The Shifting Baseline Syndrome and Generational Amnesia in Heritage Studies

Abstract

It is widely understood that the preservation of cultural heritage sites and objects is underpinned by values projected by the public onto essentially inanimate objects, that these values vary in strength, and that they are mutable qualities. Using hindsight, the contemporary values are projected on past creations that persist into the present. If deemed significant, these past creations will be listed on heritage lists and afforded various levels of protection. As time moves on, new places or objects will be deemed significant and added to the lists. Using a case study, this paper examines the concept of shifting baselines and how they impact on the identification and listing/protection of heritage places. It will demonstrate that generational biases play a significant role in the initial listing and exert a lasting legacy through the static nature of heritage listings.

1. Introduction

Humanity’s heritage is comprised of a range of tangible and intangible manifestations of people’s cultural, spiritual, and economic lives, and their interactions with their natural environment. Intangible cultural heritage, the result of peoples’ interactions with each, finds its expression, inter alia, in language, music, customs, and skills [1,2,3]. Tangible heritage is derived from people’s interaction with the physical environment and manifests itself as the built environment, refuse sites, and cultural landscapes, but also in the form of moveable items and artefacts [1]. Both spheres can overlap where multisensory experiences occur in tangible spaces [4]. Heritage places, together with places that hold items of heritage association, such as museums and art galleries, are deemed to make up part of the cultural fabric of society [5,6].

Heritage items and places are deemed significant because the public projects a range of cultural values onto inanimate entities, be they anthropogenically generated (e.g., objects, sites, buildings) or natural spaces (e.g., landscape features imbued with community relevance; eco-cultural heritage). By the profession they have been codified under the four concepts of ‘aesthetic’, ‘historic,’ ‘scientific’, and ‘social’ [7,8], which are made up of extended semantic fields that include, inter alia, ‘archaeological,’ ‘architectural,’ ‘evidential,’ ‘spiritual,’ ‘technological,’ and similar subcategories of value. There has been considerable discussion on the nature and manifestations of the values as they contribute to the significance of heritage places [8,9,10,11,12], the preservation of which primarily serves the cultural and emotional needs of the present generation [6,13], although purportedly for the benefit of future generations [14].

Fundamentally, any protection and preservation of heritage assets is based on the tenet that ‘the people’ of a community have a personal and communal connection to these places and thus value these sufficiently to desire their continuation, in completely unchanged or adapted form, in favor of their destruction/removal and subsequent alternative uses of these spaces. Following a nomination and evaluation process, these places are then codified in their importance to a community and protected by being enshrined in heritage lists, registers or inventories with their associated legislated administrative controls.

The values that underpin these personal and communal connections are founded in the interpersonal and intergenerational transmission of factual knowledge about and emotional attachment to these places. An important observation in this regard is not only the fact that such values differ in nature and strength between different segments of a community, but also that they are not static, but are mutable qualities, not only intergenerationally but also within a person’s life span. Formed during their upbringing, these values are modulated by life experiences, by subsequent cultural conditioning due to their enmeshing in the local community and society at large. They are further modulated by external stimuli derived from interpersonal relationships, communication (e.g., news items, literature) or through exposure to values of other communities (e.g., via travel) [8,15]. While the mutability of values is widely acknowledged, the dissonance of this mutability with the static nature of a heritage listing is not.

Heritage Processes

In the past, heritage assessment and planning processes were predominantly expert-driven and the sole domain of heritage managers, a profession that is primarily dominated by architects, historians, conservators, and archaeologists. Today, heritage assessment and planning processes tend to be more inclusive, recognizing the wider community as primary stakeholders central to the process and increasingly including them in identification, evaluation, selection for listing, and also in decision making.

The theoretical foundation of cultural heritage management is that cultural values underpin any assessment of significance for the community as a whole or a sub-section thereof, and that some time needs to have elapsed to adequately asses these values and their determinacy for the significance of an object, structure, or place [14,16,17]. Indeed, some countries have fixed age criteria, e.g., 50 years in the United States before an item or place can be considered heritage [17]. Effectively, by using hindsight, the community (and profession) projects contemporary values on past creations that persist into the present [6]. In the face of the methodological tenet of retrospectivity, let alone legislatively mandated time frames, it is not surprising then that the profession often struggles with places of instant heritage value (e.g., the first Moon landing [18]) let along concepts of emergent [19] or future value [20,21,22].

Just as much as a heritage listing is static, so is the retrospective nature of assessment. It occurs at a given point in time, projecting presently held values (which are shaped by past experiences) on the tangible manifestation of a past event. If heritage values are mutable qualities, it then follows that a future retrospective assessment of the same manifestation of the past event may result in a different evaluation. This is quite evident, for example, in the fact that mid-20th century architecture, which had previously been overlooked [23,24,25], has recently been undergoing a re-evaluation of its heritage value, with associated protective listings.

2. Material and Methods

2.1. Approach

The aim of this conceptual paper is to examine and extend the applicability of the concept of the shifting baseline syndrome, a concept developed in the field of historic ecology, to the field of heritage studies. The paper is derived from the author’s parallel research interests in past, present, and future values of heritage assets as well as in aspects of historic ecology and historic environments. Informed by a multi-decadal career in heritage theory and practice, this paper is a deliberation and reflection that explores the impact of passing time and intergenerational change on the retrospective assessment of heritage significance. The findings have relevance to the understanding of the validity of statutory heritage listings based on heritage studies and evaluation reports of various vintages.

As a conceptual paper, it only loosely follows the standard IMRAD pattern (Introduction–Methods–Results–Discussion). It will first explore the concept of the shifting baseline syndrome and its function in historic ecology and then will apply and exemplify that concept to an understanding of the valuation of moveable heritage to address and exemplify the issue of intergenerational mutability of values. It does so through three case studies of modern material culture: vintage cars, postage stamps, and telephone cards. Based on a framing of generations, the paper then explores the chronological nature and role of lived experience and memory. The paper will then examine the role of shifting baselines and intergenerational change in the assessment and evaluation of heritage places and, having exemplified this with a case study, discusses the implications this has on community-wide heritage studies and the resulting statutory listings. It will conclude with an exploration of avenues for further research.

2.2. The Concept of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome

Many modern ecological studies incorporate aspects of environmental history and historic ecology to explore the diachronic trajectories of change that led to, and thus explain, the present-day situation [26,27,28]. Such work gains significance where environmental management attempts to restore degraded environments that have been impacted by direct (e.g., land-clearing, logging) or indirect (e.g., introduced species) human action [27,29]. In principle, any environmental restoration aims to return a given environment to a prior state with a set baseline. Setting aside the question whether such restoration, or even reconstruction, is actually feasible given the plethora of changes that occurred to other environmental factors (e.g., climate, soil condition, etc.), ecological studies have demonstrated that this baseline is not fixed. Rather, it is relative and shifting, depending on the viewpoint of the researcher and/or manager [26,27,29,30,31,32,33].

The term shifting baseline syndrome was coined by Daniel Pauly in his seminal paper Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries, where he noted that the syndrome “has arisen because each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species, and inappropriate reference points” [34]. In the same paper, Pauly makes the point that while anecdotal evidence is important, it needs to be placed into a rigorous framework of enquiry [35] and that this recovered knowledge then be used to prevent further baseline shifts [36].

2.3. The Application of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome Outside Ecological Research

The shifting base-line syndrome as a manifestation of adaptation level theory [37,38] has also been encountered outside ecological research such as perceptions of atmospheric and other pollution and environmental degradation [38,39]. In recent years, the concept of change perceptions as embodied in the shifting baseline syndrome has begun to find it its way into aspects of social science research. The effects of shifting baseline syndrome have been raised in discussions of inter-generational knowledge and awareness in ethnobotany [40], regulatory and legislative practice [41,42], as well a critically discussed as part of memory theory [43] (a point to which this paper will return later). The shifting baseline syndrome in heritage studies not only manifests itself in change perceptions of the state of the natural and built environment, but also in change perceptions of attributed values. This can be exemplified with three examples of modern material culture.

3. Results

3.1. The Role of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome in Relation to Moveable Heritage

Among a wide range of material culture enthusiasts (‘collectors’) and their varied motivations and range of objects collected [44,45,46,47], the shifting baseline concept can explain the shifts in value and emphases of what is desirable, and consequently can cause shifts in the nature of what is being collected. Exposure to and familiarity with objects and their use or function generates personal and community interest. This can be illustrated with the examples of vintage cars, stamps, and telephone cards. These examples have been chosen as they cover three different manifestations: a standard expression of shifting base-lines with ongoing recruitment (vintage cars), shifting baselines with diminishing recruitment (stamps), and shifting baselines with terminated recruitment (telephone cards).

3.1.1. Example: Vintage Cars

The growing affluence of the Lucky Generation resulted in increased car ownership before and especially after World War II [48,49,50]. In Europe, Australia, and the USA, car ownership was strongly economically stratified for most of the 20th century, at least until the advent of cheaper mass-produced imports from Asian manufacturers. Until then, adolescents aspiring to own cars had to settle for ‘junk yard’ clunkers, which often were customized and ‘souped up’ to make up for what was desired but could not be afforded [51].

Setting aside people who collect vintage and classic cars primarily as an investment [52,53], there is a plethora of car enthusiasts keen to ‘restore’ cars, acquiring them from junkyards and ‘barn finds’ [54,55] or the open market. The desire for production and, later, also specific vintage cars is riven with a fierce tribalism of brand loyalty [56,57,58,59] that is often intergenerationally instilled at youth and carries through to adulthood. For each generation, some models of these brands are deemed more representative of the ‘ethos’ of that brand and thus more ‘iconic’ and hence more desirable in the short and long term.

Cars that are desirable at the time of a person’s baseline in their late teens and early 20s remain desirable in mid-age. At that time, car enthusiasts, having reached a level of affluence, tend to reflect and subsequently act out their mid-life crisis by acquiring the dream car of their youth, irrespective of how safe or functional it may be in contemporary society. Even car models that were derided as uninspiring at the time they were produced are now sought after by car enthusiasts. Important in this context is the chronologically sliding scale of desirability. As outlined by Lucsko, immediately after World War II American enthusiasts debated whether 1930s cars would be desirable, which by the late 1950s they undoubtedly were, whereas cars of that vintage had become of interest by the 1970s [60]. Likewise, the 1960s muscle cars were sought after from the 1980s onwards and cars of the 1970s were in demand by the early 2000s [60]. The common pattern here is a 20–25 year shift between series production and desirability. The fact that many specimens of that vintage have since been scrapped adds to the relative rarity and thus increased desirability of some models.

As each generation comes of age and acquires their affordable, but usually not desired, car, a new baseline is established. In the case of automobiles, there will a continual creation of baselines, at least as long as private car ownership remains a socially acceptable concept. Once a function disappears, however, inter-generational recruitment and establishment of new personal baselines will cease and community interest will decline and eventually die out. A good example for this is stamp collecting.

3.1.2. Example: Stamp Collecting

Soon after the invention of postage stamps and their proliferation in all countries, philately became a major hobby of juveniles globally, many of whom would remain collectors during their adulthood [61]. In parallel, collector’s albums and stamp catalogues proliferated [62,63] as did the uses of stamps as educational tools [64,65]. While national postal services still produce a large variety of commemorative postage stamps to service the collectors’ market, the dynamics have shifted as anyone looking at their incoming mail will attest. Not only has the mode of communication changed, with e-mail rapidly supplanting handwritten or typed letters since the early 1990s [66,67] leading to a collapse of the physical mail volume [68,69], but also the majority of physical mail now uses adhesive labels, the successor of machine franking that became en vogue in the 1950s [70].

Furthermore, postal services, which once were state monopolies, have been partially or fully privatized, giving companies little incentive to generate labor-intensive proof-of-payment tokens. While philatelic societies keep expounding the bright future of their hobby [71], any such hobby requires an ongoing recruitment of a large cohort of novices, usually juvenile members, some of whom will maintain the collection activity into adulthood. In the absence of physical stimuli (i.e., large volumes of incoming mail with stamps), such mass recruitment will be a matter of the past. As any parent with school-age or university-age children will attest, stamp collecting is almost unheard of among members of Generation Z and General Alpha.

It can be posited that coin collecting, a hobby that was never as much en vogue as stamp collecting, will be next. Digital payments for in-shop purchases have been on the steady increase since the early 2000s, with pundits foreshadowing a cashless society as early as the mid 1990s [72]. The recent COVID-19 pandemic, with its associated social distancing and a reduction of physical contact, has accelerated this trend, with many businesses still refusing or discouraging cash payments well after public health advisories have been lifted.

3.1.3. Example: Telephone Cards

An example for obsolete technologies that once were collectibles are telephone cards: pre-paid cards that could be inserted into a public telephone box (phone booth) obviating the need for appropriate coinage. The cards, which commenced in the mid 1970s, had their heyday between 1993 and 2006, when globally at least 290,000 different cards were issued by telecommunications providers [73]. Many larger corporations negotiated unique card issues with custom-printed imagery and used them as marketing tools. Telephone cards quickly became collectables with a considerable following and associated market price catalogues [74]. The rise of mobile (cell) phones and the concurrent demise of public phone boxes made the technology obsolete. Following their obsoleteness, some collectors continued, but few new collectors were recruited. Telephone cards are a good example of generational differences in relation to potential heritage assets: Few of the Millennials would have used such cards and almost none of Generation Z. The cards are essentially a heritage item that was invented during, and for, Generation X.

The point that these examples were to underline is that the shifting baseline syndrome explains the mutability in values for the broader public. This does not affect or negate values such items may have in the collections of technological and social history museums, archival collections held by manufacturers, and operators or collections by highly specialized collectors.

3.2. Defining Generations

While this shifting baseline syndrome is a fluid concept that moves as time progresses, at its foundation are cultural/biological generations and intergenerational change.

Understanding such change needs to factor in the intergenerational length and the duration of personal memory for which human life expectancy may serve as a proxy. The concept of ‘generation’ refers to people who were born and are living at about the same time and is defined either in biological, reproductive terms [75], or in sociological terms as people who experience the same significant events within a given period of time (e.g., ‘Baby Boomers’) [76,77]. For the purpose of this paper we need to be concerned with both.

There are a number of published intergenerational reproductive time intervals among humans, ranging from 21 years [78] to 38 years [79], with the most frequently advanced intervals falling between 27 and 30 years [80,81,82,83,84]. Gender differences also need to be taken into account because ages of reproduction, while biologically controlled, are, at least partially, modulated by underlying social and societal norms [82,85,86]. This paper will use Fenner’s cross-culturally defined intergenerational time interval of 29 years for women and 32 years for men [83].

While age at childbirth has been decreasing in the ‘developed world’ [82], thus foreshortening the length of the more recent generation(s), people’s life expectancy has been increasing, thereby expanding the length of generational memory. Albeit subject to socioeconomic and cultural factors [87,88], average life expectancy in Australia, for example, increased from 55 (51) years for women (men) in 1895 to 61.4 (57.6) in 1911, to 74.7 (68.0) in 1970 and to 85.4 (81.2) years in 2018–2020 [89,90,91,92,93,94].

The combined effects of intergenerational reproductive time intervals and life expectancy are shown in Figure 1. For the purposes of this paper, knowledge and life experiences as stored in a person’s memory are the key. Thus, each individual’s life can be circumscribed by the present (i.e., the past ten years), a person’s infancy (5 years) and youth period (10 years), and a period of lived experience and past realities that span the time between youth and present.

It can be posited that while youth represents an individual’s personal and social formative period where initial enculturation occurs, the post-youth period of lived experience and past realities represents the critical phase in that individual’s creation and consolidation (in the form of memory) of personal and communal ways of life, customs, and social realties; the nature and prevalence of technologies as well as the effects of technological change; but also personal and community utilization of structures, facilities, and public spaces and, by extension, attachment to place. Given that these life experiences, and the socio-cultural environment in which they are embedded, are the underpinning on which personal values and the creation of a person’s perception of ‘heritage’ are based, the concept of social generations [76,77] is applicable.

These generations are commonly defined as the ‘Lost Generation’ (born 1883–1900), the ‘Greatest Generation’ (1901–1927), the ‘Silent Generation’ (‘Builders,’ ‘Lucky Generation,’ <1946), ‘Baby Boomers’ (1946–1964), ‘Generation X’ (1965–1979), ‘Millennials’ (‘Generation Y’ 1980–1994), ‘Generation Z’ (‘I Generation,’ post-Millennials’ 1995–2004 [2011]), and Generation Alpha (2012–present) [95,96] (Figure 2)

3.3. Lived Experience and Generational Memory

Given the speed of technological development, which has been accelerating since the 18th century, generations can be defined by the technology that became en vogue during the time. Generation X, for example, experienced the proliferation of personal (desktop) computers during their young adulthood and the technology defined their lives. The Millennials, however, know no other world. They in turn experienced the development of the World Wide Web/Internet in their young adulthood, while Generation Z was born into that world and knows no other.

Playing on Sohail Inayatullah’s work on change and futures theory [97], we can conceptualize people as natives (techno-natives, future natives), i.e., those who those who grew up surrounded by a state of technology and know no other, and migrants (techno-migrants, future migrants), i.e., those who grew up prior to the technological change and who are capable of adapting to new circumstances and have adopted the technology. And then there are the avoiders (techno-avoiders, future avoiders), people who believe that technological change can be resisted, confined, or ignored.

When applying the concept of shifting baselines into the field of heritage, a person’s heritage baseline is that of a native. It is circumscribed and defined by the technology, the appearance of the built and natural environment, and the cultural practices they experienced during their formative years and young adulthood. As natives they are not only experiencing, but also shaping any emerging technological, cultural, and social change. As people age, they become migrants, surrounded by another emerging generation of natives that shapes an emerging technological environment, and in the process reshapes the cultural and social environment of the older generation. Some people will remain migrants throughout their lives, moving from one reality to the next, while other may eventually become avoiders, refusing to migrate to the next reality, clinging on the vestiges of the world they are comfortable with.

The further the current reality is removed from their baseline reality when they were natives, people will construe this reality as ‘the past,’ an increasingly remote part of their lived experience. For avoiders that past will become increasingly colored by a sense of nostalgia, a longing for a time when they were at ease with their social, physical, and technological environment [98,99,100].

Intergenerational and intra-generational, word-of-mouth transmission of heritage knowledge is essential to maintain heritage values and thus maintain the meaning of heritage places [101]. For the most part the multi-generational model encompasses the set of SELF|PARENT(s)|GRANDPARENT(s) (Figure 3). Theoretically, one generation can be skipped and integrity of transmission can still be maintained.

Using a multi-generational model that factors in average life expectancies (Figure 3A) we can develop a structured set of ’pasts’ with appropriate generational shifts (Figure 3B). Apart from the present, a person’s memory is defined by and grounded in the direct personal life experiences of their youth and adulthood periods (‘autobiographical memory’ [102,103]). In relation to self, living in the ‘now’, all personal life experience post youth comprises the ‘recent past’, while events that occurred during personal early youth and the parents’ generation can be constructed as ‘past’. The transition period between late adolescence and young adulthood is a major autobiographical marker that establishes, in Schacter’s words, a ‘reminiscence bump’ [104] (which accounts for the mid-life crisis-induced desire to acquire ‘vintage’ cars, or example).

Events that occurred during the parents’ generation, as conveyed through direct interpersonal intergenerational transmission (‘communicative memory [105,106]) can be conceptualized as ‘past’. Events that occurred during the grandparents’ generation, as conveyed through direct or indirect (via parents) interpersonal transmission, can be conceptualized as ‘distant past’ (while acknowledging that there are other definitions for this term). The next level, the ‘deep past’, is only accessible through indirect interpersonal transmission provided with one (via grandparents) or two levels of separation (via grandparents and then parents) (Figure 3B) As these constructs of past overlap between co-existing generations, the deep past extends in time (Figure 3C).

The creation of these pasts depends on personal memory and on inter-personal transmission, unless ‘archived’ via textual or visual artefacts (letters, diaries, photos, etc.). In the first instance, autobiographical memory is affected by observation of objects or events with subsequent reflection on the attention, which changes these into experiences that can be encoded as memory [107]. These memories in themselves can be modulated by prior and subsequent experiences. It goes without saying that such observations and experiences are inherently personal and thus both subjective and selective.

Setting aside personal observation and conscious or subconscious recollection biases, a major inhibitor to intergenerational transmission is the potential dissonance between the value sets of different generations. While the older generation may wish to pass on their life experiences and recollections to the younger generation, that requires the younger generation to be receptive to these [108,109]. Essentially, the content of the transmission not only has to resonate with the recipient but also has to possess sufficient relevance for it to be retained and eventually passed on intra- or intergenerationally. Conversely, the younger generation may wish to know [110], but the older generation may be either selective or altogether unwilling to share as their past contains unpalatable truths [109,111].

When considering the permeability of the boundaries between the various pasts, the boundary between the past and the distant past is the most significant as experiences are essentially separated by a full biological generation. This is the inflection point where, to use Kahn’s term, generational amnesia can set in [112]. Moving back one more generation we reach what Vasina called the floating gap, a near total termination of collective communicative memory [113]. Thus, shifting base lines based on memory recall have a finite depth, unless specific events are canonically encoded in communal cultural memory.

It must be remembered that intergenerational transmission is selective. Favored among direct interpersonal transmission are personal life experiences [109] including reminiscence bumps [104], significant cultural interventions in people’s lives (e.g., revolutions, war) [109,114,115], significant natural interventions (e.g., earthquakes, bushfires) [116,117], as well as positive and negative technological interventions (e.g., first moon landing, technological disasters) [18,118]. Yet some interventions that ‘defined a generation,’ such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1968, have lost their relevance to a generation that cannot include this event in their lived experiences [119,120] and have been reduced to (almost) de-rigeur attractions of dark tourism [121]. Common among indirect interpersonal transmission are significant life events of ancestors with relevance to the present, be they traumatic (e.g., PoW experience) [122] or ‘heroic’ (e.g., wartime actions) [123]. Some significant life events of ancestors are attributed to be of such personal value that transmission is maintained over multiple levels of generational separation (e.g., genocide) [122,124,125].

The more distant the past, the more the minutiae of lived experience fade, with memories reduced to major personally, culturally, or environmentally catastrophic events. This change in granularity of memory has major implications on the shifting baseline concept.

4. Discussion

4.1. The Shifting Baseline Syndrome in Heritage Site Identification

In the domain of tangible cultural heritage, the “authorized heritage discourse” of cultural heritage management [1] focusses on the identification, documentation, protection, and preservation of places of cultural significance through area-based or thematic heritage studies, listings, and protective legal instruments (e.g., development control plans), as well as, on a site-specific level, through conservation management plans [126,127].

As noted earlier, traditionally heritage assessment and planning processes tended to be primarily expert-driven and the almost exclusive domain of heritage management professionals. Local government heritage registers as well as site-specific conservation management plans [126,127] were drawn up by a group of archaeologists, architects, historians, and landscape planners. Today, heritage assessment and planning processes tend to be more inclusive, not only recognizing the wider community as primary stakeholders but also increasingly including them on a formal level in the process of both identification and evaluation [128,129,130,131]. Community consultation and conversation about the value of heritage can reinforce the relevance of heritage and intensity of values attached to it [101,132].

While value to the community (‘social value’) has been identified by a number of studies [128,133], regulatory mechanisms are based on legislation, which often restricts listing to those places where the evaluation of significance can be based on the three ‘traditional’ concepts of ‘aesthetic, historic, and scientific’ [17]. Importantly, in the Australian policy and legislative context, the value of heritage places to a community is formally recognized in the form of ‘social value’ [7,12,134] since its inclusion in the 1981 revision of Australia ICOMOS Burra Charter [135,136], thus giving regulatory weight to places that are valued by the community and identified as significant [132].

In some jurisdictions, local government area heritage studies are primarily driven by community representation with the experts often relegated to coordinating and facilitating roles [137]. In New South Wales (Australia), for example, community heritage studies are the mandated norm [138]. The rationale is that “[m]embers of the community work alongside the consultant for the duration of the project. They undertake research, nominate items and consider recommendations for managing and promoting their local heritage items in the future” [138]. In-depth and genuine community involvement strengthens the resulting studies and engenders wider community buy-in for the imposition of development controls and other management actions.

Community recognition of cultural heritage items is fairly straightforward for places that have social significance to the social generations making up the present; for places that are reflective of and representative for specific, no-longer-practiced architectural styles (e.g., Victorian or Art Deco) and for which examples are still extant; for communal places that are reflective of spiritual needs (e.g., churches, mosques); and for places that represent power relationships in a community (e.g., court houses, town halls). Yet, these places only make up a small part of the heritage universe.

Community recognition of cultural heritage items is flawed, however, in cases where the historic or scientific/evidentiary significance may lie in times beyond the recollection of the present generation.

Example: Crawford’s Coach Stables, Albury, New South Wales

To exemplify some of the issues, this paper will draw on examples from the city of Albury, a regional service center in southern News South Wales (Australia). In a previous paper, the author presented an example of regionally highly significant late 19th century coach stables (the largest outside the metropolitan centers of Sydney and Melbourne) that had been converted into a shopping arcade and hidden behind a metal façade [139]. Despite extensive community representation and participation, it had not been identified by the community heritage study that had just been completed [140]. Due to a lack of regulatory protection, the building was eventually demolished to make way for the current library and museum complex [141]. The concept of the shifting baseline syndrome is very much applicable here.

Built in 1886 for Crawford & Co., the company ran the coach stables until 1919 when it could not adjust its business profile to meet the changing demand of motorized transport. The building was used then as a produce and auction mart until the mid 1920s, when it became a car dealership and motor garage. The building was solely used as a motor garage and service facility until 1977 when it was converted into a shopping arcade [139].

Once the built-in shopfronts had been removed, the core of the open-space building was intact, with its curved roof and cathedral ceiling of 8.9 m height, supported by Oregon posts of 20 × 20 cm cross-section [141]. While by the time of demolition, part of the 1886 front façade had been altered by the addition of large shop windows, and the historic integrity was thus partially compromised, the stables was locally or even state-wide significant due to the nature and scale of the structure, as well as its contribution to the understanding of the importance of the Albury as a transportation and communications hub at the inter-colonial border between New South Wales and Victoria Furthermore, sufficient photographic evidence existed that would have allowed for its restoration and partial reconstruction [139]. If it had been identified in 2003 by the community heritage study, it would without a doubt have been listed on the local heritage list.

Considering the intergenerational knowledge available at the time of the community heritage study in 2003, it is not surprising, however, that the origins of the building as a coach stable are in the deep and distant past of the participants (Figure 4). To use Kahn’s phrase, generational amnesia had set in [112]. Furthermore, for much of their lived experience, the building served as a motor garage and then as a shopping arcade. Conceptually, motor garages are considered by the general public as light industry, grimy, and undesirable, albeit necessary spaces and places.

As noted earlier, for avoiders of cultural and technological change, the baseline of their lives, their past, will become increasingly colored by nostalgia, a past that may well be glorified. Importantly, though, the recollections of the past will be seen through a colored lens, emphasizing positive aspects while diminishing or even expunging negative and uncomfortable elements, let alone dissonant aspects of heritage [142].

While not dissonant heritage, light industry and mechanical workshops are not front and center in the heritage conceptualization and consideration of the general public, unless personal or familial connections exist to that line of business.

Clearly, the 2003 community representatives also never wondered why a large motor garage could have been located in what is effectively the prime city block, literally at the heart of Albury’s CBD. The reason is simple: Until 1947, when the route was realigned, the highway between Sydney and Melbourne ran along that block and directly past that building [139]. Again, in terms of intergenerational knowledge, the rerouting of the highway occurred during the youth period of the participants’ lived memory and at that time little, if any thought, would have been given to the location of businesses in relation to their function in town.

4.2. The Shifting Baseline Syndrome in Heritage Site Listing Processes

To contextualize some of the discussion, it should be noted that AlburyCity is currently undertaking a heritage study conducted by the author. The first such study was conducted in 1976 by the National Trust of New South Wales [143]. It was carried out by a single architect and dominated that person’s values and professional expertise. The first major study that involved a modicum of community consultation, by consulting a locally-based historian, occurred in 1988 [144,145]. This study was replaced by a formal community heritage study, with a broader remit, in 2003–2004 [140,146]. The various intergenerational ‘pasts’ as they came to bear on these four heritage studies are visually presented in Figure 5.

In terms of timelines, the participants of the 1988 study would have been in a better position (Figure 5) to assess the historical and social value of the stables, but the historian was relatively new to the area and view matters or a more abstract scale, and the concept of social value had been introduced into the revised Burra Charter only a few years earlier [136]. Moreover, the approaches to listing were highly expert-driven and dominated by architects and historians. While transportation infrastructure was considered in the 1988 study, this was confined to the pre-motor car period (albeit not expressed as such) [135]. Participants of the 1988 study were natives of the motor car era, with horse-drawn passenger transport firmly in the past. Thus, unless personal family connections with the coach industry existed, it would have been unlikely that intentional intergenerational transmission would have occurred by members of the Greatest Generation or that members of the Lucky Generation would have enquired about past functions of buildings.

5. Discussion

Subjective valuation, revaluation, and ultimately prioritization occurs consciously and subconsciously on a continual basis. Cultural heritage values, like all other values, vary between communities as well as between socio-economic layers within a given community [13]. The standard heritage listing process follows a formalized conceptual sequence from identification to listing (Figure 6A) [138,147,148], which in reality contains additional steps with a high level of subjectivity (Figure 6B). Given these multiple interventions of subjective personal opinion and observer bias, the generational effects on heritage listings are significant.

Values, however, are mutable qualities that change over time both in intensity of conviction and in general, and thereby create a semifluid state in heritage assessments [8]. Yet, administratively, heritage places are essentially static entities once they have been nominated and gazetted in local and state-wide planning instruments. Heritage lists are inherently accretive and continually expand. Realities of limited funding during the execution of new studies led to the informal ‘custom’ that places inscribed on existing lists are ‘grandfathered’ into the new listing. There is a general reluctance to revisit existing listings and delist sites, an action that is usually confined to places that have been destroyed or damaged beyond repair by natural and anthropogenic disasters or have been demolished. Even places that have become so dilapidated that they are essentially ruins still remain to be listed as if they were intact structures with considerable integrity. The Albury heritage studies and formal listings can serve as a pertinent example (Figure 7) [140,143,144,145,146,149,150,151,152,153,154,155].

It is important to recognize that the heritage management as a profession is a comparatively recent phenomenon, emerging in the post-World War II era and formalized with instruments such as the Venice Charter of 1964 [156,157,158] and the World Heritage Convention of 1972 [159]. If we apply the social generational logic discussed in Section 3, then the initiators and authors of the Venice Charter belonged to the Greatest Generation and were imbued with the associated formative values as well as the events shaped by Word War II. The next phase in the development of professional rule sets and charters was influenced by representatives of the Silent Generation.

If we apply the social generational logic to the four heritage studies for Albury, while taking into account that under 20 year-olds would normally not be included (i.e., formally asked to participate), then the generational representation in these studies differs considerably. The community participants to the 1988 study, as limited as they were, would have been mainly drawn from the Baby Boomers and the Lucky Generation, with a smattering of long-lived members of the Greatest generation (Figure 8). A few members of Generation X would have been represented. The 2003 study was again dominated by Baby Boomers and the Lucky Generation, with a greater representation of members of Generation X and a few Millennials. Theoretically, the 2022 study will be dominated by Generation X and the Baby Boomers, with a strong representation of Millennials and a few Generation Z (Figure 8).

Cumulatively, the Lucky Generation and the Baby Boomers contributed to more than 50%, and if Generation X is included, then these three generations make up two thirds of all generational contributions. The Lucky Generation contributed 20% to the overall picture, but their influence on the outcomes was limited as the early studies were heavily expert driven. Considered on a time continuum, however, Baby Boomers clearly exerted a disproportionate and prolonged influence on shaping the heritage listings (Figure 9).

It can be posited that the values of this generation may, in fact, have had a formative effect on the composition of the existing heritage listings. This has implications for the interpretation for the Albury Heritage Study 2022 currently under way.

6. Conclusions

Community heritage studies will only be as ‘good’ as the ability of the individual contributors to provide an informed and comprehensive view of heritage-worthy assets. It is inevitable that this is guided, and biased, by experience and personal value constructs.

As this paper has shown, shifting baselines in heritage studies are real and have a significant effect on the validity of the outcomes of these studies. Properties can be wrongly excluded from due consideration based on shifting base lines in personal knowledge of prior uses as well as by value-driven observer bias in the initial identification phase. From a practical point of view, then, it is desirable that community heritage studies are executed using a combination of, ideally locally sourced, heritage professionals; a representative suite of community members that cover different social strata, professions, and social generations; and a formal community-wide on-line survey that canvasses they wider public opinion to nominate both specific place and to comment on heritage themes that should be represented in the community. Acting in concert, observer bias can be minimized. The shifting baseline syndrome can be addressed in some way if the survey specifically includes questions that target recollection of places the parent and grandparent generation valued.

Funding realities are such that once properties have been inscribed and ‘enshrined’ in the heritage lists, based on evaluation at that point in time, they will remain unless destroyed. Consequently, the values ascribed to them in the first instance are static while the values themselves, as projected on the property, are mutable. This has two possible outcomes.

On the one hand, properties that had been evaluated as significant may, on reflection and when seen through the lens of a second generation, have lost their significance. They will remain on the heritage list and will continue to be a cost line item, both for the managing authority (local council) when assessing development applications or planning for land-use changes, and, importantly, to the owners as their freedom of action is curtailed by planning controls associated with the listing.

On the other hand, the values ascribed to properties may increase. If the property has not yet been nominated and added to the list, an opportunity exists to do so and to provide a statement of significance that is current. If the property is already listed, however, then it is unlikely (due to administrative and funding constraints) that the statement of significance will be revisited. Consequently, planning controls will remain in force that are in accordance with the values expressed in the listing, and which, in consequence, may allow for development actions that are no longer commensurate with the new, higher level of significance.

This expression of shifting baselines can be partially addressed by ensuring that all inventories/listing records clearly indicate when the site was first included in the lists, and a process that ensures that places that had been evaluated by a previous social generation of heritage professional and community members are being formally reassessed when a new heritage study is carried out.

The heritage examples used in this paper were drawn from material culture and individual items of the built environment. It must be acknowledged that all individual items of the built environment are intrinsically embedded in cultural landscapes, where autobiographical memory intersects with communal and community memory and where cultural value fields attain much greater diversity and complexity. Having established the role of the shifting baseline syndrome in heritage studies per se is the first step. Theoretical and case study explorations of shifting baselines in cultural landscapes evaluation are the next.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

Not applicable.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Figures

Figure 1. Conceptual model of the time depth of multi-generational overlap of lived experience and past realities, for different birth cohorts and associated average life expectancies. The red line demarcates the present (2022).

Figure 2. Conceptual model of the time depth of social generations and associated life expectancies.

Figure 3. Conceptual model of an individual’s perceived past through intergeneration transmission. (A) Individual generations as experienced at the time; (B) individual generations and level of ‘past’ as understood by the person in the present; (C) intergenerational overlap of level of ‘past’.

Figure 4. Shifting baselines of what constitutes the various intergenerational ‘pasts’ as well as the effective end points for the data collection of heritage studies in relation to the usage phases of Crawford’s Coach Stables.

Figure 5. Shifting baselines of what constitutes the various intergenerational ‘pasts’ as projected on Albury’s heritage studies.

Figure 6. Standard heritage listing process for inscription in local environmental planning instruments in the Australian regulatory setting. (A) theory; (B) reality.

Figure 7. Diachronic development of heritage items included in heritage studies, heritage lists, and local environmental plans for Albury (NSW).

Figure 8. Duration of generations (based on average life expectancy) and (average) individual perceptions of the past in relation to the effective end points for the data collection of Albury heritage studies of 1976, 1988, 2003/2004, and 2022. Also shown are the effective end points of the Venice Charter of 1964 and the World Heritage Convention of 1972.

Figure 9. Decadal proportions of the cumulative contributions of social generations to the understanding of heritage to four heritage studies (1976, 1988, 2003–2004, and 2022).

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