Navigating discourses and local practices: the people-centred approach in urban heritage practice

Abstract The discourse of heritage conservation has developed from a material-centred approach to a people-centred approach (PCA), reflecting a shift towards a relational and dynamic understanding of heritage-making. While the PCA is prominent in global discourse, its local implementation—particularly its interaction with institutional discourses and extradiscursive factors—remains underexplored. These factors shape its capacity to promote social justice and equity in heritage practices. This study examines two models of PCA implementation in China and Thailand to reveal how discursive visions of heritage are enabled or constrained by extradiscursive forces such as governance practices, resource distribution, and actor dynamics. In the coproduction model, the dominance of authorised heritage discourse-led practices reduces community agency through limited participation, misaligned heritage values, unequal resource governance, and tourism market-driven heritage practices. In the bottom-up model, external dependencies and fragmented governance limit local agency and continuity. We argue that realising the PCA’s transformative potential requires acknowledging the extradiscursive factors that constrain and enable discourse while fostering cultural recreation and addressing systemic inequities in heritage governance. This study proposes a staged framework that integrates the PCA discourse with institutions, empowers communities, embeds heritage goals in local planning, and enables iterative feedback mechanisms.