Introduction
Values-based approaches are among the best practices for management and conservation planning. However, cultural significance assessments (of the attributes and values of cultural heritage) have generally been performed by experts (top-down) instead of including expert and nonexpert communities (top-down and bottom-up).

Objectives
This paper presents a multitechnique approach in which different strategies are applied to assess the perceptions of cultural significance held by several actors (users, managers, staff, experts, children, students, virtual community) within the framework of the Keeping It Modern Grant awarded by the Getty Foundation (2020–2023) for the Ocean Swimming Pool (1960–1966) designed by Álvaro Siza in Matosinhos, Portugal.

Method
Interviews, surveys, social media analysis, and workshops with children, students, and experts were adopted for the method, and, whenever possible, the ‘Imagine Ballarat’ Love, Change and Imagine questions were utilised as a resourceful instrument for assessing the significance attributed by multiple stakeholders.

Results
Based on the results, stakeholders’ opinions and values regarding the heritage site could be compared, which revealed the relationship between the values and the groups of actors, thereby deepening the complexity of heritage sites as National Monuments.

Conclusion
By using this integrated perspective, we could define the cultural significance of a modern heritage site through an inclusive methodology while also establishing the grounds for conservation policies within a more broadly participative management of change. ... Read more

Governance, and specifically local management and institutional systems, is among the key factors affecting the management of World Heritage (WH) properties in urban contexts. The adoption of the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL approach) promotes a governance reform towards more inclusive and integrated management. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the HUL approach may help to solve the key governance challenges affecting WH in urban contexts. The governance of WH in three European cities is compared. Edinburgh, Porto, and Florence were chosen for their familiarity with the HUL approach and willingness to provide guidance and review policies and review their policies as management plans. The methodology includes a policy analysis of the management plans followed by a comparative analysis based on the six key governance challenges addressed in the recent literature. The results show that the HUL approach is supporting the governance of WH in urban contexts, and that more inclusive and integrated management has helped address the challenges affecting heritage management. ... Read more

The growing complexity of managing the sustainable development of cities stresses the need for interdisciplinary approaches, with a stronger articulation between different fields. The integration between heritage conservation and spatial planning has already been addressed in recent literature, ranging from a traditional sectorial perspective towards more cooperative and coordinated initiatives, occasionally resulting in integrated policies. Nevertheless, the lack of institutional and policy articulation remains among the most frequent critical governance issues unsolved. This paper unveils the integration degrees between heritage conservation and spatial planning policies in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and Ballarat (Australia), acknowledged for local and upper governmental initiatives, such as the Belvedere Memorandum and the Imagine Ballarat project, placing both at the forefront of the roadmap to this policy integration. In-depth semi-structured interviews with municipal officials in both cities reveal that, while policy integration is aimed at, implementation remains challenging. Both cities’ heritage conservation and spatial planning fields keep operating in parallel, often in conflict, and with different perspectives on the cultural heritage commonly managed. By identifying local technicians’ challenges, this research demonstrates that policy integration between heritage conservation and spatial planning is an ongoing process that demands more effective articulation towards more sustainable and resilient cities. ... Read more

Cities are the main drivers in the race to sustainable development, and the needed transformations would affect their built environment. Transformations through development plans or projects are often regulated by local planning policies, which are assumed to simultaneously enable transformation and the conservation of irreplaceable resources such as heritage. Earlier research, however, denounces a different reality, where local planning policies omit heritage or a share of these resources e.g., intangible, or even when local planning policies acknowledge heritage as a whole, but their guidelines of transformation are unrelated to heritage and/or their attributes. This paper is part of doctoral research that aims to discuss the dynamic between heritage conservation and urban development in planning policies and tools. It introduces the results of a systematic literature review crossing both fields. Focused on the methodology adopted recent researches, it discusses the outcomes of an in depth analysis of 37 publications, with a detailed methodology description. The analysis explored the type of data sources, actors addressed and heritage categories, values and attributes. Results confirmed the recent trend in which the relation between heritage and planning is shifting, from being considered a threat to a crucial resource to development. Although still far from the leading role as promoted by international documents as the UNESCO 2011 Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape. The results of this research are relevant for science, but also for society, by highlighting how these approaches can raise the efficiency of planning policies, the results assist cities
developing more sustainably. ... Read more