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The purpose of this paper is to report the development of internet‐based educational support to enable practitioners in built environment conservation (preservation in American terminology) to evaluate and, if necessary, improve their competence. In the UK it is a condition of project grant‐aid of some heritage bodies that the professional leading a conservation project is accredited, and several schemes, peer‐reviewed by professional bodies, have been set up in recent years. Since these require practitioners to provide evidence of their competence, there is a need for an increased understanding of the issues involved. The work aimed to define the basis for the competences and establish an educational framework for professional development in this area.

A structured framework of competences, consisting of five units dealing with all the stages of a conservation project, is presented and evaluated against the 1993 ICOMOS Guidelines on Education and Training in the Conservation of Monuments, Ensembles and Sites. The framework is appropriate for all professional disciplines and has been converted to a computer‐assisted self‐learning package that provides support for practitioners in developing their portfolio of evidence for submission for accreditation peer‐review.

The internet‐based educational support has been available since 2007 and receives over 2,000 visits per month from all over the world. It has the support of all the UK accreditation schemes in built environment conservation.

A desk survey of electronic resources in the subject domain suggests that the educational support material described in this paper is unique in the world.

This paper is an editorial to JCHMSD's Volume 2 Issue 1. Its purpose is to introduce the selection of papers in the issue.

The paper discusses the increased focus of national and local authorities, as well as multilateral agencies, on historic cities in a search for a more sustainable process of urban development that integrates environmental, social and cultural concerns into the planning, design and implementation of urban management programmes and projects. The recent adoption of a new policy instrument by UNESCO, the 2011 Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, is providing a set of general principles in support of sustainable urban heritage management and the paper further explains the first results of a field testing of the embedded Historic Urban Landscape approach in two different geo‐cultural regions of the world (i.e. Central Asia and East Africa). It points to fields of further research, which are linked to the papers selected for this issue.

The Historic Urban Landscape approach, as promoted in the new UNESCO Recommendation on the subject, facilitates a structuring and priority setting of the manifold needs and wishes in the broader urban development and heritage management process, thereby creating clarity and understanding in an often very complex process with competing demands.

The new UNESCO Recommendation was adopted on 10 November 2011 and this research paper is the first to expound on an implementation of the approach embedded therein, explaining its merits and potential.