Negotiating heritage in Danish public housing renovation

This paper presents a significant problem when it comes to the challenging task of safeguarding recent past architectural heritage with reference to the democratization ideals propagated by the New Heritage paradigm. Based on controversy mapping relating to the renovation of a Danish 1950s high-rise
complex of public housing, it discusses how implementing an expanded idea of heritage as what is regarded relevant for and by a given contemporary population of democratic deliberation presents difficulties in ongoing efforts of safeguarding architectural heritage in practice. Thus, the paper raises questions about how heritage understandings are currently negotiated in a complicated process of interdependent partners promoting different agendas; on what terms this negotiation is made, how and by whom. And not least, it discusses the importance of when the issue of architectural quality and the performance of interventions conveying heritage understandings can be addressed and given a binding form for this process and its partners.