Urban Heritage Dynamics in 'Heritage-Led Regeneration': Towards a Sustainable Lifestyles Approach

This paper aims to introduce a novel approach to sustainable heritage-led urban regeneration. More specifically, the paper proposes a new heritage-led urban regeneration paradigm that has communities and sustainable lifestyles at its core. The paper concludes with this approach after analysing current paradigms of heritage-led urban regeneration through system dynamics. We have chosen to analyse though system dynamics a longitudinal study of the Townscape Heritage Initiative (THI), a heritage-led regeneration scheme funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Our system dynamic analysis unveils the absence of environmental sustainability concerns in current heritage-led regeneration examples as well as the critical role of the existence of concerted, strategic and participatory vision of a heritage-led urban regeneration programme. The critical, systemic and dynamic analysis of the THI longitudinal study provides the basis for developing a new approach towards sustainable heritage-led regeneration which has communities and sustainable lifestyles at its core. Although we acknowledge that extensive applied and theoretical research is needed to validate or enhance the proposed approach, we do cite sporadic examples that provide some first indications of the effectiveness of the approach.