Integrity as Process and Feature: Cultural Landscapes of Underrepresented Communities

Abstract:National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) integrity evaluation is the primary means by which historic resources are documented, designated, managed, and interpreted in the United States, measuring the degree to which a property's defining features, linked to a specific period of significance, are unchanged. Standard application of this integrity process fails to recognize more complex and layered historic places that often comprise contested spaces with underrepresented histories. The cultural landscape concept can strengthen application of the NRHP integrity evaluation, with an understanding of place and placemaking that is both process and feature based, considering these places as evolving systems with critical inherent change.Case studies illustrate how current applications of integrity lack cultural and environmental literacy and how this practice marginalizes, erases, or ignores minoritized groups' heritage. The authors argue that resistance to change, including cultural discontinuity or normative processes of change over time, perpetuate assumptions that marginalize lived experience, local constructions of landscape dynamics, and place meaning. Inequalities, misapplication, and erasure perpetuated by the currently accepted approach to assessing "integrity" in historic places is revealed. Recommendations are presented to broaden our thinking and evaluation of integrity with application of the cultural landscape lens to a range of historic resources.