Announcements

Heritage creates identity and the destruction of heritage destroys identity. Therefore, individuals and societies are responsible for the sustainable safeguarding of their heritage. This is the focus of the most successful convention for the protection of our heritage, the World Heritage Convention, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2022. The destruction of heritage is multidimensional. So is also the responsibility that individuals and societies must assume for their heritage. This is the key message of the book 50 Years World Heritage Convention: Shared Responsibility – Conflict & Reconciliation. It reflects on 50 years implementation of the World Heritage Convention, focussing on conflicts related to areas such as Global Governance, Urban Transformation, War and Terrorism, Climate Change, Technological Change, and Commodification, and developing solving strategies. Furthermore, the book relates to the future of the convention, discussing important values such as “responsibility”, “reconciliation” and “sustainability”. more …

This book proposes a Metamodel for heritage-based urban development, based on urban morphology, governance theory, and the metamodeling concept of John P. Van Gigch. Building on international policies such as the 2011 Recommendation for Historic Urban Landscapes and the results of the 2016 Urban Habitat III Conference, cultural heritage is now regarded as a potential resource for sustainable urban development. While more and more evidence of the potential benefits of cultural heritage for sustainable development has been published, this book is the first to develop and design a Metamodel that can be universally applied in a wide variety of settings. The Metamodel was developed using grounded theory and the design research methodology and is based on three successful case-models from European contexts. The book includes three application scenarios that elaborate how the metamodel can be used to design, evaluate, and improve processes where cultural heritage is a starting point for sustainable urban development. more …