Heritage and sustainable development; bound-partners in a believable future

International audienceTwo global notions are improving their importance: heritage and sustainable development – obviously involving safeguard and climate changes. New transformations in urban areas are showing the great tension existing among heritage and development needs. Heritage and Sustainable development still need, public interventions with the purpose of implement a virtuous and self standing development strategy. The great Maghreb's towns will be presented as study case: challenges, chances and realities. It's largely clear that the main issues to manage heritage and sustainability at urban scale are not any more technical ones. The issue is a global policy able to combine together the countless partial strategies and interests existing in human settlements. Generally speaking, both heritage and sustainability are requesting public strategies and policies; therefore a transformation of general urban actors in advised ones is needed. Paying attention to the general speeches about town planning, urban transformation and landscape modification, we can frequently observe the use, and often the abuse, of two global notions: heritage and sustainable development – obviously involving safeguard and climate changes. Those two notions are global ones since they are inclusive and each one of them is ready to contain the whole ecumene inside its own universal space. Of course I'm overstating the reality, but not so much. Actually these two " expanding " notions will be obliged to face each other and they are called to manage a common way of life. Will they find a pacific coexistence or will they suffer of an obliged one?Will the future of our globe assist to a competition between sustainability(s) and heritage(s) or they will collaborate among them