From heritage recognition to value reproduction: making cultural value legible in Hong Kong heritage management

In the world of historic preservation, a building is rarely just a collection of bricks and mortar. It is a vessel for memory, a stage for daily life, and a symbol of who a community is. For decades, experts have tried to figure out how to protect these places. The traditional approach focused heavily on the physical object: how old is it? Is the architecture beautiful? Is it rare? But in recent years, the conversation has shifted. Scholars now understand that a building's true value also lives in the people who use it, the stories they tell, and the rituals they perform within its walls. This is the realm of "intangible" heritage. The challenge arises when these old buildings are given new lives, such as turning a former police station into a hotel or a factory into an art center. While the physical shell might be saved, the new functions can change how people connect with the place. The critical question for modern cities is not just whether a building is officially recognized as historic, but whether the deep social and cultural meanings attached to it can survive and thrive after the building opens its doors to a new public.

This is the precise puzzle researchers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University set out to solve. They focused on Hong Kong, a city where a sophisticated system already exists to grade buildings based on their historical and social importance. The government acknowledges that a building's value includes its role in local identity and collective memory. However, the researchers suspected a gap between that initial recognition and what happens next. Once a building is designated as heritage and handed over to a new operator for adaptive reuse, the conditions that allow its cultural meaning to grow and change are often left unmeasured. To investigate this, the team developed a new way of looking at these sites, moving beyond a simple checklist to a more dynamic profile of value.

The researchers began by breaking down the complex idea of "cultural value" into three distinct, observable parts. First, there are the "Forms," which are the physical, tangible aspects of the building: its age, its style, and its architectural details. These are the easiest to see and document. Second, there are the "Relationships," which are the emotional and symbolic bonds people have with the place. This includes how a building makes a community feel, the memories it holds, and the sense of identity it provides. These are harder to pin down because they live in people's minds and vary from person to person. Third, there are the "Practices," which are the actual things people do at the site. This covers the rituals, the events, the daily routines, and the skills that are performed there. A building might look perfect, but if no one visits it or uses it for its intended purpose, the cultural value is not being reproduced.

To test how these three parts work together in the real world, the team selected eighteen different heritage sites across Hong Kong that had been repurposed. These included famous landmarks like the Tai Kwun complex, former police stations, old factories, and even a former slaughterhouse turned artist village. They gathered a group of experts—professionals who work in heritage management, architecture, and conservation—and asked them to evaluate each of the eighteen sites. The experts were not asked to give a single score or rank the buildings from best to worst. Instead, they were asked to rate how strong each of the three dimensions was for every single building. They looked at how well the physical form was preserved, how strong the community connections were, and how active the cultural practices remained.

The results revealed a striking pattern. When the experts were asked to decide which of the three dimensions was most important for preserving a building's value, they treated them all as roughly equal. They believed that the physical structure, the social connections, and the ongoing activities were all vital. However, when they actually evaluated the eighteen buildings, a clear imbalance emerged. The experts consistently gave much higher scores to the physical "Forms" than to the "Relationships" or the "Practices." In other words, while everyone agreed that the social and active parts of heritage were important in theory, the buildings in the study were much better at showing off their physical beauty than they were at demonstrating strong community bonds or active cultural life.

This gap suggests that our current systems are better at measuring what is solid and visible than what is fluid and social. The researchers found that the experts were much more likely to agree with each other when rating the physical architecture than when rating the social connections. This lack of agreement on the social side is not necessarily a failure; it likely reflects the fact that relationships and memories are complex and personal. What feels deeply significant to one group might feel less so to another. The study suggests that this uncertainty is a feature of the data, not a bug. It shows that the "social" part of heritage is harder to standardize because it depends on the specific people and the specific moment in time.

The study also looked at how different types of management affected these scores. While the researchers were careful not to claim they had found a single formula for success, the patterns offered useful clues. They observed that sites where access was open, where programming was active, and where stewardship was continuous tended to have stronger profiles in the "Relationships" and "Practices" categories. This implies that the way a building is run matters just as much as how it is built. If a historic building is locked behind high prices, closed off to the public, or managed without a clear plan for community engagement, its cultural value may fade even if the bricks remain perfectly preserved.

Ultimately, the paper proposes a shift in how we manage our historic places. Instead of treating the official designation of a building as the final word on its value, the researchers suggest a system of periodic review. They envision a tool that could be used every few years to check not just the condition of the roof, but the health of the community's connection to the site. This tool would not be a rigid test to pass or fail, but a way to ask the right questions: Are the stories still being told? Are the rituals still happening? Is the place still feeling like home to the people who matter? By making these invisible dimensions visible and reviewable, cities can ensure that their heritage remains a living part of the community, rather than just a museum piece. The goal is not to create a perfect ranking of buildings, but to create a conversation that helps managers understand where their attention is needed most to keep the soul of a place alive.