Historic Urban Landscape Approach for the Conservation of the Historic Centre of Cuenca, Ecuador

After its adoption by UNESCO in 20111 the ‘Recommendation on Historic Urban Landscapes’ (HUL) (hereby called the 2011 Recommendation) is seeking effective tools for implementation and to ensure conservation of urban heritage in an effective way, contributing not only to the local cultural heritage agenda but also to the urban development processes. While the appreciation of values and categories of cultural heritage has broadened in range the last decades, including not only historic, esthetical but also social, economic and environmental values; and mixed, digital and analogue categories; also urban planning has extended its approach from traditional to innovative and social-embedded forms of planning to face current development processes. The holistic understanding from the heritage and from the urban planning field, is implicit in the 2011 Recommendation where the HUL approach considers the city as a whole characterised by the intensity of the interaction between the community within the city and the physical environment in which it is located. Hence, considering the common features coming from the integration of the cultural heritage and the urban planning field as conveyed in the 2011 Recommendation, this research will refer to the territory, to the activities carried out as well as to the stakeholders involved in the implementation of the HUL approach.

Being adopted worldwide in various cases, each with their specific geographic and socio-economic contexts and resources available (human, time, technologic, etc.), these cases have tested diverse methods to innovate in matters of urban conservation and sustainable development. Today, research and practice require a state-of-the-art on the implementation of the 2011 Recommendation around the world not only as a conceptual exploration but also as an understanding of the results achieved through different ways of its implementation. Therefore, the present research presents an in-depth study of the case of Cuenca in Ecuador where the results of the implementation of the 2011 Recommendation are presented and synthesised to propose a comparative analytical framework for 102 case studies that have developed activities linked to the HUL approach. The methods used to this aim consist of the collection and analysis of secondary data coming from literature and policy review published during the last decade and, of primary data from a validated questionnaire as the core of the empirical research to carry out the comparative analysis.

In this framework, the results present, on the one hand, the actual impact of the 2011 Recommendation for the conservation of urban heritage and its practical implications based on the scope of the research. The 2011 Recommendation is proven to be a research enabler that promotes activities carried out at the level of academia but it has limited enabling potential when implemented by public administration. On the other hand, the analysis allows positioning the Latin American case of Cuenca in a regional a worldwide framework.  The analysed implementation of the 2011 Recommendation demonstrate only partial success in the creation of the expected relations among the territory, activities, and stakeholders. There is still an ongoing learning process in the city of Cuenca and the results achieved allow to benchmark the achievements in this city.  The results of this dissertation allow also other interested case studies to positioning themselves into the global HUL implementation framework.