Urban Heritage: integrating cultural heritage management and sustainable urban development

This paper is part of a doctoral research focusing on how cultural heritage could be assessed on an urban scale. It will explore the theoretical framework behind the evolution of concepts addressing cultural heritage on an urban scale, mostly known nowadays as urban heritage, illustrated by the case of the Amsterdam canal ring area. The paper starts by tracing the concept of urban heritage back to its beginnings, in order to reveal how it was once ‘invented’. Then, it debates that cultural heritage management is going through a process of change, from focusing on built heritage assets, to a more holistic approach where the setting and context as well as development play a greater role. This process of change calls for the development of management tools and research methods towards the preservation on a larger scale such as cultural landscapes, historic urban landscape and World Heritage cities. All three are being developed in close relation to morphological research interpreted as a discipline that has the potential to embrace not simply a two and three-dimensional methodology that studies and characterizes the physical evolution of historic cities, but one that facilitates a fuller understanding of their functional and socioeconomic evolution .2 Eventually the goal is to use morphological research to integrate cultural heritage management and urban development, and with that making urban development more sustainable