The article draws extensively on the author’s experience with the concept of social value, recognizing that Australian frameworks and guidance have been influential in several other Western countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, and others.The article examines social value in Australian heritage practice by defining four lenses: a “distancing lens,” an “associative lens,” a “relationship lens,” and an “embodiment lens.” The distancing lens ignores the personal meanings that people may attribute to place, with the domination of history and aesthetics used as “objective measures” of heritage, and noting its continuing influence. When social value started to be recognized in heritage assessments in the early 1990s, the concept was initially framed as sentiment and then as association, focusing on demonstrable evidence of the use of a place by broadly defined communities/cultural groups and considering the social, cultural, and spiritual meanings that arise.In the early 2000s, the spatial “turn” in the humanities produced new ways of conceptualizing heritage, framed here as a relationship lens, where feelings of connection to place became framed in terms of agency, affect, and entanglement and where place was seen as an active agent in the processes of human place attachment. These theoretical perspectives, while engagingly framed, have not yet resulted in a shift in heritage practice. The social value framework established in the late 1980s and early 1990s had become institutionally embedded and effectively marginalized. Registers of significant heritage places continued to be dominated by the heritage values best able to be espoused by heritage professionals, not the “places of the heart” held dear by communities.The third lens, embodiment, is based on contemplating a deeper, more intimate relationship between people and place, and at this stage is largely atheoretical. In proposing this lens, the article contemplates what approaches might be used to engage with the idea of the indivisibility of people and place, a sense of mutual embodiment, within heritage practice.

While this article does not engage specifically with Indigenous relationship to place and Country, it does acknowledge that Australian heritage practice has been profoundly influenced by the nature of colonial settlement and by the assertion of Indigenous rights (to culture, land, and knowledge).

In conclusion, the article considers how recognition of the embodiment lens, even conceptually, may offer a powerful new perspective and encourage development of more integrated, holistic approaches to challenge the exclusionary model that is now so deeply embedded in heritage policy and practice.

Published in Global Perspectives in December 2025, a University of California Press publication.