Built cultural heritage and sustainable urban development

Current debates about urban sustainability tend to focus on technical issues, such as carbon emissions, energy consumption and waste management, or on the economic aspects of urban regeneration and growth. Increasingly, however, governments recognise the contribution that built cultural heritage makes to the social well-being of different groups living within increasingly cosmopolitan towns and cities. Heritage is seen as a major component of quality of life, but the two main methods of identifying and protecting built heritage – the listing of individual monuments and buildings and designation of conservation areas – are unable to deal with less tangible features of townscape, such as street patterns. Yet it is often precisely these features that give a city its unique character and provide the sense of belonging that lies at the core of cultural identity. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to examine the role that built cultural heritage can play within sustainable urban development. The paper considers changing definitions of built heritage before outlining the broad contribution it can make to sustainable urban development. The paper then considers how the built environment contributes to the satisfaction of human needs by providing symbolic meanings that bind cultural groups and communities across generations. Results from the development and application of a novel survey method, designed to assess different peopleʹs perceptions of and attitudes to urban historical areas, are presented before describing a case study of recent urban development in Belfast that highlights the problems of intangible heritage. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of shortcomings of existing approaches to urban regeneration and suggests how these might be overcome through a greater understanding of how people interact with the urban environment and its heritage.