A sustainable future for the past: Managing historic industrial and urban environments

There has been an increase over the past fifteen years in the number of industrial and urban sites on the World Heritage List. This, together with UNESCO's recent declaration that heritage makes a "significant contribution to sustainable development", places expectations on heritage practice to accommodate change This paper sets out, firstly, to determine how the concept of sustainable development is being applied to complex historic environments. This is achieved through a multiple embedded case study of six industrial World Heritage sites in the United Kingdom. An analysis of documentary evidence, physical surveys and semi-structured interviews is used to form a model of current best practice heritage management. This model is evaluated against a theoretical best practice model of sustainable heritage management derived from literature on sustainable development and heritage management. The resultant best practice model is then applied to the mining city of Broken Hill which is currently being assessed for inclusion on the Australian National Heritage List. The model is relevant to other complex historic sites that are looking to implement a long-term sustainable approach to their management