Contemporary Challenges for Urban Built Environment and Landscape Conservation: Social, Cultural and Economic Issues

Dear Colleagues,

In the last few decades, growing concern about the negative effects of climate change, environmental degradation, and a land consumption-based planning approach has driven decision-makers to opt for sustainable development models in projects and plans at the urban and landscape scales. This shift in paradigm has resulted in a focus on territorial and urban systems’ built heritage dimension as a possible source for making cities, human settlements, and landscapes inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. However, the acknowledgement of built heritage’s possible role in sustainable and multi-dimensional development is still struggling to find reflection in intervention and planning practice due to the high thematic and operative complexity of heritage assets’ specificities.

Such a complexity, stemming from the need to balance heritage asset value protection with the social and economic sustainability of conservation interventions, poses several challenges of a cultural, social, and economic nature to decision-makers, planners, and scholars.

This Special Issue is aimed at collecting a variety of research papers and reviews to frame an interdisciplinary and structured debate on how to interpret and address the contemporary challenges related to built heritage conservation. Moreover, coherently with the journal scope, it aims to reflect on heritage conservation’s space in the UN’s urban and landscape planning agenda 2030 (SDG 11) and on the possible role of assessment and evaluation frameworks toward addressing these challenges from an economic, social, and cultural perspective, considering the interaction between these dimensions.

Within this general thematic frame, this Special Issue welcomes articles dealing with the following:

• The existing criticalities or ‘virtuous’ elements in the relationship between territorial planning and conservation at the national and international levels;
• Innovative planning and decision-making approaches to heritage conservation at the urban and landscape scale;
• Heritage-driven or culture-driven approaches to urban and landscape regeneration;
• Participatory approaches to conservation issues and local community roles in heritage landscape planning and decision-making processes;
• Built heritage conservation’s specificities and challenges in development and transformation processes related to different territorial contexts (urban landscape and rural landscape);
• The cultural, social, and economic dimension of built heritage reuse and landscape enhancement;
• Assessment and evaluation methodologies to support conservation decisions;
• The multi-dimensional value of cultural heritage assets and landscape.

We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.

Dr. Francesca Torrieri
Dr. Marco Rossitti
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.