Urban Heritage

Abstract

The concept of urban heritage has two meanings. First, urban heritage can refer to the list of heritage elements located in urban areas: archaeological vestiges, historical buildings, vernacular architecture, historical gardens, social practices, rituals, and festive events, among others. Second, urban heritage can refer to the city as heritage, a special type of cultural property that is mainly associated with neighborhoods, urban centers, and historic cities. This article focuses on the second meaning. The focus is placed on the heritage values of the urban space, which are overall values resulting from the integration of different components. The use of the term urban heritage has become popular during the last decades. However, it is closely linked to conservation and restoration proposals of historic centers in European cities since the mid-20th century. From Europe, urban conservation extends to other parts of the world, driven by organizations such as UNESCO that establishes a special category of cultural properties named “groups of buildings” in the World Heritage Convention in 1972, generally associated with towns. Since the beginning of the 21st century, UNESCO is promoting an extended approach to urban heritage that goes beyond the built environment and integrates social, economic, and functional dimensions. The Recommendation on Historic Urban Landscape of 2011 provides a more global vision and gives special prominence to the communities that inhabit historic towns or historic centers. This approach also implies a disciplinary opening, with an increasing number of inputs coming from social sciences. In this sense, this article basically includes some recent works on urban heritage that allow to establish the present state of the issue. Historical trajectory of the concept is described until reaching the current approximations in terms of the historical urban landscape. A set of contributions that deal with its components are presented, from the location conditions to the social representations and their meanings. References to the main vectors that threaten the preservation of their values and also to the mechanisms to make heritage a vector of sustainable development are included. Special attention is paid to the management of heritage sectors of the city. This urban management must balance the safeguard as heritage properties and the maintenance of adequate levels of quality of life for the communities that live there. Due to the important tourist dimension of these spaces, reflecting on the positive and negative effects of an increasing influx of visitors is very important nowadays. Finally global preservation strategies, in case of the World Heritage List, are contrasted with specific situations of very different geographical areas (Europe, Latin America, China, Middle East, etc.).

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