Historic urban landscapes : an assessment framework part II

Current theory defines conservation, or heritage management, as ‘managing thoughtful change’ and recommends a landscape-based approach towards heritage management. Moreover, it indicates a landscape-based approach to heritage management as a key indicator for sustainable socio-economic development. The recent UNESCO (November 2011) recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) provides guidance on such a landscape-based approach at international level. Yet, it is now up to the national and local governments to adapt, disseminate and facilitate its implementation. The research aims to develop a method to reveal the way historic cities currently manage contemporary socio-economic transformations. This is done by evaluating their management practices by means of an assessment framework. This framework has been deduced from a thorough literature survey to identify the evolution and guidelines on international cultural heritage management, including those proposed by HUL. The framework intents to be a method to reveal the differences and resemblances between existing local policy and management practices and those recommended by the HUL approach, defined for 4 dependent variables: attributes, values, stakeholders and strategies. The part of the framework presented in this paper to reveal how the values of cultural heritage are addressed in current policy. The recent adoption of HUL makes it difficult to assess the results of its implementation; therefore the framework will be used to assess the policy and management practices in cities that previously implemented measures similar to HUL such as Amsterdam. Keywords: Heritage Management, Historic Urban Landscape, Assessment Framework