Isabel Breda-Vázquez

This paper conducts a semi-systematic literature review (2012–2023) on urban World Heritage Site (WHS) management, using bibliometric and content analysis. It identifies four key themes: heritage management, community engagement, tourism pressures, and policy concerns. Findings highlight the central role of management plans, tourism’s strong influence, and governance challenges. The study calls for interdisciplinary research, improved governance, and better legal frameworks to address conflicts and strengthen WHS management.

Transformative capacity (TC) is key for addressing climate change impacts. It refers to urban areas’ ability for profound and intentional change to address current challenges and move towards a more desirable and resilient state. However, its varied applications across disciplines can lead to misunderstandings and implementation challenges. Thus, this Semi-Systematic Literature Review (SSLR) on TC within urban studies from 2016 to 2022 aims to overview and synthesise TC literature and its gaps to inform ongoing debates, intersecting it with climate-related research. The results show an increasing interest in TC within two fields of knowledge: resilience studies and transformative research. The review found TC as a catalyst for transformative actions, promoting sustainable pathways, enhancing resilience, and driving fundamental changes in urban climate adaptation. Finally, the prevailing literature gaps concern the TC concept’s fragmentation, excessive research on governance features, and lack of joint research about TC and innovation.

Governance, and specifically local management and institutional systems, is among the key factors affecting the management of World Heritage (WH) properties in urban contexts. The adoption of the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL approach) promotes a governance reform towards more inclusive and integrated management. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the HUL approach may help to solve the key governance challenges affecting WH in urban contexts. The governance of WH in three European cities is compared. Edinburgh, Porto, and Florence were chosen for their familiarity with the HUL approach and willingness to provide guidance and review policies and review their policies as management plans. The methodology includes a policy analysis of the management plans followed by a comparative analysis based on the six key governance challenges addressed in the recent literature. The results show that the HUL approach is supporting the governance of WH in urban contexts, and that more inclusive and integrated management has helped address the challenges affecting heritage management.

The formal existence of a specialisation in spatial planning at FEUP dates back 50 years. The present paper aims to contribute to the analysis of this experience, and to some extent of its contributions, by tracing the evolution of the themes of MSc dissertations and PhD thesis. under the scope of the different spatial planning specialisation courses. After a brief contextualisation, which refers to changes in higher education in Portugal and in FEUP, the paper answers two research questions: How did the themes of Master Dissertations and Doctoral Theses in Spatial Planning evolve within this field of specialisation in FEUP? How do the themes in the field of Spatial Planning correlate between themselves? To this end, methodologies of content analysis of metadata, titles, and abstracts (CAMTA) and cluster analysis based on the software VOSviewer were applied. The increasing number of publications and themes, which reflect the consolidation of this field of specialisation, and the permanence of three major research clusters, which are thus a characteristic of the planning approach developed at FEUP, constitute some of the main results of the study.

This special issue of U.Porto Journal of Engineering aims to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the creation of the specialization in Territorial Planning (1972-2022), in the Civil Engineering Department of the Faculty of Engineering - University of Porto.

Urban Heritage Rehabilitation: Institutional Stakeholders’ Contributions to Improve Implementation of Urban and Building Regulations | Article | Urban Planning

The need to study and understand urban resilience has been defended by academics, justified by a new global context characterized by a growing urban population and a changing climate. Moreover, the importance of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) has been recognized by UNESCO since 2003. Nevertheless, the relationship between ICH and urban resilience discourses is recent, with academic studies on this topic seeing an exponential growth from 2017 onward. This article aims to develop a systematic literature review in order to answer the research question “how does intangible heritage relate to urban resilience?” and present current academic debates on this relationship. Following a methodology which entailed an academic database search and the application of exclusion criteria, 94 results from Scopus and Web of Science were retrieved and analysed. The article presents a discussion of results and showcases an existing linkage between both areas of study. This study demonstrates the fragmentation and diversity of the debates when addressing the relationship between the two topics, with an existing focus on sustainability discourses, built heritage and the role of local communities. Moreover, the article also shows a prevalence of discourses based on an engineering resilience approach. Considerations for future approaches to ICH and urban resilience are presented, namely, the need to better integrate ICH into urban resilience discourses.

The ageing and degradation of built heritage is an important topic in discussion around the world, especially when located in urban areas, and it raises concerns about their safeguard and preservation. In this regard, national and regional policies have an important role in controlling the level of the interventions and giving the stakeholders tools that allow taking sustained decisions. For that, it is fundamental that the decision-making entities have the information concerning built heritage characteristics and in-situ conditions, and incorporate this data in their policies, namely through inventorying and cataloguing processes. Such information is also fundamental to establish differentiated levels of intervention and support the consideration of flexible and proportional criteria in building codes and regulations. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the relevance of an integrated assessment of inhabited built heritage to feed plans, guidelines and policies concerned with the control of interventions, particularly on buildings with values that should be preserved, in order to support accurate decision-making. To do this, a specific assessment tool built within the Methodology for the Assessment of Residential Built Heritage (MARBH) is applied to a specific set of old residential buildings located in the historical centre of Porto, Portugal.

The problems faced by stakeholders in contemporary urban policy-making processes are becoming increasingly intricate and are emerging at an increasingly faster pace. Many of these problems are emerging as dilemmas between option A or option B. This article proposes that dilemmas can be addressed at three different levels of complexity. At the lowest level, stakeholders accept dilemmas without questioning their formulation, and assume that an either-or choice is required. They accept both the costs and the benefits of either option A or B while dismissing the benefits and costs of the discarded alternative. At a higher level of complexity, stakeholders manage to transcend the dilemma: they reconfigure the problem formulation and create a hitherto unforeseen solution that compounds the benefits of options A and B while rejecting the costs of both options. At the highest level of complexity, stakeholders purposefully look for several dilemmas to transcend in tandem while creating synergies throughout the process. In order to illustrate this argument, the article explores the case of Porto and considers two dilemmas in particular. The first is the envisioning versus adapting dilemma: should cities embrace a powerful vision for their future or adapt to emerging opportunities? The second is the growing versus stabilizing dilemma: should cities continuously pursue economic growth or aim to maintain an agreed-upon level of economic activity? The article offers empirical insights on both dilemmas as experienced in Porto and concludes with a reflection about the strategic relevance of addressing dilemmas at the highest level of complexity possible.

This paper presents an integrated methodology for the assessment of inhabited built heritage, referred to as metodologia de avaliação de património edificado habitado (MAPEH), which emerges from the need to solve gaps resulting from the existence of fragmented studies that do not take into consideration the complex interaction of the different aspects involved in the interventions on built heritage. In particular, it incorporates a multidisciplinary analysis that combines three dimensions: patrimonial, technical, and social, which are associated with criteria such as identification of characteristics and values; assessment of safety and housing conditions; and recognition of residents’ profile, expectations, and basic needs. The paper also presents the results of the application of MAPEH to a case study: the inhabited old residential buildings of Porto, Portugal, underlining the interaction and importance of the three dimensions and the need for flexible and proportional criteria in the application of building codes and legislation, offering new input for establishing better-oriented intervention procedures on built heritage.