Assemblages for Cultural Heritage: A Methodological Approach of Heritage-Driven Enhancement

Cities are constantly evolving organisms where social, economic, and political changes challenge the design of new sustainable urban futures. In heritage-rich contexts, this often takes to the co-existence of transformation activities and cultural heritage, where culture plays an essential role in regulating human relations and shaping new infrastructures and organizational rules of our societies and urban ecosystems. In this perspective, a new approach balancing preservation and sustainable cultural value-based development is required. The paper analyses the UNESCO Historic Urban Landscape Recommendation approach as a holistic, integrative, and value-based approach. Nevertheless, the Recommendation needs to be implemented through a trans-disciplinary lens, aiming at the integration of knowledge to develop evaluation and policy models based on community-recognised heritage values. The research analyses the possibility of integrating an ‘assembled’ vision of urban ecosystems, co-constituted by ‘human and non-human aspects’, and the adoption of the Cultural Values Model as a tool to integrate diverse visions of cultural values of cultural landscapes, address rapid policy decisions, and ensure a sustainable future through heritage-driven actions.