Existing qualitative studies into the value of ‘participation in the arts’ tend to be from a traditional empirical-sociological perspective and do not take into account the value of these projects as part of urban studies strategies, or the art historical concerns and contexts of art practice. Other studies are located from within an art history discipline where scholarship is focused on participatory art practices that accomplish a significant work of art, discounting the social relations attained during the project and resorting to a traditional art historical analysis of discrete objects. We believe that these approaches fail to capture the complexity, significance and value of social art practices. Moreover many interdisciplinary projects look at the question of value in participatory artworks by proposing measuring tools or evaluation research, which we think tend towards ‘quantifying’ value, rather than mapping the diversity of meanings the idea of ‘value’ could have. In this paper we claim that is crucial to understand artworks as having various forms of value depending on their context and function.