Towards Smart Planning Conservation of Heritage Cities: Digital Technologies and Heritage Conservation Planning

Consensus exists on the importance of local identity and diversity in the sustainability discourse, including community resilience. As result, cultural policies are essential to enable sustainability goals. In the construction industry, digital technologies are playing a significant role in flattening the richness and distinctiveness of local contexts and homogenizing languages and practices, under the pressure of the constant urge to reduce costs and the necessity to comply with a sometime overwhelming plethora of technical and legal requirements and standards. The ambition of this paper is to shed light to the interplay between digital technologies, planning practice and tangible heritage conservation in the city, by clarifying the dynamic among the three fields and their implications in the practice. In so doing, this paper aims at offering recommendations that can inform the smart heritage conservation planning practice worldwide, and can be used by experts working for heritage conservation authorities, local authorities, professional practices, charities and digital technologies companies.