Sustainable Urban Built Heritage: Conservation, Accessibility, and Adaptive Transformation of Historic Cities

Dear Colleagues,

Urban built heritage is not only a material legacy to be preserved but a living urban condition in which cultural values, everyday practices, environmental performance, social inclusion, economic regeneration and collective identities continuously interact. Today, historic cities, heritage districts and stratified urban fabrics are confronted with converging pressures: climate change, demographic ageing, tourism, mobility transitions, depopulation or overuse, energy retrofit, digital transformation, and the growing need to ensure equitable access to public spaces and cultural resources.

These challenges cannot be addressed through sectoral approaches that separate conservation from use, accessibility from heritage protection, or technical performance from cultural meaning. Urban built heritage requires integrated and context-sensitive strategies capable of governing the tension between continuity and transformation. In this perspective, sustainability is not limited to environmental efficiency, but includes cultural sustainability, social justice, long-term care, adaptive reuse, inclusive governance and the capacity of historic environments to remain meaningful and usable over time.

This Special Issue aims to explore sustainable urban built heritage as a field of mediation between conservation, inclusive design, urban regeneration and environmental transition. We welcome contributions that investigate historic cities and heritage urban landscapes as complex systems, where material integrity, accessibility, climate resilience, public space quality, community participation, digital knowledge systems and adaptive management must be considered together.

The issue seeks to open an international debate on methods, tools and case studies capable of moving beyond purely regulatory or object-based approaches to heritage conservation. Particular attention will be given to approaches that interpret historic urban environments as dynamic and inhabited places, where design, planning and conservation can support both the protection of cultural values and the right of people to access, understand and use heritage.

Original research articles, review papers, methodological contributions, comparative case studies and policy-oriented papers are welcome.

Research areas may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Sustainable conservation and management of historic urban landscapes;
• Adaptive reuse, maintenance and long-term care of urban built heritage;
• Accessibility, usability and inclusive design in historic cities and heritage sites;
• Plans and governance tools for urban accessibility in historic contexts;
• Heritage-led urban regeneration and public space quality;
• Cultural sustainability, social inclusion and the right to heritage;
• Climate adaptation, environmental performance and energy retrofit in historic urban fabrics;
• Circular economy, material compatibility and low-impact transformation strategies;
• Digital inventories, GIS, HBIM, digital twins and decision-support systems for heritage management;
• Participatory processes, heritage communities and multi-level governance;
• Sustainable tourism, overtourism and everyday use of historic centres;
• Risk mitigation, resilience and vulnerability assessment of urban built heritage;
• Multi-criteria evaluation methods for balancing conservation, performance and social impact.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Alberto Arenghi
Prof. Dr. Carlotta Coccoli
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-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 2400 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.

• urban built heritage
• historic cities
• cultural sustainability
• architectural conservation
• adaptive reuse
• accessibility
• inclusive design
• heritage-led regeneration
• climate resilience
• digital heritage governance