Narrow Results

The paper discusses the meaning and nature of urban cultural heritage, and the available methods for its valuation in the perspective of sustainable city development. From this perspective, decision-making problems of renovation often involve a complex decision-making process in which multiple requirements and conditions have to be taken into consideration simultaneously. In project development it is hardly possible to get exhaustive and accurate information. As a result, the situations occur, the consequences of which can be very damaging to the project. Sometimes the loss is related to symbolic values that the public perceive as disregarded by the project, despite the overall improved conditions. This paper presents the multiple criteria assessment of alternatives of the cultural heritage renovation projects in Vilnius city. The model consists of the following elements: determining attributes set affecting built and human environment renovation; information collection and analysis, decision modeling and solution selection. The main purpose of the model is to improve the condition of the built and human environment through efficient decision making in renovation supported by multiple attribute evaluation. Delphi, AHP and ARAS-G methods, considering different environment factors as well as stakeholders' needs, are applied to solve problem.

Cultural Heritage is comprehensible within an integrated vision, involving economic, cultural and ethic values, typical of not renewable resources. It is an open system that doesn't correspond just to monuments but is made by the complex interactions of a built environment. The systemic relationships between cultural goods (object, building, landscape), and their environmental context have to be considered of the same importance of the systemic relations established with stakeholders/observers.

A first partial answer to Cultural Heritage systemic nature has been the creation of "networks" of cultural institutions, that afterwards have been evolving in "cultural systems" and have been recently followed by "cultural districts".

The Cultural District model put forward a precise application for the theory of emergence. But its systemic nature presents also some problematical identifications.

For Cultural Heritage the point is not any more limited to "direct" actions. We must consider stakeholders/observers, feedback circuits, emergence of activation of social/cultural/human capital, more than that linked to the architectural design process.