Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development Targets: A Possible Harmonisation? Insights from the European Perspective

Abstract

The Agenda 2030 includes a set of targets that need to be achieved by 2030. Although none of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) focuses exclusively on cultural heritage, the resulting Agenda includes explicit reference to heritage in SDG 11.4 and indirect reference to other Goals. Achievement of international targets shall happen at local and national level, and therefore, it is crucial to understand how interventions on local heritage are monitored nationally, therefore feeding into the sustainable development framework. This paper is focused on gauging the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals with reference to cultural heritage, by interrogating the current way of classifying it (and consequently monitoring). In fact, there is no common dataset associated with monitoring SDGs, and the field of heritage is extremely complex and diversified. The purpose for the paper is to understand if the taxonomy used by different national databases allows consistency in the classification and valuing of the different assets categories. The European case study has been chosen as field of investigation, in order to pilot a methodology that can be expanded in further research. A cross-comparison of a selected sample of publicly accessible national cultural heritage databases has been conducted. As a result, this study confirms the existence of general harmonisation of data towards the achievement of the SDGs with a broad agreement of the conceptualisation of cultural heritage with international frameworks, thus confirming that consistency exists in the classification and valuing of the different assets categories. However, diverse challenges of achieving a consistent and coherent approach to integrating culture in sustainability remains problematic. The findings allow concluding that it could be possible to mainstream across different databases those indicators, which could lead to depicting the overall level of attainment of the Agenda 2030 targets on heritage. However, more research is needed in developing a robust correlation between national datasets and international targets.

Fuzzy and Interval AHP Approaches in Sustainable Management for the Architectural Heritage in Smart Cities

“…As sustainability is one of the crucial preconditions for the formation of smart cities, management of architectural heritage in smart environments include various urban operations and tools related to the main aspects of current spatial sustainable development strategies. All instruments for the management of architectural heritage can be classified through the system of appropriate groups of indicators refer to the conceivable aspects of the sustainability paradigm [64][65][66]-economic, environmental, social (three primary dimensions), institutional [67], and cultural [68,69] (included later), with the introduction of the technological framework that corresponds to smart development [70,71]. Given that architectural heritage is one type of cultural heritage and the focus of this paper, the cultural dimension of sustainable smart management is recognized as an architectural aspect of influencing factors.…”

Multi-Attribute Analysis of Contemporary Cultural Buildings in the Historic Urban Fabric as Sustainable Spaces—Krakow Case Study

“…Despite a considerable amount of research on sustainability [20,21] and an emerging number of studies that link this issue to the functioning of cultural buildings in the urban fabric [22], a research gap in this topic is still present. This has been confirmed by Petti, Trillo and Tsube Macone who focus on gauging the implementation of the SDGs with reference to cultural heritage and recommend 'future research into the pluralistic values and impact of cultural heritage in achieving sustainable development' [23]. The lack of the studies on the functioning of buildings excluding their main cultural functions, but related to the surrounding public spaces, should be remedied by helping these facilities and areas to function more effectively for city residents.…”

Connecting Sustainable Development and Heritage Education? An Analysis of the Curriculum Reform in Flemish Public Secondary Schools

“…The role of cultural heritage seems limited or underdeveloped. However, a reference can be found in SDG 11, where it is mentioned in 11.4: "Strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world's cultural and natural heritage [40]. "…”