Our health, our heritage : measuring psychological wellbeing from heritage appreciation

Abstract

In a fast-growing city like Hong Kong, conserving our culture and built heritage is an essential element of a sustainable development. In recent years, there is a growing public concern on how we conserve our heritage for a better future. As recommended by World Health Organisation (WHO), United Nations (UN), and United Nations Educations, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNSECO), our wellbeing is one of the initiative to achieve sustainable city and this is also related to our heritage. Our ability to appreciate our heritage is therefore a major factor on our health and a city’s sustainable development, which is largely neglected in Hong Kong. Currently, there are many programmes in Hong Kong that introduce our heritage to our society. However, none of them provides measure on its effectiveness and whether there is a direct relationship between health and heritage appreciation. Hong Kong is therefore behind the global trend to recognise the relationship between health and heritage. In view of this research gap in Hong Kong, the author organised a heritage appreciation workshop in order to investigate whether heritage has any direct relationship between health and wellbeing. The result of the heritage workshop shall be analysed and presented in this report. The focus of this dissertation is to investigate whether there is a connection between health and heritage, and if so, what is this connection. The scope of this dissertation is to study and provide quantitative and qualitative measure on the relationship between health and heritage in the context of Hong Kong. For data collection, the author first devised a Hong Kong-specific measurement method based on the Scooping Review on the Impact of Heritage Interventions to Community Wellbeing (by the NGO What Works Well Centre for Wellbeing) and the Historic Framework (by Historic England). With the method established, the author conducted a workshop to test out this Hong Kong-specific method to understand if the relationship between health and heritage can be measured quantitatively and qualitatively, and if so, what could be improved upon.