A LANDSCAPE approach to cultural heritage management in the context of climate CHANGE

This proposal addresses cultural heritage conservation and management in the context of climate change. It goes beyond the traditional differentiation between tangible and intangible heritage and addresses the city as a living heritage. Accordingly, it seeks to develop a landscape people-centered methodological framework that acknowledges the active role of communities in co-producing local knowledge. The proposed framework integrates different perspectives from different disciplines noting the scientific, social and humanities approaches along with cultural and natural heritage perspectives. As a result, it is structured around several axes to address physical settings, landscape perceptions, cultural values, digital heritage practices, and vulnerability of cultural heritage to climate change. To address the complex nature of cultural heritage, the proposed method incorporates social media metadata and traditional data sources and integrates qualitative, quantitative, geographical, and visual analysis along with machine learning techniques. By doing so, it seeks to map how different stakeholder groups value heritage in the context of climate change and assess the vulnerability of heritage and its associated values to climate change. The novel aspect of this proposal is the use of digital technologies to engage local communities in heritage values assessment and heritage management recommendations to foster a sense of communal ownership in the local heritage landscape from the grassroots level. The innovation of this project lies in linking physical vulnerability and risk management concepts with a more general and multidimensional resilience approach focused on the singularities of cultural heritage resilience. Results are expected to draw recommendations for integrating policies and practices of heritage management, sustainable urban development, and climate governance.