Bridging urban development, resilience planning, and heritage management for Climate Neutral and Resilient Historic Urban Districts

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges that our planet is currently facing. From seasonal shifts in climate, with droughts, heatwaves, floods and storms, the impacts of climate change are global in scope and unprecedented in scale. Cities are heavily affected by the climate change consequences, with most of Europe’s population living in cities and urban areas and projections for 2050 predicting even larger shares (Nabielek, Hamers, & Evers, 2016). At the same time, cities generate up to 80% of a country’s GDP (United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2011), but also consume 75% of the natural resources and account for 60-80% of greenhouse gas emissions. That is, urbanisation and cities’ economic growth are the biggest contributors to climate change.

Heritage, as a sensitive and valuable element of the living environment, is being affected by the increase in frequency and intensity of climate-related events, posing new challenges and needs to conservators and heritage managers. But improving the resilience of the historic urban districts, adapting to urbanisation, climate change, and other social, economic, and security trends is a challenging endeavour for cities and prone to potential conflicts of interest. It requires managing tasks like accommodating a growing – and in many cases aging – population, providing the required services, fostering social, environmental, and economic sustainability, and keeping the city liveable and attractive. But a liveable, sustainable, and, above all, resilient city is not just a product of organised and well-functioning services; other crucial elements are the places that make up the city, along with their communities. Sites of significant cultural and historical value and significance have an important role to play in fostering location-based identity and social cohesion. With the increased recognition of the threats that heritage faces from climate change, but also the role heritage can play in driving climate actions, all those connected to heritage face both a profound opportunity and a challenging responsibility. (ICOMOS Climate Change and Cultural Heritage Working Group, 2019)

As a response to these threats, a bridge is needed to fill the gap between urban development, resilience planning, and heritage management to boost collaboration among all involved stakeholders and make our cities more climate neutral and resilient. This should be based on a vision to stimulate and promote development for wider adoption of solutions for climate change mitigation and adaptation in historic urban districts. This process will promote constructive dialogue, development, and exchange of best practices for achieving better integration between resilient urban planning and heritage management. Moreover, it will aim to increase awareness of the role of historic areas – with their unique value and importance – play in stimulating the general public to actively contribute to coordinated efforts on climate resilience in accordance with protection and preservation of heritage both within local environments as well as nationally and internationally.

In the long-term, the goal is to make historic urban districts and their communities climate neutral and resilient, but also branch out to issues of contemporary urban districts to build and nurture more synergies.