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The purpose of this paper is to explore authenticity conception of cultural built heritage. As a core of heritage management, authenticity is often seen as a validation of certain identity. In the cultural built heritage context, authenticity is vital for the community, particularly the ethnic minority community, because it can be viewed as a tool to tackle discrimination and misrecognition issues.

This research was conducted in two Indonesian Chinatowns, namely, Lasem and Semarang Chinatowns. An ethnography method was employed to address the research aim. Four techniques to carry out data collection were used in this research; they were life story interview, participant observation, documentary research and physical observation through house tour. Two theories were used to analyse the data, and they were Technologies of the Self from Foucault and Habitus from Bourdieu.

Result shows that authenticity conception in cultural built heritage is not fixed because it lies on the immaterial aspect (the community’s cultural values) that is continuously reinvented. This research also reveals that the immaterial aspect of cultural built heritage, the community’s cultural values, becomes the core of the conception of authenticity. These cultural values become the foundation for the community to create their cultural built environment.

This research brings an important perspective on authenticity to be applied in heritage management. Interestingly, by adopting this perspective, heritage management could become a tool to create an inclusive society.

This research offers a unique perspective on heritage authenticity, which was constructed through sociological and materiality approach.

Oman has a rich built heritage due to its strategic location, making its history full of events, which resulted in remarkable cultural and social heritage. The government works on preserving the built environment through the adaptive reuse strategy of abandoned buildings or sites, which is considered a comprehensive approach to sustainability. The adaptive reuse process often involves complex factors especially through decision-making, which influence the success of the generated project. The research aims at proposing an assessment strategy that offers guidelines that can help to achieve comprehensive adaptive reuse.

This paper analyzes and assesses adaptive reuse interventions of selected five heritage projects in Oman. The assessment was conducted based on semi-structured interviews with stakeholders and local community representatives, as well as onsite observations, documentation and relevant data analyses.

The results display that a comprehensive sustainable management plan for adaptive reuse projects is essential to ensure the success of the new uses in promoting the local economy, enhancing social values, preserving the cultural identity and adapting to the local environment.

This contribution proposes a comprehensive strategy for assessing the adaptive reuse projects' performance that can be used as a checklist for achieving more social, cultural, environmental and economic benefits. This strategy can be further developed by extending to include more categories.

Built heritage constitutes the uniqueness and identity of a place. While being overlooked in existing research, built heritage in small towns is increasingly threatened by dilapidation, exhaustion and disappearance. Therefore, this study aims to examine the challenges in protecting the unique features and identity of small towns with regard to building regulations, guidelines and policies.

A semi-structured interview was conducted amongst a purposive sample of nine stakeholders from different organizations involved in heritage matters in Malaysia to investigate the issues and challenges facing the protection of small towns’ identity with regard to existing protection mechanisms impacting development of the towns. The data were then analyzed using the qualitative software package NVivo 8.0. The summary models imported from NVivo were created to visualize the connections between various dimensions of constructs, concepts and categories identified in the interviews.

The study found that the current issues of built heritage protection at the local level can be classified into five emergent themes: legislative, institutional, economic, social and technical issues. While absence of specific guideline for identifying local cultural places has been identified as the most fundamental issues facing the protection of unique and distinct resources in small Malaysia towns, the paper concludes with a framework of measures that can then be used for identification and protection of small town identity.

This study is the first of many fruitful contributions that examine heritage identification and protection mechanisms at the local level.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the critical factors for enhancing social sustainability of the conservation of built heritage projects and to highlight the importance of addressing social sustainability in urban conservation.

First of all, a list of social sustainability factors is compiled from the international literature and then verified by a panel of experts in the field of heritage conservation and laymen through a pilot study in Hong Kong. Afterwards, through a questionnaire survey carried out in Hong Kong for an urban conservation project, the citizens' responses were obtained and evaluated. Results were derived from factor analysis.

The results indicated that social considerations should be incorporated for achieving social sustainability in urban heritage conservation. “Educational and local cultural promotion means”, “Meanings of the place”, “Social inclusion and psychological needs” and “Public participation and opportunity for skills development” were found to be the significant underlying factors for enhancing social sustainability of the case study project.

The underlying social factors found in this study can help enhance planning, management and implementation in conservation projects that should promote social well being in society.

The case study provides a valid basis for an interesting analysis on the relevance of the social sustainability aspects to an urban conservation project that also provides insights for other urban conservation projects of a similar nature. The factors identified can form an evaluation framework to measure the social sustainability level of a significant urban conservation and revitalization project in practice.

The purpose of the study is to generate insights into the planning process for reusing cultural heritage within urban redevelopment projects and identifies barriers to and drivers for stakeholder commitment.

Characteristics of five Dutch urban redevelopment projects with built cultural heritage are studied in terms of the context, interaction and commitment. The findings are confronted with insights from urban planning literature.

The study shows that although there is a strong belief in the added value of reusing cultural heritage, dealing with uncertainty over costs and benefits associated with heritage transformation is a major barrier. There is no standard planning strategy to deal with these issues. Further, we could not identify a direct link between the planning strategy used and the commitment of key stakeholders. Nevertheless, it seems that a shared framework and a shared belief in the heritage's added value are vital.

The study has an explorative character meaning that further analysis is needed to gain a greater understanding on how planning strategies affect stakeholder commitment in cultural heritage projects. As only cases in the Netherlands are studied, institutional differences are not considered.

This study can help practitioners to develop planning strategies by offering insight into a number of barriers and dilemmas that need to be overcome in the planning process.

This study explains why the presence of cultural heritage creates difficulties in adapting available planning tools and in developing new sustainable strategic planning approaches.

Heritage tourism has become increasingly popular, and improving the sustainability of such sites is essential both nationally and internationally. The purpose of this paper is to explore the opportunities and challenges of improving the condition and sustainability of a chapel at a busy international heritage tourist attraction.

A case study approach was adopted. This utilised interviews with four of the primary building professionals involved with the refurbishment project. Documentary analysis and observations were also used.

The present case study presents the opportunities and challenges faced by a tourist heritage attraction. Improvements to the condition and sustainability of such assets are essential to ensure their sustained and enhanced use, and the protection of heritage buildings. Such projects create opportunities to increase knowledge and understanding about these assets as well as enhancing opportunities for meaning making for visitors. The paper highlights the importance of a strong leader and a balanced team working towards common objectives. Further, whilst synergies between conservation and sustainability exist, there are also tensions and compromises.

This case study highlights the opportunities and challenges of improving the condition and sustainability of built cultural heritage at a tourist attraction. Opportunities included increased knowledge and understanding about the heritage asset; enhancement of values for present and future generations; improved condition, increased usability; and increased sustainability. Challenges were: team turnover; delays resulting from archaeological findings; previous work resulting in building defects; the existing building condition; and unfamiliarity and the uncertainty regarding particular measures.

The practical implications of this case study include ensuring clear project objectives and a balanced project team are in place. These should be enhanced by a good system of information recording throughout the project to limit the impact of staff absence. Good communication within the team and with external members such as manufacturers will reduce the impact of unfamiliar products and aid in decision making. Future research should explore whether these findings are applicable to other heritage tourist attractions, and whether visitors’ narrative encounters with the asset change following a sustainability improvement project.

Limited research has been previously performed on improving the sustainability of built cultural heritage at tourist attractions. This research investigates the opportunities and challenges facing building professionals in improving such heritage assets. The improvement of heritage tourist attractions requires careful consideration. Whilst they need to be conserved for future generations, increasing the sustainability of such assets is essential to ensure their continued usability.

Smart Heritage is a recently established discourse that entwines smartness and the heritage discipline. Studies have shown that place identity is at the core of value-based frameworks of built heritage. This study aims to unveil the role of identity in existing Smart Heritage frameworks, which is currently a gap in existing research.

To better understand place identity in the Smart Heritage context and facilitate future framework establishments, this study uses a cross-case analysis method to scrutinise common trends in the identity development of seven current best practices.

The results show that current best practices involve smart technologies in sustaining or rebuilding heritage identities, mostly mapped on the local scale. Catered solutions are essential in this context due to historic cities’ variegated pursuits of identity. Most current Smart Heritage projects are at the transitioning stage from digital to smart, as the autonomous ability of smart innovations is yet to be fully realised on the city or the global scale. Researchers are encouraged to draw essence from existing heritage frameworks considering the built heritage’s place identity, which is at the core of culturally sustainable Smart Heritage transitions.

This study concludes with five recommendations for addressing heritage identity in Smart Heritage frameworks, targeting future research avenues. Also, this study furthers the discussion on the linkage of Smart Heritage, place identity and marketing strategy, contributing to the city branding and tourism management field. Future research should extend the case-study selection beyond Europe, which is a recognised limitation of this study.

This research aims to highlight the values, principles and recommendations for conservation in order to establish valid strategies for the conservation of earthen built heritage. This is done following a methodology which uses indirect (bibliography) and direct (case study) sources systematically analysed from different perspectives: the values of Earth as a material and of architectural and vernacular heritage; the heritage conservation principles found in international documents; and the analysis of over 3,000 case studies from which good practices in earthen architecture conservation are extracted.

Earthen built architectural heritage is found widely in all parts of the world, in archaeological sites and monumental and vernacular architecture, which research centres and researchers are increasingly studying and cataloguing. However, despite its richness and historic and cultural values, as well as its many merits in environmental sustainability, sociocultural and socio-economic terms, the value of this heritage has not been fully recognized in fields with major repercussions in conservation.

Finally, these data are cross-referenced to establish the broadest possible strategies to guarantee all aspects to be taken into account in the conservation of earthen built architectural heritage.

The text provides an overview of the different methodologies in order to extract specific strategies applicable to the conservation of this heritage, both locally and globally.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges to urban cultural heritage management conservation in the historical city of Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan-Iraq. The paper focusses on the roles and interactions of stakeholders and the issues that confront the decision-making processes that underpin the management of historic city towns.

A case study methodology is utilised for this research. It involves documentary analysis and interviews with stakeholders who are part of the management of the historic city centre of Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan-Iraq. The findings from this case study are analysed in a systematic way before being discussed in the context of the literature on urban cultural heritage management.

The research shows that although there is a shared vision of the need to preserve and conserve urban cultural heritage, the management process is a contentious one. Stakeholders have different ideas as to how to achieve conservation goals which leads to increasing conflicts among stakeholders. This situation is compounded by the limited financial resources available to local government agencies, political interference in the work of implementation agencies and the lack of capacity in local government to enforce rules and carry out conservation projects. There are also significant power differentials among stakeholders in the decision-making process which often means that local residents are excluded from the process of conserving their built urban heritage.

This research can help practitioners who are in charge of urban cultural heritage management in dealing with stakeholder conflicts. The paper offers insight into a number of sources of stakeholder conflicts and on ways to overcome these in the planning process.

The originality of research lies in the novelty of the case study area. This research highlights the issues of built heritage conservation management and planning practices in an area – Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan-Iraq – that is geographically less represented in the extant literature. The research also identifies some of the key sources of conflict in urban heritage conservation projects and provides an insight into the roles of stakeholders in the management of smaller locally-dependent historic city centres.

Each place possesses characteristics that confer on it a sense of place and identity through the meanings and values that they provide. The role of the physical built environment in place and identity development has not received adequate attention in built environment literature. This paper attempts to identify the unique and exceptional characteristics of places which create a unique environment and make a continuing contribution to the overall sense of the place. A preliminary survey was conducted in Kuala Kubu Bharu (KKB), a small town in the northern part of the Malaysian state of Selangor; to examine the characteristics of the place that influence and contribute to the identity of the town. The survey results demonstrate that the cultural heritage of the physical built environment acts as an important trigger for the town’s identity. While it is undeniable that cultural heritage is indeed greatly the product of non-visual sources; subjective meanings, experiences, beliefs, ideology and past history of the place, this paper highlights the significance of the physical built environment in influencing the very individuality of the place.