Heritage between culture and sustainability : a case study based on the southern European medium-sized cities

Abstract

Culture, as it embodies the way humans have adapted themselves to the environment, -in other words, their particular way of adaptation and their main mean of livelihood in environmental, economic and social terms-, has been largely considered as a source of sustainability. In this sense, the concept of heritage stands out as a cultural asset that makes particularly explicit the historic relationship between men and territory, as well as the result of the diverse human and cultural activities within the environment -including architecture and urban settlements-. Considering, additionally, it is deeply linked with identity and social behavior, this contribution aims to defend urban and architectural heritage’s potential to make our cities more sustainable. In addition to the theoretical framework and conceptual positioning, the paper focuses on the territorial and urban phenomenon which has comprised, for centuries, the settlement of a bunch of small and medium-sized cities that represents, nowadays, the sixty percent of the land structure in the South of the Iberian Peninsula, still growing in terms of urban land and population as well as on cultural and sustainable networking initiatives. For this purpose, two particularly interesting and complementary study cases have been selected by reason of the quality and influence of their cultural heritage assets: the cities of the center of Andalusia (Spain) and the cities of Algarve and Alentejo, the Southern regions of Portugal. Throughout a mixed methodology that includes inputs from very diverse disciplines like humanities, urban studies, architecture, geography, sociology, history or anthropology, the work is intended to yield results concerning factual links between the existence of heritage assets in a wide range of scales, their influence on social and cultural daily life in the selected cities, and their prospective benefits to future sustainability.