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  • Editorial
  • Open Access

29 November 2024

Approaches to Urban Landscape Transformation vs. Heritage

,
and
1
Department of Urban Planning, Spatial Planning and Landscape Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb, Kačićeva 26, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
2
Architecture Program, Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, International University of Sarajevo, Hrasnička Cesta br. 15, 71210 Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Land2024, 13(12), 2049;https://doi.org/10.3390/land13122049
This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Landscape Transformation vs. Heritage
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1. Introduction

Cities are systems composed of urban and natural landscapes with intangible and tangible layers, continuously developing and overlapping [1]. Based on this perspective, the layer of heritage is inherent to urban transformation and is a part of the continuous process of urban change. However, urban transformations can have different, possibly unwanted outcomes.
As cities today are facing the consequences of rapid population growth and uncontrolled urbanisation [2,3], as well as the impacts of environmental changes and disasters, there is a growing pressure in terms of land resources and limited usable land being available in urban areas. Within this rapidly shifting, everchanging, and globally evolving urban context, rethinking the role of heritage as an integral part of urban landscapes and land usage requires new attention, definitions and comparisons.
The Special Issue titled ‘Urban Landscape Transformation vs. Heritage’, therefore, employs the term ‘heritage urbanism’ [4], an internationally recognised research approach for the restoration and revitalisation of cultural, natural and mixed heritage in order to address the following questions:
  • How can urban landscape transformation contribute to the protection and preservation of heritage?
  • Does urban landscape transformation, in fact, transform heritage?
  • Can urban landscape transformation generate, create, and develop new heritage?
This Special Issues invites manuscripts that address the following themes:
  • Urban landscape transformation through heritage preservation;
  • Urban landscape transformation through the active use of cultural and/or natural heritage;
  • Urban landscape transformation as an opportunity for using heritage to support change towards sustainability and resilience;
  • Urban landscape transformation as a catalyst for creating new heritage;
  • The evaluation and prediction of heritage-related issues in urban landscape transformation;
  • Assessing the impact of environmental factors on cultural and natural heritage sites amid urban landscape transformation;
  • Cultural and natural heritage between climate change and urban landscape transformation.

2. Observing Heritage in the Context of Urban Landscape Transformation: Architectural Heritage, Urbanscape as Urban Heritage, and Landscape as Cultural Landscapes

The fifteen papers within this Special Issue book cover a range of valuable research topics, observing urban landscape transformation and heritage from various perspectives and spatial contexts.
All examples (Table 1) explain that urban landscape transformation influences heritage and its relationship to wider urban contexts, thus redefining heritage.
Table 1. Overview of topic “Urban Landscape Transformation vs. Heritage”.
The gathered research observes examples of architectural heritage and protected urban and landscape settings. The comparative approaches enabled the following research contributions. First, some contributions define the criteria for understanding the relationship between urban change and heritage layers in scales of architecture, urban planning and cultural landscape. Second, some contributions enable the detection of heritage reuse modes. Third, some contributions redefine our understanding of lost and preserved heritage values within their specific processes of urban transformation.

3. Recent Developments and Open Questions for Future Research

In the contemporary context of diverse “urbanisms” theories, common planning goals can be found in the concepts of integration instead of fragmentation in order to increase quality of life [5]. As such, the integration of heritage into urban landscape transformations is seen as an inevitable basis and evaluation criteria. Increasing quality of life through urban transformation and planning resilient urban infrastructure systems [6,7,8] includes exploring and solving walkability issues and preserving the urban and architectural values of historical cultural heritage. In the case of the landscape values of summer villas and their gardens and surrounding cultural landscapes, it is questionable if the lost values can be regained or if urban devastations can be mitigated.
Recent research presents dynamic shifts in urbanism where cities, as well as projects, are not observed in their static states but instead are designed and explored as processes [9,10,11]. The aim is to predict the possible scenarios and their role in a constantly changing world where reuse and multifunctional criteria apply [12]. Rethinking heritage from a dynamic urban perspective remains a constant question when connecting the past, present and future.
Modernistic and functional urbanism is required knowledge for understanding the 20th-century city and its development, and as such, examples of modernistic urban planning have been established as heritage, so their contemporary situation needs careful consideration [13,14,15].
Altogether, the mentioned theories and presented research (chapters) raised important issues for future research and design practice in the context of urban landscape transformation:
  • Climate change vs. landscape conservation strategies where cities are observed as urban ecosystems balancing natural and human habitats while carefully protecting landscape values for raising biodiversity [16];
  • Connecting various cultures into coherent tolerant communities where urban memory is supported by participatory and other mixed planning practices [17,18].
Perception and awareness of previous layers is important because they can guide planners and designers towards understanding contextual limitations and solving spatial and social problems by achieving stronger interconnections (Figure 1). Each urban landscape transformation builds on previous layers, and through the rediscovery and reinterpretation of these layers, we can form a basis for achieving new values such as heritage for future generations.
Figure 1. The urban landscape transformation of the city of Zagreb in Croatia. The author of the collage: Jelena Bule, a student work from 2013 under the mentorship of Prof. Dr. Sc. Bojana Bojanić Obad Šćitaroci (Urban Landscape Workshop at the Master Studies of Architecture and Urban Planning, Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with a minor correction to the readability of Table 1 and a number in the main text was corrected (representing only the total number of articles published in the special issue). This change does not affect the scientific content of the article.

References

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