Social value: identifying, documenting and assessing community connections

Landscape is where we live, each and every day. These everyday places are imbued with personal and shared meanings, as inevitably as the run rises each morning and sets at day’s end. Focusing on Australia, this chapter examines an aspect of place attachment referred to in Australia as ‘social value’: a felt connection to place, landscape, or environment that gives it strong or special social, cultural, or spiritual meaning in people’s lives. Australian practice suggests that it is long, continuing, and direct association that strengthens the social value, and where associations are shared across and valued by a community or cultural group, it is a heritage value worthy of recognition.