Bridging Heritage Conservation and Urban Development Planning Policies : Exploring Research Methodologies in the Literature

Cities are the main drivers in the race to sustainable development, and the needed transformations would affect their built environment. Transformations through development plans or projects are often regulated by local planning policies, which are assumed to simultaneously enable transformation and the conservation of irreplaceable resources such as heritage. Earlier research, however, denounces a different reality, where local planning policies omit heritage or a share of these resources e.g., intangible, or even when local planning policies acknowledge heritage as a whole, but their guidelines of transformation are unrelated to heritage and/or their attributes. This paper is part of doctoral research that aims to discuss the dynamic between heritage conservation and urban development in planning policies and tools. It introduces the results of a systematic literature review crossing both fields. Focused on the methodology adopted recent researches, it discusses the outcomes of an in depth analysis of 37 publications, with a detailed methodology description. The analysis explored the type of data sources, actors addressed and heritage categories, values and attributes. Results confirmed the recent trend in which the relation between heritage and planning is shifting, from being considered a threat to a crucial resource to development. Although still far from the leading role as promoted by international documents as the UNESCO 2011 Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape. The results of this research are relevant for science, but also for society, by highlighting how these approaches can raise the efficiency of planning policies, the results assist cities developing more sustainably.