TPR, 79 (4) 2008 K. Olsson Citizen input in urban heritage management and planning A quantitative approach to citizen participation Krister Olsson is Senior Researcher in the Department of Urban Planning and Environment, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden; email: kristero@infra.kth.se Paper submitted October 2007; revised paper received and accepted July 2008. This article discusses why and how to take local citizens, and their values, into account in urban heritage management and planning. It includes an analysis of the relation between a traditional instrumental rational view on planning and a communicative planning ideal. With a starting point in economic theory, urban heritage is analysed as an infrastructure and a public good. Mail surveys directed to inhabitants in two Swedish municipalities further illustrate how urban heritage can be discussed as a public good, and what implications that has for involving citizens in heritage management and planning. Citizen participa- tion as traditionally conceived includes active citizens taking part in a direct way in planning discussions, i.e. by means of qualitative approaches. However, direct participation is especially difficult to accom- plish concerning public goods and infrastructures. The article concludes that there are good reasons to increase and develop citizens’ input in heritage management, and that the public good characteristics of urban heritage beg for quantitative analysis. Thus, a quantitative approach to citizen participation has the potential to complement qualitative ways of involving citizens in planning. In the city, time becomes visible: buildings and monuments and public ways, more open than the written record, more subject to the gaze of many men than the scattered artefacts of the countryside, leave an imprint upon the minds even of the ignorant or the indiferent. Through the material fact of preservation, time challenges time, time clashes with time: habits and values carry over beyond the living group, streaking with diferent strata of time the character of any single generation. Layer upon layer, past times preserve themselves in the city until life itself is inally threatened with sufoca- tion: then, in sheer defense, modern man invents the museum. (Mumford, 1970 [1938], 4) The quotation above, from Lewis Mumford’s classic book The Cultures of Cities, can be regarded as a starting point for this article. There is an inherent conlict between preservation of urban cultural built heritage and eforts to adjust cities to contem- porary demands and needs. At least, this has for a long time been a prevalent view in urban development planning, as well as in heritage management. Consequently, public heritage management has been much occupied with adding parts of the urban environment to ‘the museum’ that Mumford writes about. Heritage management TPR79_4_03_Olsson.indd 371 27/10/08 14:35:03