns, and community engagement initiatives. In the context of planning objections, built environment professional Mark stated that the ‘decision maker – the planning inspector or the secretary of state – can’t put a lot of weight on how passionately you believe something in the majority of cases’. Emotion can be expressed and recognised but on its own it is unlikely to be persuasive

Here, it is evident that emotion, as a way of making arguments or decisions, is contested within a highly professionalised context in which decisions about the future of places are carefully and judiciously considered alongside a range of other factors. However, if we look beyond emotion as a way of passionately presenting an argument, we can start to see that there are emotional categories of information within the argument. For example, built environment professional Roy, continuing the legal theme, recognised the following:

In both examples, we can see that emotional arguments are likely to be informed by a person’s existing attachments to the place they are arguing for. The extent to which these attachments are neglected or rejected within the system was recognised by Paisley resident Thelma, who stated, ‘Change of use happens without reference to the people who would use the facilities.’ This statement opens up a conversation surrounding both the inclusion of local people in decision-making and also their everyday experiences of using places which can shape the ways in which attachments are formed and/or disrupted through existing systems.

In order to present passionately and infuse your language with anger, fear, joy, or pride, it is likely that a person holds a profound attachment to that place and is, as seen in Section 4, engaging in place-protective behaviour. In essence, the people and communities recognised by Mark and Roy are trying to convey what their place means to them in the ways that feel most authentic to them. This may not always be in the measured and detached rhetoric more common to legal processes but rather their form of expression is true to how place-based communities feel about their place and the future that they need for their sense of self and sense of place. Roy alluded to this through the use of ‘our community’ and how a sense of not understanding the needs and desires of place-based communities provoked raw emotions. An emotional argument therefore may not just be a rhetorical device but, as Roy partially demonstrated, through active and deep listening it is possible to hear the variety of responses and recognise the deep attachments held by place-based emotional communities. Here, it is important to note that the professionalised systems and structures that underpin both the heritage and planning systems in the UK have ingrained particular ways of communicating and validating particular forms of expert knowledge. In the two examples recalled by Mark and Roy, we can identify a clash in the preferred styles of communication (Ruiz et al., Reference Ruiz, Snelson, Madgin and Webb2019). This is both verbal and written as Mark reflects ‘the emotional side is very much at the forefront of what we do, even though it may not come across in the documents. It is hard to express that.’ We can also see that the emotional information in the messages conveyed by local residents and communities cannot yet be validated within the existing systems. This does not mean, however, that emotional relationships do not exist but rather that, in these examples, they are not able to be fully recognised and therefore neglected or rejected as valid forms of information that can shape decisions concerning possible futures for historic urban places.

A fear that the attachments that people held for their places would not be validated was evident across the conversations with residents and took many different forms. In Kirriemuir, this was grounded in a belief that the red sandstone from the ‘wee red toun’ would be lost and any place protective action that could result from this.

This desire to ‘resist’ in Kirriemuir was matched by campaigns led by SAVE, often in partnership with local organisations. For example, in Gateshead, SAVE reported how ‘a spirited campaign was mounted by the many local people who did not want to leave their homes’ (Powell, Reference Powell1982c: np), whereas in the case of Yorkshire mills, SAVE drew on the published work of Tamara Haraven and Randolph Langenbach in North America to demonstrate ‘the factory workers and their families had a very special feeling for the massive industrial buildings all around them’ (Binney, Reference Binney1979: 3). Satanic Mills, the book of the exhibition held in 1979 ‘sold out within ten days’ mainly to local people, who believed: ‘These mills are part of our lives. We don’t want them torn down’ (SAVE, 2005: 18). In Newcastle, the emphasis was placed on businesses: ‘The tenants shared the local press’s fears that the arcade (Handyside Arcade, Percy Street) would be “Eldonised” and its character lost. They saw clearly the threat to their own livelihoods’ (Powell, Reference Powell1982a: np). Within each of these examples we can see that SAVE recognised that people have attachments to their homes, industrial buildings, and the character of retail areas. If we go further we can see that these attachments were based on both the use of the built environment and their historic and architectural interest. These are just a handful of examples where a national organisation was able to understand the needs and desires of place-based emotional communities formed of residents, civic organisations, and businesses in ways that could retain meaningful places for local communities and thus provide the opportunity for existing attachments to be nurtured rather than neglected.

In the context of working with the public, there were mixed views. In Paisley, some local residents were sceptical about ‘consultation’:

This view is mirrored in the wider literature, and is perhaps best expressed by Grosvenor (2019), an international organisation involved in urban property, who found trust levels in development were low and could be restored if ‘predicated on a better quality conversation between local councils, private developers and the public’ (7). In addition to this, the Quality of Life Foundation, in conjunction with Landsec, found that ‘trust is vital but often absent in community engagement processes’ and that they ‘need to listen to communities in a meaningful way’, which ‘may require more creative and interactive methods of community engagement, rather than just surveys and interviews’ (Quality of Life Foundation and Landsec, 2023: 5). Despite an increasing focus on people-centred approaches, there remains a lack of trust in planning and development. Moves to improve practice are now evident through the Community Charter put forward by Grosvenor (2020), and through an increasing focus on people-centred methods (Edwards and Purohit, Reference Edwards and Purohit2023).

On the ground, this was shown by built environment professional Rachel who talked of the need to recognise existing emotional communities, particularly in the context of understanding their collective memories and seeing their historic places as lieux de memoire rather than a development site

Rachel was attuned to the fact that emotion is an integral aspect of people’s relationships with place and that the traditional communication styles ingrained within heritage and planning systems can often clash. While there may have been a clash of communication styles in legal settings described earlier by Mark and Roy, here Rachel actively worked with emotion as both information and method to understand place and the consequences of change. In a similar vein, Grace talked about having to work with the grain of place, to recognise that people held attachments to place names and the need to validate their desires and emotions, in this case pride, within any future plans

Rachel and Grace aligned, in the language of this Element, with a need to identify existing place-based emotional communities: to understand how individuals and collectives felt about their places through using different types of community engagement exercises. Rachel and Grace both alluded to the importance of memory, whether as a result of living, visiting, or working with place, within the formation of responses, attachments, and communities. Rachel went one step further to state that, in her experience, often ‘the attachment is around the memories, not about the building’. Rachel’s view, however, can be taken further to consider the relationship between the memory and the building and in particular how memories of a place can give people a sense of felt ownership. This is a type of ownership that has no legal basis in that it does not refer to private property rights or government ownership. Instead, it is informed by psycho-emotional experiences in which people feel like their investment in place is so powerful that their attachment can manifest as felt ownership. In essence, their feelings are powerful due to the intensity of their emotional attachment to the historic place. This was eloquently explained by a built environment professional, Roy, as he discussed Covent Garden: ‘Covent Garden is a greatly cherished and much-loved piece of the urban landscape. It is owned by the public really in a sense. Well, it is owned by Capital & Counties, but the public – and I would be one of them – feel that I have a stake in it’. Local resident Isla, in Section 2, also touched on this, believing that ‘people have got ownership of the Picture House’. We can build on this to consider the ways in which memories embedded in place may be at risk of being lost between generations. In Burnley, SAVE discussed the intangible elements of conservation in which these intergenerational stories of place and the attachments that they generate may be lost as places undergo radical change

SAVE’s report recognised the importance of retaining historic fabric in strengthening connections both between generations and between children and place. Nurturing attachments is not just about ensuring the continuity of an individual’s relationship with place but also that these relationships can be strengthened and adapted over generations. Memory is not just something in the past or a nostalgic reflection on the history of place but rather an active agent in nurturing intergenerational attachments to place. In these ways memory and emotion were recognised within campaigns and community engagement initiatives.

The ability to recognise memories and attachments was evident in the case of the redevelopment of the former Royal Infirmary, now named Quartermile, in Edinburgh, where built environment professionals attempted to understand who would be part of their engagement exercises and what mattered to these communities. This was tricky given the context of the complex which was a former hospital site that was relatively hidden within the everyday urban environment and people only spent time there out of necessity, whether as a medical worker, patient, or visitor. Establishing their communities to engage with and understanding who was likely to have an emotional relationship to the site was therefore a challenging task, made even harder given that the site started to be developed before social media provided a medium through which professionals could ascertain the responses and attachments of emotional communities. However, built environment professionals reflected on working with a range of different communities, from workers to patients, and how this could reveal attachments to the former hospital site. As a result of this engagement, built environment professionals were able to synthesise the information into a hierarchy of places which generated stronger and more widespread emotional attachments. The former Nurses Home – the Red Home (Figure 10) – and the Simpson’s Memorial Maternity Pavilion (Figure 11) were each believed to be the locus of emotional attachments.

Figure 10 Red Home.

Source: Canmore, Historic Environment Scotland: DP 028963 © Crown Copyright: HES. All Rights’ Reserved

Figure 11 Simpson’s Memorial Maternity Pavilion.

Source: Canmore, Historic Environment Scotland: SC 1174629 © Courtesy of HES (Scottish Colorfoto Collection). All Rights’ Reserved

Aaron built on this to state that there was an ‘incredible emotional attachment’ to the Maternity Pavilion, ‘not because actually the quality of that fabric but because almost everyone in Edinburgh was born there and had their children born there. So you’re really touching something that, it’s a very raw nerve’. These attachments to parts of the former hospital complex that were expressed by a range of different people from staff, patients, and parents were not, however, strong enough to ensure that all the buildings remained. Thomas recalled that ‘probably one of the most contentious aspects of the whole site masterplan related to the demolition of the chapel on the site’ because people had gone through ‘some very happy times but also some very sad times, where people had used that chapel facility, and had tremendous emotional attachment to it’.

Thomas went further to acknowledge that recognising these attachments took an emotional toll on all involved:

Emotion, however, was not seen, as built environment professional Lorraine recognised, as a ‘material consideration’ within planning and therefore could not override the other factors on the site. What can and cannot be a material consideration is broad and subject to change. For example, Mark stated:

However, in Lorraine’s view, emotion, and the attachment that people had for the Red Home, Simpson’s Maternity Pavilion, and the Chapel, could not be validated through the planning process for Quartermile. Emotions were therefore recognised by built environment professionals but there was no formal outlet for them within the existing heritage and planning system. In the case of Quartermile, emotion provided background information as part of community engagement exercises. This resulted in two different futures for the buildings that were the locus of emotional attachments. The Red Home, after much wrangling, was partly retained in an uneasy compromise and Simpson’s Memorial Maternity Pavilion and Chapel were demolished. Existing attachments to place were therefore recognised as one variable within a complex array of competing factors that also included a focus on ensuring that new attachments to an award-winning new development could be created.

Negotiating New Emotional Relationships

Urban areas are not static, frozen in time and sheltered from change and neither are people’s emotional relationships with places. Instead just as urban areas change so too do our relationships with them. We are therefore continually negotiating our emotional relationships with historic urban places. Within this context it is important to ask the extent to which different types of development help us to negotiate new emotional relationships.

A striking example of this was the extent to which ‘human scale’ was considered within new developments and in particular SAVE’s focus on ensuring the aesthetic design of new places respected the ways in which people engaged in place. Indeed SAVE’s focus on the emotional relationships that people have with their places as outlined in Section 4 translated into a desire to respect and nurture these relationships within urban design, architecture, and planning. Here, there was a call to actively validate the human-scale and to prioritise it within urban redevelopment initiatives across the United Kingdom:

Human-scale in this conceptualisation is not just the aesthetic preserve of urban designers, architects, and planners, but moreover is crucial to the everyday experiences that this Element has shown underpin the formation, disruption, and intensity of emotional attachments. A number of built environment professionals discussed the importance of designing for human-scale:

Attributing sense of place to historic urban areas was also discussed by built environment professionals. Cassie talked of the ways in which history is used as a ‘starting point for an identity of a place’ as well as ‘to create new emotional attachments, and a new sense of place’, while Lorraine used different language as she moved to discuss the ‘feel’ of a site in order to understand the existing and future emotional resonance of the historic place:

The way historic places feel to local residents was a recurring issue. In Section 2, issues surrounding scaffolding were repeatedly brought up with residents expressing conventionally negative emotional responses. Understanding the way places make you feel is not new, as Worskett (Reference Worskett1969) remarked, ‘The townscape is of course, not just a matter of bricks and mortar; it is also concerned with atmosphere and personal experience. The architect on the planning team must get the feel of the townscape and communicate that experience to his colleagues’ (119). However, gaining this insight into the feel of place was difficult as there were ‘no standard methodologies’ as ‘It’s not written down really anywhere or any methodology’ (Lorraine). Despite this, a number of built environment professionals talked about spending their time trying to get the feel of different historic places and using this as a way to inform design decisions. Jean, for example, remembered ‘having lots of conversation’ about the Quartermile site ‘to try and explain how it would feel within the site, because you’re talking about big buildings … so if you put a person in that, what are the proportions and how do those proportions reflect the proportions of other parts of Edinburgh? What kind of street will this feel like?’ Callum went one further by stating:

In their different ways, built environment professionals tried to imagine the look and feel of the place through the built environment and through the stories that the built environment did and could narrate.

Built environment professionals also discussed the feel of historic places and related this to investment decisions. For example, Lesley discussed how businesses will co-locate near St Paul’s Cathedral as ‘people will go to the roof, people love showing … they love having the headquarters there, “Look at St Paul’s”’. Nathan further developed this aspect by outlining why people may make an investment decision to either live or work in or near historic buildings

This was counterbalanced by Archie, who believed that emotional relationships with former industrial buildings could also inform a decision to live in a historic place:

In these examples, there is a recognition that the juxtaposition of historic and modern produces emotional responses – pride and love – supported by investment decisions to locate either near, or in Archie’s case, in a historic building. Built environment professionals recognise the multifarious ways in which people form emotional relationships with historic buildings and weigh this up alongside other factors including price, value, legislation, and location. Common across this is a recognition that historic places play a role in mobilising future attachments to place. The most explicit aspect of this mobilisation is seen during the process of place marketing. Stories embedded in historic urban places are often used to ensure that new investment, both human and capital, is predicated on building an emotional relationship between a potential investor and a redeveloped place. Here the role of emotion in ‘selling places’ is evident

The extent to which this was seen as successful was however debated by local residents. In Selkirk, this was based on a belief that ‘you can’t manufacture history and tradition. And we have it in Selkirk in spades, but as I said before, we just probably don’t sell it enough’ (Donnie). However, in Rothesay whether the ‘right’ characteristics were being ‘sold’ was brought up by Cameron, who contemplated the everydayness of place:

The fact that historic urban places could provoke emotional responses was seen as a selling point within the urban development process, yet the extent to which this reflected the authentic lived and felt experiences of place was questioned. In addition, the extent to which emotional attachments rather than responses are favoured in this process largely depends on the type of investment being made. For example, a place-based entrepreneur investing for the long-term and wanting to secure a reliable profit is more likely to be attuned to the need for a place to have the capacity for multiple and durable attachments to form and therefore be aware of the need to nurture everyday lived and felt experiences. On the other hand, a different type of developer may instead need to build and extract profit straight away in order to move to a different site and so be more interested in generating positive emotional responses that motivate people to invest in the short term and be less concerned with how these responses turn into attachments over time.

Conclusion

This section has demonstrated that historic urban places matter emotionally but that the reasons for why they matter are often hidden or neglected within existing processes within heritage and planning. Through using the tripartite conceptual framework set out in Table 1, it is possible to recognise where emotional responses, attachments, and communities can be located within policies and processes. Evidence from this section suggests that emotion is implicit in a number of macro-level policies in both the heritage and planning sectors and can be located within a number of place-based decision-making processes. Within this, there were a series of smaller and larger-scale interventions that included understanding how emotion helps to develop national and local campaigns, engage communities in formal consultation, inform urban design and architectural decisions both for buildings and areas, and influence place-marketing strategies. In these ways, we can engage with Sara Ahmed’s question ‘What do emotions do?’. In the context of this section, they can be seen to partially influence decisions, meaning that while emotion can be recognised at different times within urban development, it is rarely a driver or fully validated within these systems.

Process

Figure 12 is not a flow chart and therefore does not impose a staged approach but rather outlines each of the elements needed to unlock why a place matters emotionally. A staged approach could, however, start with either identifying responses and using this to identify communities or mapping communities and using this to identify responses. Either way the process would not stop there but would instead be used to unravel what people are attached to and why.

Figure 12 How to unlock why historic urban places matter emotionally.

Source: R. Madgin. All Rights’ Reserved

Figure 12Long description

The diagram shows three large boxes across the top with the following labels: 1. Emotional responses, 2. Emotional attachments and 3. Emotional communities. The larger boxes are linked to three smaller boxes directly beneath them by two-way arrows. Emotional responses are connected to isolated, blended and mixed. Emotional attachments are connected to psychological, variable and intensity. Emotional communities are connected to place-based, multiple and overlapping. These smaller boxes are further connected by arrows to an image of an unlocked lock in the shape of a heart.